Canada's mission to Mali dead in the water

About a year and a half ago, the newly elected Grand Chief Sunny Daze, and his Minister of Defense, Turban Guy, made waves by hinting that our great nation was about to reappear on the world stage and re-commence "punching above our weight."

It's safe to say that like most Trudeau promises, this one has fallen by the wayside, and that's probably a good thing. After all, who can forget the early days of Hollande the Conqueror's foray into Mali?

Goaded along by the unctuous twat BHL, Hollande was to "earn his spurs" by re-liberating Mali for the umpteenth time from whatever it needed to be liberated from. The legacy of colonialism, mainly, but only an imbecile of the rank of BHL would find that an appropriate task for the former colonial power.

The think tank here at Falling Downs had a lot of fun with that mission. Alas, the French didn't. Nor do the Americans, who lost three special forces soldiers  just this week. No spurs for Hollande. No spurs for Uncle Sam. Just more death and destruction. 

So you can't blame our erstwhile neo-colonialists in Ottawa for getting cold feet. No, we'll settle for punching above our weight somewhere safer. Haiti maybe.

Meanwhile, having successfully liberated Iraq and Libya and Syria and Mali, the blood-thirsty cretin BHL is currently getting oodles of free column inches in major Western media lobbying for a sovereign Kurdish state.

What could go wrong?

Neo-colonialist Bernard-Henri Levi gets Globe & Mail platform to spew his neo-colonialist rubbish

The Globe's opinion page has been invaded by foreign prognosticators, which I suspect has more to do with Globe management cutting costs than anything else. After all, we've got plenty of competent pro-capitalist, pro-empire prognosticators right here at home.

But they generally want to be paid a living wage. Printing stuff from outside sources is a neat way around that.

Which might explain why the widely esteemed asshole BHL got a slot in today's paper. Maybe David Shribman is on vacation or something.

The gist of BHL's missive in the Globe today is that "we," meaning the Nations of Virtue, should be all in for granting the Kurds their own statelet in the Middle East, to be carved out of the countries we've been bombing to ratshit for the last twenty years or longer.

After all, the Israelis absolutely love the Kurds.

If the apartheid state of Israel is on board, we should be too, goes the conventional reasoning.

I'm not so sure.

Ya, they might hate Arabs, but check out this site re: female genital mutilation in Kurdistan.

Aside from hating Arabs, do we really have any common ground with the Kurds?

I think not so much.

How is it the responsibility of we in the West to meddle in the Middle East even more than we already have to ensure that a greater Kurdistan becomes a reality?

Haven't we caused enough damage?

Is Canada complicit in Kurdish war crimes?

On November 3rd Maclean's carried a story by Adnan Khan advising us that Canada's role in the Iraq war is "bigger than you think." Definitely worth a read if you're one of those Canadians who wonder what our troops and our tax dollars are accomplishing over there.

Four days later, Amnesty International came out with a report accusing the Kurdish fighters of committing war crimes in some of the Arab villages they've been helping the Canadians liberate, or we them.

That should raise some questions, wouldn't you think? I mean questions for the opposition in parliament and questions our ever-vigilant fourth estate should be pestering our political leadership with.

When Canada signed on (or more correctly, when our leaders signed us on) for this mission, the public was assured that our military would be well back from the front lines, "advising and training" the Kurdish fighters. It's since become obvious that they've been doing a lot more than that, up to and including taking the fight to "the enemy."

That's a conundrum, isn't it? Who exactly are our "enemies" over there? At the moment, our enemies are radical Sunni jihadists who nevertheless have some degree of popular support among the Sunni population of Iraq. Mainwhile, our NATO ally Turkey is fighting our allies the Kurds, and we are further allied with Hezbollah militias who remain on Ottawa's terror list.

Confusing? You bet!

Canada has zero strategic interests in the region, a fact that should have tempered our enthusiasm for for getting involved in the first place. Nevertheless, our leaders were after some strategic brownie points in Washington and Brussels, so there we are.

Are we complicit in Kurdish war crimes? We won't know anytime soon.

Erdogan takes Turkey over the cliff

When Erdogan officially joined the war on Islamic State last week, the move was widely heralded in Western media as a good thing.

After all, Turkey has been, unofficially, the most prominent facilitator of Islamic State heretofore. ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State/Daesh would not have been possible without the connivance of Turkey. Not that this fact was widely acknowledged in that same Western media.

I've long been a fan of the wily Erdogan. He seemed to think himself the reincarnation of Kemal Ataturk, and he conducted himself accordingly.

But if you've been paying attention, you've noticed that the much ballyhooed war on the Islamic scourge is nothing of the sort. What he's done is declared a war on them but instead opened a war on the Kurds.

