Canada to lead Nations of Virtue in seizing assets of despots and dictators

Perennial do-gooder Lloyd Axworthy has come up with a great idea; lets help ourselves to the frozen bank accounts of dictators and despots and use the money to address the global refugee crisis! Lloyd figures we should be able to raise ten to twenty billion a year from the bad guys on our shit list.

Whose bank accounts we seize is of course a question of politics rather than morality. You'll notice that it tends to be leaders Washington doesn't like who have their assets seized. Maduro and Putin are despots, but MBS and Erdogan get a pass.

As for the refugees themselves, what are they fleeing? In the great European refugee crisis of 2015-16, 75% of the arrivals came from only three countries; Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. What do those countries have in common? They've all been targeted for regime change by those same Nations of Virtue now wringing their hands over the refugee crisis, Canada included. How ironic to read such nonsense on the very day that we're remembering those 158 Canadians who gave their lives in the noble mission to bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan.

This is not a fact that the Axworthys of the world address or even acknowledge. So long as disinterested experts like Ahmed Chalabi or Bill Browder can be trotted out to spin scary stories, that's good enough for Lloyd.

Here's an alternative funding source for staunching the refugee crisis; a modest tax on international weapons sales. Since eight out of ten of the top weapons purveyors are in the Nations of Virtue club, reaching a consensus on such a tax would be a snap!

Refugee crisis solved!

Even better, although "thought leaders" like Axworthy can't seem to get their heads around the concept, we in the virtuous West could end most refugee crises simply by minding our own business and giving up the idea that it's our right to meddle in other countries.

New US bumboy in Kabul allows US troops to stay after they leave

There's an Orwellian mind-fuck for ya...

This Ashraf Ghani chappie is obviously our cup of tea; check out his comments when his new government signed an agreement that will allow US troops to stay after they technically leave; "Today Afghanistan has regained its sovereignty as a power."

Huh?

You regain your sovereign power by signing a deal that allows the occupiers to stay in your country, totally immune from your country's legal system?.. oh my, there's an Oxfordshire village cemetery got a spinning corpse with a great big boner right now...

Meanwhile Barry O sees this as an "historic day," as well he might.

In fact, he's looking forward to cementing "an enduring partnership that strengthens Afghan sovereignty, stability, unity, and prosperity."

Just like it has for the past 13 years...

What's the big deal about 1500 civilian casualties in Gaza?

Make no mistake; Operation Off the Cliff is political theatre of the highest order. It's not about tunnels and it's not about rockets; it's about avoiding any "peace" that would threaten the long-term goal of the maximalists in Israeli politics, the eventual consolidation of a "greater Israel" from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

Or perhaps from the Euphrates to the Nile... it's always tough to nail down the borders of the Promised Land.

All the blather about "rockets raining on Israel" sounds good but doesn't justify a war that at this moment has taken the lives of 56 IDF soldiers. That's twice as many dead in a couple of weeks as the number of Israeli civilians killed by Gaza rocket attacks over the last 15 years.

Those Gaza rockets have claimed the same number of Israelis in fifteen years as lose their lives every month in traffic accidents.

In other words, there's absolutely nothing about the rocket threat that could possibly justify the thousands of civilian Palestinian deaths in this war on Gaza, and the one before, and the one before that.

Having said that, the war boosters have a point when they accuse the world of hypocrisy for its condemnation of Israel, especially when that condemnation is emanating from that most exceptional nation, the United States.

Afghanistan has never fired a single rocket at the US, but tens of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians have died at the hands of the US military.

Iraq has never fired a single rocket at the US, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died at the hands of the US military.

Vietnam never fired a single rocket at America, yet millions of Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of the US military.

So, yes, it's hard to argue with that charge of hypocrisy.

Too soon to judge success of Afghan war - just wait 60 years

That's the word from Canadian historian David Bercuson, writing yesterday in Canada's newspaper of record.

According to Bercuson, had the West not intervened in the Korean civil war in 1950, all of Korea today would resemble the isolated underdeveloped north.

Furthermore, that proves we should remain optimistic that the loss of life and the hundreds of billions of dollars it cost to lose them in Afghanistan has been money and lives well spent. We really need to give it some time - sixty years seems reasonable to Bercuson, before we make an assessment.

The main problem with fatuous comparisons is that they are fatuous. There is utterly no reason to make any kind of comparison between Korea and Afghanistan other than retroactively justifying the war we've been losing for twelve years.

We aren't leaving an Afghanistan that is divided between a half that is bound to the West and another half with its loyalties in an anti-Western camp. We are leaving behind an Afghanistan in which a tiny and corrupt oligarchy which owes its good fortune to the Invasion of 2001 will miss us, and the rest of the country is happy to see the last of us.

That corrupt elite will for the most part have resettled in Dubai and London and Miami before the last NATO occupiers leave their country.

How does Bercuson know that all of Korea would today resemble North Korea had the West not intervened in 1950?

He doesn't. Neither do you or I.

We can however make some reasonable assumptions if we look at other countries that were in 1950 considered part of the "enemy" in the cold war standoff. What do we see?

We see a world that has been integrated into the global economy even in cases where the governments are still nominally "anti-capitalist."

There is no reason whatsoever to assume that a unified Korea would have been different.

It is far more likely that if the West had never involved itself in the Korean war, that a unified Korea would today resemble the South rather than the North.

Instead, we have for sixty years burdened the North with constant sanctions and economic blockades just to prove the superiority of the South.

While Bercuson stretches matters a good deal when he refers to South Korea as a "bastion of liberal democracy," he is simply making stuff up when he credits the West's interference in 1950 for that accomplishment.

Which is about the only way to put a positive spin on the past twelve years of our gravely misguided interference in Afghanistan.

Poster girl for women's equality shot dead in Afghanistan

Lieutenant Islam Bibi was no stranger to Western media.

That might be one of the factors that made her a target of insurgents yesterday. Most media coverage is focused on this being a symbolic strike against women's rights, but that's probably an oversimplification.

Afghan National Police are gunned down at the rate of three to ten per day. If Afghan women want to be cops, they're going to take their chances. Sooner or later they could be shot down too.

There is no reliable evidence to show that the Taliban hates women Afghan cops any more than they hate cops in general. The Afghan National Police are seen as stooges of the occupiers, which would be a reasonable conclusion from the perspective of the Taliban.

Not only that, they are widely despised by the general population for their rampant corruption.

So while Islam Bibi was a minor celebrity in certain circles in the West, she met the same fate that eventually catches up with many of her male compatriots in Afghanistan.

Let's not make her a martyr for women's rights.