Dougie93

Over twelve years, and the vast majority of those troops were service support in the rear with the gear, in terms of what they had on the ground at any given time, actual combat arms soldiers in the fight? 3 rifle company groups.

And again, this is what I'm talking about in terms of de facto armed constabulary, and even then, they couldn't even handle the Taliban at the tactical level, twice they went at the White Schoolhouse, first the Patricia's and then the Royals, in mindless frontal attacks, against a handful of lightly armed insurgents, and they actually got their asses handed to them both times, before finally getting serious and bringing everything they had to bear, and even that attack was a brutal slog through minefields which they were not equipped to clear, welding metal onto civilian bulldozers and driving into mineblasts, next man, stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door. Again, valiant, but criminally negligent on the part of the Canadian government in my opinion.

Indeed, and thankfully the Taliban were a relatively lightweight opponent, can you imagine what the casualties would have been like if they had ATGW's like what the Turks are facing in Syria or the Saudis in Yemen? 152 KIA, much as several of them were my close friends; we got off easy in the end, could have been much worse.

The upside is that each de facto sub nation within Canadian Confederation could and would be governed far far better to the benefit of all, rather than as now with this abomination of a federal government forcing us altogether even though in most cases our interests and desires are contradictory, in terms of remote communities under federal jurisdiction, Nunavut, NWT, and Yukon, I would offer them self determination, to include joining one of the other Dominions as with Labrador, grouping together to form their own Dominion, or go it alone. In terms of the viability of these extremely remote communities, if they are not self sustaining then they are a fool's errand, but if they insist on remaining where they are, I would suggest they seek assistance from either the United Kingdom or the United States, I honestly have absolutely zero interest in governing the arctic, the Americans can have it for all I care, since for all intents and purposes, it is already their responsibility, it's not like we can actually defend it, and what you cannot defend is not actually yours, under international law.

Indeed, but she is also Queen of Ontario, see; office of the Lieutenant Governor, and upon De-Confederation as per my plan, would remain Queen of the Dominion of Ontario, although I would actually free Northern Ontario from Queen's Park and just go back to pre 1867 and be the Dominion of Upper Canada.

Not that I am saying that Canadian pers were not valiant in their execution of their duties in Afghanistan, in what was a no win situation in the end, but to say that Canada's contribution was significant to the overall operation above the tactical level, I would have to disagree, basically sent a single battalion into action, ill equipped, vastly outnumbered and surrounded, and then just left them there to take a beating, with only one significant and very limited win at the White School House on Operation Medusa, after concentrating all their forces to seize a small compound, other than that, easily replaceable by the Americans, to wit, a token force, as all Canadian deployments are since the end of the Cold War.

"Treasonous" would infer that I am in violation of my oath to the sovereign, which is not the case vis a vis De-Confederation, because each province in Canada has a direct relationship to the Crown, nothing in my oath to Her Majesty binds me to defend and uphold Confederation per se, I'm perfectly within my rights to advocate for an Independent Upper Canada as much as the Pequistes are to advocate for an Independent Quebec. Again, as Canada is a monarchy, my fealty is only to the Crown, person not a place, to wit, Liz Windsor is the boss of me, and no other.

It's going to happen regardless, I'm merely advocating a formalization of a process already and in fact long in progress. /shrugs

No argument here, but since the broad consensus of Canadians insist on only buying hardware made in Canada, as really all they care about is pork barreling, while other Gendyne subsidiary countries like Switzerland and the UK are open to buying offshore as it were, GDLS-C is far more significant to the Canadian defence industrial base. Not that I'm arguing that Canada should have a defence industrial base, at this juncture I actually advocate for the complete disbandment of DND and the CAF and simply turning it all over to DPS as constabulary "Giant Iceland" option, en route to eventual devolution of Confederation writ large.