This can only end badly for Turkey.

Welcome to the Banana Republic of Canada

Get a load of this;



That's Canada's top soldier, Chief of Defence Staff Lt. General Thomas J. Lawson, having a sit-down with Masrour Barzani, son of Masoud Barzani, the top dog in the imaginary state of Kurdistan.

(Barzani is the guy with the tea-towel on his noggin, in case you're wondering. Lawson is the guy seriously eyeing it because it would definitely make him look less bald.)

The fact that our top soldier only gets face time with the son of the Kurdish leader and not the leader himself should tell you something; not even the imaginary state of Kurdistan takes Canada all that seriously!

But there are other issues that our recent love affair with Kurdistan should bring to the fore. First of all, this father-son stuff should raise some eyebrows. Then again, maybe not... after all, you had Bush and Bush junior, and we might even get Trudeau junior right here in the great white north... so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree on that one.

Nevertheless, rampant nepotism is generally not the sign of a thriving liberal democracy...

Barzani Jr. apparently exhorted our Defence Chief to cough up lots and lots of guns and bombs so the fabled Peshmerga freedom fighters can keep killing whoever they're killing over there. The actual meeting itself was not revealed to the Canadian public by our government until the Kurds publicized it.

Why?

Well, I have a hunch that the Harper gang is not too keen on having the Canadian public take too close a look at our new besties in the Middle East. Kurdish culture doesn't actually have a lot in common with Canadian values. Google "female genital mutilation Kurdistan" and "polygamy Kurdistan" and you'll see what I mean.

By the way, our latest Middle East mission to help Iraq fight ISIS isn't about helping Iraq at all; it's about helping the imaginary state of Kurdistan.

Another by the way; did anybody else find Harper's remarks about our "evolving" mission, ie "we're gonna kill 'em," to be a little untoward? We haven't heard that kind of blustery bullshit since General Rick Hillier was on his way to Afghanistan to rid that land of the murdering Taliban scumbags.

We know how that turned out.

Anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say, and Harper's done a grand job of getting us in. We're not likely to cut and run until we do, which will be a few hundred billions and a few hundred dead Canadians down the road, when the entire exercise in stupidity becomes an election liability.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, we are yet again proclaiming Israel's right to defend itself by itself. (That "by itself" bit just started mysteriously showing up in Baird's pronouncements in the past year or so... I think it's code for "without consideration of international law.")

The "terrorist incident" in question is Hezbollah's retaliation for an Israeli attack on Hezbollah fighters in Syria a week or so ago. Did the Harper gang condemn that? Don't be ridiculous! Continuous violations of Syrian sovereignty, multiple genocidal wars on Gaza, ever-expanding illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land...
what would Israel have to do to draw a mild rebuke, nevermind a "condemnation," from the Harper gang?

The mind boggles...

The Banana Republic agenda continues on the home front as well. After forty years of falling crime rates, the Harper gang promises to get tough on crime once again in the upcoming session of parliament. Yup, there's always a few votes to be had by getting tougher on imaginary crime.

Crimes against the environment are a different matter though. Check out this headline; NAFTA probe of Alberta tailings ponds blocked by Canada. Ya, we're not gonna let those enviro-weenie tree-huggers in Washington and Mexico City push us around!

Kinda makes ya proud, don't it? By God, I think I have to vote for the guy in spite of everything...

"Please Massah, send in some Paveways!..."

Apparently things aren't going that well for our Peshmerga allies attempting to secure their imaginary realm from the Towel-Heads of Terror.

That's why both the Kurds and the nominal joke government in Baghdad are pleading with the Nations of Virtue to send in some death and destruction to help tip the balance in Kirkuk.

While that may be a laudable short-term strategy, it has some ultimately fatal flaws in the long term.

Memo to Kurdistan; the USAF cannot pretend to be the Kurdish Air Force indefinitely! Sooner or later you're going to have to make it on your own... or not.

There's a great deal of confusion among the American populace about just who is who and what is what in this latest round of Middle East adventurism. Our Peshmerga pals are, as of this writing, still on the official "Terror List." The IS underwriters in Qatar and Saudi are officially our best buddies in the ME right after the Chosen People, who for their part, variously support either the Kurds or the IS, depending on vagaries of weather, geography, expediency, time of day, etc...

Long story short, I think it's safe to say that there's a whole lot of Big Dogs here in the Nations of Virtue who are beyond thrilled to see our various "enemies" killing one another off, and the fact that they're doing it with weaponry that keeps our armament manufacturers humming, well, bonus!

