Not surprisingly, Trumped-up Republicans reacted by calling for a wall between the United States and Canada too.
Just kidding.
[Emulating Obama] Justin Trudeau got help from youth, new voters, social media in election win…
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau outpaced his competition on Twitter on Election Day as well; there were more than 150,000 tweets to @justintrudeau, whereas Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s account @pmharper only got 68,385.
(Toronto Star, October 23, 2015)
Obama aside, many commentators, on both sides of the border, are now hailing the Trudeaus as the Kennedys of Canada. They invariably refer to similarities in liberal politics and good looks for this dynastic comparison. Never mind that the Trudeau women, especially Justin’s notoriously hedonistic mother Margaret, make the Kennedy women look like stepford wives.
But surely it would be fairer to hail them as the Bushes of Canada. After all, Justin, 43, has now emulated his father Pierre, who served as prime minister (1968-79 and 1980-84); just as George W (2000-08) emulated his father George H.W., who served as president from 1988-92. By contrast, no Kennedy has ever emulated his father (or any other family member for that matter) in this context – with all due respect to the promise JFK Jr. showed before he died so tragically in 1999 at age 38.
On a more serious note, Trudeau pledged during his campaign to establish a far closer relationship with the Obama administration than Harper had. Of course, this wasn’t pledging much; not least because the Harper administration acted like the northern flank of Obama’s Republican opposition in Congress.
Even so, Trudeau distanced Canada from the United States with his first act as prime minister-elect. He announced the immediate withdrawal of all Canadian combat troops from the Middle East.
Recall that Obama premised his 2008 presidential campaign on withdrawing all American troops from foreign entanglements in the Middle East. He argued, quite sensibly, that those entanglements, especially in Iraq, have done nothing but cause hundreds of thousands of lives and waste trillions of dollars. Accordingly, he made quite a show of announcing the withdrawal of those troops.
Yet, incomprehensibly, Obama still has a few thousand over there trying to do what one hundred fifty thousand failed, for over a decade, to do; namely to train Afghans and Iraqis (and now Syrians) to govern, defend, and sustain themselves.
Again, Muslims have been waging sectarian wars for over a thousand years. But nothing demonstrates the folly of U.S. meddling quite quite like U.S.-trained Afghans, Iraqis, and Syrians either surrendering to or joining ISIS fighters, instead of fighting them. That is, mind you, when they weren’t turning their U.S.-issued guns on their U.S. trainers….
Not to mention performing so poorly when they actually showed the will to fight that their U.S. trainers invariably ended up doing most of the fighting … and dying too – as was the case just days ago:
American and Kurdish commandos raided an Islamic State prison in Iraq on Thursday, freeing about 70 captives believed to be facing “mass execution” and leaving one U.S. soldier dead, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.
It was the first time a member of the U.S. military had been killed in a combat situation in Iraq since President Obama pulled out all U.S. troops in 2011…
The maneuver underscored the risks facing troops in Iraq despite the Obama administration’s efforts to keep U.S. forces far from combat and avoid the bloodshed of the last Iraq war, when more than 4,000 American service members died.
(Washington Post, October 22, 2015)
Clearly, just as “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” combat by any other name would spell defeat. In fact, the other name for Obama’s new mission of “train, advise, and assist” is mission creep … with all of the horrors of Vietnam that entails.
But this deadly, foolish game — of deploying troops to a combat zone but insisting they’re not in combat — illustrates how mired in the folly of Bush-league wars Obama has become.
I have written many commentaries lamenting this metamorphosis, including most recently “Obama more Like Bush than Obama Would Like to Say,” September 25, 2014, and “Obama Amassing Coalition of the Willing to Do in Syria What Bush Did in Afghanistan/Iraq,” September 30, 2015.
Therefore, it’s hardly surprising that, during their first conversation on Tuesday, Trudeau informed Obama that he’s withdrawing all Canadian combat troops from Obama’s coalition. By the way, Britain’s new Labour leader, Jeremy Corbin, would do the same if he pulls off a Trudeau-like miracle by winning the next election.
This, after all, is what Obama would’ve done – before he became more concerned about protecting his presidential legacy than doing the right thing.
Hail, Trudeau!
Related commentaries:
Obama more like Bush…
Obama’s coalition of willing…
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