Conservative MPs and ideologues alike have adopted 2006 Conservative candidate’s Rondo Thomas’s most famous utterance as their mantra: “the facts don’t matter.”  North Shore News columnist Trevor Carolan is such an ideologue.  He is trying to wrestle the title of village idiot away from fellow North Shore News columnist Trevor Lautens.  The North Shore News meanwhile seems eager to recapture the title of Vancouver’s most backward newspaper, a title it automatically won every year Doug Collins was on Staff. 

Here are his most recent idiocies:

“Fellow citizens never mind the avian flu.  Consider instead the contagion of unelected officials their weight around with the health of our civil society.  
In Ottawa, Bernard Shapiro, the unelected Liberal-appointed parliamentary ethics commissioner, is hassling Prime Minster Harper about David Emerson.” 

  
That said, in light of Shapiro’s most recent report, do not expect the Conservatives to introduce a new ethics commissioner any time soon.  They already have their man, only Carolan did not know it at the time is probably wishing he could go back in time and rewrite his column. It is hard to pronounce Shapiro’s report objective having just characterized him as a hack.  After all, hacks are by definition guided by something other than the facts and as in common law, precedent matters.    & nbsp;

    & nbsp;  
“But Shapiro’s ethics appear selective: Where was he when Belinda Stronach was instantly rewarded with a cabinet post after defecting to the Liberals last year, foreshadowing the Emerson switch.”

Does the North Shore News employ a fact checker?   The reason why Emerson was investigated and Stronach not was that Shapiro was asked to investigate Emerson, but was not asked to investigate Stronach.  The CBC explains the relevant Act.  "the 2004 amendments to Parliament of Canada Act that sets out Shapiro's powers and duties, requires him to investigate anytime he has had a formal request from a member of the Commons or Senate. The act allows him to discontinue an examination if he finds no merit to the allegations. But even if he discontinues it he still is obliged to provide the prime minister and Parliament with a report setting out the facts in question and his own conclusions.'

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“Under the gutless Federal Liberals the Supreme Court began flexing its abs, functioning as judicial activists rather than interpreting laws.”  
 

Yet more parroted dribble from Carolan.  What the hell is an “activist” judge?  As the Sun’s Peter McKnight pointed out, the only coherent and comprehensible definition of judicial activism is when the courts over rules government legislation.  The problem for Conservatives is that by that measure the most conservative Justices in both Canada and the States are also the most activist.  That little ditty should not trouble Carolan though.  For him, “the facts don’t matter”.       
 

Part and parcel of an upsurge in nationalist fervor since Bush took over the Whitehouse, Canadians having been expressing a desire for Canada to play a more prominent role in world affairs. Politicians such as Martin and Harper took this as a sign that Canadians should play a greater role in Afghanistan. (The media has been making continued mention of the Afghan mission. This obscures matters. Kabul and Kandahar are for intents of purposes different countries and certainly entirely different missions.) They were half right. In the abstract, Canadians support widening the Afghan mission. On more pragmatic level, however, they do not. Every causality reminds Canadians of the foolishness of the mission and what little there is gain from being there.

As a hardcore realist, personally, I have no time for nation building. Western democracies simply do not have the wherewithal to sufficiently build up undeveloped traditional societies plagued by ethnic and tribal tensions. Their ability to do so in the face of a determined insurgency is even more limited. The expense of such projects in both political and economic terms is too high and militarily the rules of engagement are too limiting.

Politicians and policy thinkers alike still have not figured it out. They tend to group Western military action since the fall of the Soviet Union into only two categories, successes and failures. Kurdistan and Kosovo are counted as success stories and Iraq and Somalia failures. They are looking at things all wrong. What sets Kosovo and Kurdistan apart is that in both cases the Western world was able to use air power to help a guerilla force based out of and supported by a relatively ethnically homogenous region defeat a nation state based elsewhere. Such missions have little in common with what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan where rather than assisting an insurgency various Western countries are fighting one. Western democracies can help an insurgency succeed; they can, however, defeat one.

Now, there are those that say that Canada is helping to make the world safer by rooting out the Taliban there. What nonsense. The Taliban are not a threat to Canada now and never have been. What made Afghanistan so menacing was that Al Qaeda controlled the Afghan state in no small measure and they were able to operate out in the open (e.g., terrorist training centers) without the worry of attack. The Americans from their base in Kabul will be content to play whack a mole in Afghanistan for as long as Al Qaeda is a reality. As long the Western presence on the ground is not too pronounced and ability of Al Qaeda to operate in the open curtailed, disaffected middle class and upper middle class Middle Eastern men (the real terrorists in other words) will not come to Afghanistan.

That is right. As Israeli and CIA studies have shown with regard to Iraq, a large Western presence in Afghanistan is likely to increase the number of trained Jihadists there by providing the aforementioned Middle Eastern men with on the ground training. The veiled suggestions of prominent Republicans aside, there are not fixed numbers of terrorists in the world and all the West need do is kill them all off. The problem with Iraq is that the number of trained Jihadists being created by the conflict is greater than the number of trained Jihadists being killed there.

Parts of Afghanistan have the potential to go down the same root as Iraq and indeed over the last year some analysts have started talking about the Iraqication of Afghanistan. These analysts are half way right. Techniques used in Iraq are now being used in Afghanistan, but as long as there is large number of Western troops in Iraq, Afghanistan does not have much pull as far as recruiting young men from the Middle East. Indeed, the real danger is if the US should ever start pulling out of Iraq and Jihadists there move to Afghanistan. This is why Canadians should pay attention when hot heads like Hiller start talking about a ten year commitment.

As far as Canada is concerned, military operations only increase the chances that Al Qaeda or more likely a group sympathetic to Al Qaeda will widen the conflict and attempt to carry out an attack on Canadian soil. Indeed, it is simply not a good idea to provide a forum for many raw but ideologically rigid Jihadists to learn skills, such as bomb making, well all the while developing a grudge against Canada by seeing many of their friends killed by Canadian troops.

All that being said what else could be expected from the Conservatives. They are proving once again that they committed to a three pronged foreign policy, moralistic, moronic and macho.

For the other federal parties, but more so the Liberal party than the NDP, Kandahar is opportunity to gain ground. While it might have been that idiot Martin that got us into this mess, the NDP’s base makes it particularly tough for that party to sketch out a coherent policy based upon social justice considerations alone and even more difficult for the party to differentiate between Kabul mission and Kandahar mission. In order to make this a winner, the Liberals have to make clear for the public the difference between the Kabul and Kandahar missions and come up with a set of precepts that will allow future Canadian governments to differentiate between the two types of missions in the future. In short the Liberals will have to come up with Canada’s version of the Powell doctrine for foreign intervention. The other reason is that opposition to the mission, to the surprise of no one I am sure, is strongest in Quebec and the NDP ran a distant 4th there during the last election.