So rest assured the Paveways are on their way... and, depending on how things fare out this week, perhaps next week we'll have our Saudi pals send a few transports of Paveways to the IS, just to keep things fair and square!

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!

Next steps for Gillian Rosenberg

When last we encountered "Gill" three weeks ago, she had begun building her brand by getting world wide media attention as the first foreign female fighter to join the Kurdish resistance.

That was a great start!

Mere weeks later, Gillian is rocking the headlines again!! This time she is the first foreign female fighter captured by ISIS!

Here's what she should do with this bountiful over-abundance of publicity;

1. Stage daring escape and/or rescue.
2. Hire PR agency.
3. Retain agent.
4. Negotiate movie deal.
5. Negotiate book deal.
6. Pump speakers' circuit for all it's worth...

Of course, that could all go for a shit in the event that her ISIS captors decide to feature her in their next be-heading video...

In which case she will at least have the satisfaction of knowing she died for a cause she truly believed in.

How long can Erdogan defy the Empire?

It should be obvious by now that America and the NATO me-too states are spoiling for a regional war in a last desperate attempt to have their way with Assad, and insofar as it is an "independent" proto-state (of which I'm not convinced) Islamic State as well. Unfortunately, the Coalition of the Courageous is determined to have others fight that war on their behalf.

That's proving to be a problem. The Washington warmongers can't at this point be seen to give Assad a reprieve in his fight with Isis. The next most effective anti-ISIS forces are the Shia, who will always have more allegiance to Iran. The Kurds are next up, but they have proven ineffective and are themselves waiting for a NATO intervention to save them from the NATO-created Islamic State.

That leaves Turkey. Having been pressured to take a leading role in the creation of ISIS, Erdogan is in no rush to be pushed into providing the boots for America's ground war in Syria. The utterly pathetic hypocrisy Biden voiced when he accused Turkey of creating ISIS recently didn't go over well. This blog speculated two years ago that Assad could very well outlast Erdogan, a result that seems even likelier today.

The news that Turkey's thirty-year war on its Kurds has become a hot war again can only hasten Erdogan's demise. The propaganda organs of the Empire have lavished a lot of fawning attention on the Kurds for the past couple of years. They're the people in the neighbourhood who Israel can work with, so they're obviously the good guys, although we have by some oversight neglected erasing them from our ever-fickle "terror" lists.

So, Erdogan gets begonced, a more pliable leadership will be installed, and voila, America's regional war will have its boots on the ground!

And NATO will be spared the incongruity of a member state in the crusader alliance governed by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Gaza attack wipes Syria off the news map

Click on any major American news site right now and chances are you won't even find a reference to the Syrian conflict. When the only democracy in the middle east decides, (and it usually needs to do this just before an election, coincidentally) to teach those implacable Palestinians one of their periodic good sharp lessons, all other news disappears.

Which is not to say it stops happening. In fact, if one visits news sites based in the region, there seems to be quite a lot going on.

The popular Turkish news site Hurriyet has a take on the Gaza strikes that readers here wouldn't imagine. In the first place they seem to assume, incorrectly, that the Israelis would never undertake such an adventure without the explicit approval of the US.

Secondly, the tone used by Hurriyet suggests that they see the US/Israel attack on Gaza as an attack on Islam, and take offence accordingly. They have gone from being the crucial conduit  keeping the Syrian insurrection going to being yesterday's news.

They further seem a little put out that only France among the NATO allies has joined Turkey in recognizing the new Syrian opposition coalition that the Americans themselves were pushing so hard for the past two weeks. Yesterday Obama seemed to say the US still doesn't trust the rebels.

Here's another reason the Turks are miffed. Regardless of how the Syrian insurrection unfolds for Assad, there is a de-facto Kurdish state being created right now all along Turkey's border with Syria. The Kurdish militias creating the new Kurdistan are allies of the PKK that the Turkish state has been fighting for years.

Erdogan is up a stump. In an attempt to ingratiate himself with his NATO pals he went along with their plans to destroy his one-time ally Assad. In doing so he's allowed his country to violate international law continuously for the past year and a half by providing safe haven and supplying the rebels operating in Syria. Not only is Assad not out of power, but Erdogan's NATO friends, with the exception of France, are clearly losing interest.

And in the meantime, his worst nightmare, an independent Kurdistan, is blossoming right at his door.

So in spite of what you see or don't see at Fox or CNN, Gaza is just one story from a Middle East in chaos, and probably one of the more predictable ones. A few thousand Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis will die, Netanyahu will be re-elected, and it will be business as usual in the Holy Land.

But it's that rapidly changing landscape all around it that we need to be watching.