Canada at war!

Quite an alarming headline on page A7 of my Globe and Mail this morning.

"Russia poses immediate military threat to Canada, top General says."

Wow!

That sure sounds like some serious stuff, no?

Then again, what else would a General say? I'm pretty sure you don't get to be a "top" General by downplaying threats.

But General Vance just might be downplaying the threat after all.

According to Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, we're way past "threats."

"The war is on."

I'll spare you the football analogy that precedes his conclusion. Let's just say if that's the calibre of intellectual rigour emanating from the AEI, Putin and his top generals are more likely to die laughing than fighting.

If the Kagan name rings a bell it's because Fred and his brother Robert, together with their father Donald, have been at the forefront of American war-mongering for many years. They're all about freedom and democracy and America's God-given mandate to spread same around the globe using whatever means necessary.

What these folks don't get, and apparently the writers who still fawn over that "rules based international order under US leadership" don't either, is that American leadership has long since lost any credibility it may have once had. From My Lai to Abu Ghraib has been one long downward spiral.

Today the champions of freedom and democracy are busy doing what they can to forever extinguish the voice of Julian Assange, who is guilty of exposing American war crimes.


Canadians, especially those who still wax nostalgic over some mythological era when America was a force for good, would do well to ask themselves if this is really a country with which we share values to the point that we will follow them into whatever military adventures the Kagans and their ilk deem necessary to advance the cause of their peculiar vision of "freedom."