Those Crazy Dutch

MenWithoutGuns
RootCausesVille


Remember the good old days.

The days when we, the good people of the country formerly known as Canuckistan, would not only applaud something like this.....

"here in (Afghanistan's) Uruzgan Province, where the Taliban operate openly, a Dutch-led task force has mostly shunned combat. Its counterinsurgency tactics emphasize efforts to improve Afghan living conditions and self-governance, rather than hunting the Taliban’s fighters. Bloodshed is out. Reconstruction, mentoring and diplomacy are in"

.... we would actually want to be a part of it.

Unfortunately, those days appear to be over.

Because now it seems that we are willing to sit still for stuff like this:

"I'd say the vibe is excitement. In fact, for the past seven to eight months the vibe has been excitement," Broomfield said from under the shade of one of Canada's current Leopard (tank)s, while explaining being sent to Afghanistan — the first combat deployment the Canadian tanks have had since the Korean war — has given his squadron a serious boost in morale.

He said the mission for his troops in Afghanistan, and the possibility of new tanks, is a tangible sign that both the Army and the government are fully behind the tankers and what they can provide for infantry soldiers in the field.

It is a sentiment clearly shared by other soldiers in the squadron.

"I think it's fantastic," said Corp, Mike Murphy, a tank loader from P.E.I. "If they [the government] are going to give us something new it shows they are behind us 100%," he added. "It says a lot about the people backing us back home like the government and the public."

Yup.

Sure does.

Winning hearts and minds with tanks - that's what we are now backing.

Sheesh.

Is now not the time for us to look up from that penny we get back with our newspaper every morning, that $100 we get every month to destroy our nascent child care system, and maybe even that golden hockey stick rebate we're going to get once a year for no good reason at all and ask....

Why?

Why is this happening to us?

And more importantly, especially for those millions and millions of us who actually care, why are we letting it happen?

OK?


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