Canadian Special Forces teach peshmerga intricacies of combat

There's a fluffy bit of DND propaganda hiding on page A3 of today's Globe and Mail, pretending to be a news story.

Yes, those plucky Kurds have turned to plucky Canada to train up their fighters. We are, after all, renowned for our pluck. Oh, and for punching above our weight, too!

Yes, some plucky senior military officers from the Canadian Forces were made available to the Globe, on condition of anonymity of course, to brag about how our 61 member training mission in Iraq is enhancing the capabilities of the peshmerga with our superior knowledge of war-craft.

Well, let's ponder this for a moment. Recent Canadian combat experience consists of being run out of Afghanistan by a motley collection of part-time opium farmers and religious fanatics. This would not seem to be a track record that would place a high premium on Canadian training.

The Kurds, on the other hand, have been warring almost non-stop with each other or the armies of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, practically since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Not only have they survived; they are thriving. They could no doubt teach the Canadians a few things about asymmetrical warfare.

But that's not what the media gate-keepers want us to read on page A3 of the national newspaper of record. In the Harper era we have seen two contradictory trends with respect to our military. The bellicose bluster keeps going up, while the budget goes in the opposite direction. Veteran's Affairs offices are shut down, troops are nickled and dimed literally to death, major equipment procurement decisions are stalled and stalled some more, not for months or years, but for decades, but never before have we seen so much government-sponsored propaganda extolling the virtues of our brave men and women in uniform.

Propaganda aside, everybody knows the real reason we're in Iraq now, and in Afghanistan and Libya before; to suck up to the big dogs in Brussels and Washington. Those would be the same big dogs who have made a complete mess of those countries, and plenty of others as well.

Why are we so desperate to ingratiate ourselves with war criminals?

It's time Canada became an independent country!