{"id":190421,"date":"2009-11-30T14:27:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-30T19:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/11\/30\/canada-bails-out-of-afghanistan\/"},"modified":"2009-11-30T14:27:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-30T19:27:00","slug":"canada-bails-out-of-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/11\/30\/canada-bails-out-of-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada Bails Out of Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you’ve lost Stephen Harper on the war<\/a>, you’ve lost the war:<\/p>\n

Canada is sticking to a 2011 end date for its combat mission in Afghanistan even as the United States prepares to significantly boost its military presence in the war-torn country.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, speaking at the conclusion of a Commonwealth leaders\u2019 summit in Trinidad, said he doesn’t see any enthusiasm among Canada\u2019s 308 MPs for prolonging or expanding this deployment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a guy who was literally George W. Bush’s best bud in this hemisphere, and was right behind Tony Blair in the competition for best poodle in show, and disappointed about finishing 2nd<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

This won’t change the White House’s position on Afghanistan, which is all about Barack Obama attempting to defuse attacks from the right that he is a peacenik, so he is better positioned to run for reelection in 2012, which, of course worked so f$#@ing well for LBJ in 1965<\/span>.<\/p>\n

So, it’s wrong on pragmatic political level, where Vietnam kneecapped Johnson’s Great Society and the Democratic for years, and it’s wrong on the moral<\/span> level, where feeding new bodies to what Eric Palmer calls “Operation Useless Dirt<\/a>” simply to inoculate one’s self from right wing attacks that will happen anyway<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you’ve lost Stephen Harper on the war, you’ve lost the war: Canada is sticking to a 2011 end date for its combat mission in Afghanistan even as the United States prepares to significantly boost its military presence in the war-torn country. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, speaking at the conclusion of a Commonwealth leaders\u2019 summit …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153,1113,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-canada","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190421"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}