Impasse on legal "similarity" as, again, there is obvious similarity from where I'm sitting. In terms of Fake Country I said "de facto" rather than "de jure" colony of the United States rendering international law moot. On "ally" of the United States I would say "with allies like us, who needs enemies?". On rely on clout of US military security I would submit we are the ultimate free rider as we rely totally on the United States as no other country of our scale does. On didn't participate in Iraq War; not true, we sent air and naval forces inclusive to Operation Iraqi Freedom, simply declining to send ground forces. On not interning Kadr at Gitmo, does not absolve us of complicity once he was there. As far as how else could we have acted; I'm willing to discuss further but would rather not do so by wall of text. On the Americans keeping Kadr from us, as I said earlier, the opposite was the case, they actually wanted rid of him as Gitmo had become politically radioactive, but as I said, my suspicion is that Harper government did conspire with the Americans to keep him there, because even tho they were complicit, they wanted to keep all that offshore to avoid the legal and political ramifications upon his stepping back onto Canadian soil.

Well Canada doesn't have the capacity to do what Sweden does, but not because Sweden is neutral, rather because Sweden replaces its military hardware on a regular basis whereas the absurdly corrupt and dysfunctional Canadian government cannot run a defense department as almost every other country on earth does, resulting in not replacing military hardware on multi generational time scales, leading to a inherent boom and bust cycle, inciting the slow motion collapse of Canada's capacity to employ armed forces above the constabulary level at all.

It's all of a piece from where I'm sitting, in that essentially with regards the GWOT in the wake of 9-11, the Canadian government went just as crazy and off the deep as the American government did with regards to throwing the rule book out the window, and to say otherwise I would submit, is what Bush-Cheney2004 has accurately ascribed to the pathological Canadian inability to take any responsibility for anything and rather blame everything on the United States, "the Canadian Disease", which I would add is all inclusive to "Fake Country" in that Canada is de facto not a sovereign state but rather a former de jure British colony which has simply converted itself into de facto colony of the United States upon collapse of the British Empire.

Except that's not actually true, IIRC, the RCMP are the ones who put Arar in harms way, because it was the RCMP who flagged him as a "terrorist", and it is also not true that the RCMP and CSIS were not aware that the Americans were going to render him, they were in on it from the beginning and in fact concocted the whole thing, it was actually the Americans who were relying on them to make sure they had the right guy not the other way round.

In fairness to the Harper government, this is not just any old military contract, this is the largest military contract in the history of Canada by orders of magnitude, and General Dynamics Land Systems Canada is not just any old company, it is actually one of Canada's very few domestic strategic assets, in that it is the go to shop to build armoured vehicles for the Canadian military, not just now, but in the future as well, which it cannot do, if it does not have any contracts, and as Canada only buys armoured vehicles once in a generation or two, cannot be kept open by Canadian contracts alone, so what the Saudi contract is actually doing is allowing us to keep our strategic asset without having to buy anything from them in the meantime. Ergo why I suggested that Canada buy the vehicles instead, knowing full well we ain't gonna do that, which brings me back to "if not us, than who?" Bearing in mind that if you let these assets go away, if you ever want to buy anything in the future, you're either going to have to buy from other countries, or go through an absurdly expensive process of rebuilding them from scratch which will likely fail under the weight of said expense, see; National Shipbuilding Procurement Boondoggle.

Who is "we"? You've seemed to have internalized the state as being indistinguishable from yourself as an autonomous individual, which, again, as a classically liberal limited government conservative, I do not do, and I would caution others from doing so as well.

I never said our military role in Afghanistan was a war crime, the war crimes Canada has committed have to do with being complicit in the kidnapping of Canadian citizens to be rendered to places like Syria or Egypt to be tortured, and in the Kadr case conspiring to keep Kadr in an extra-judicial black hole concentration camp, which, again, if they can get away with that, they can get away with pretty much anything, and if they can do it them, they can do it to me and they can do it to you.

Obvious nonsense is obvious, as the Americans are in fact aggressively selling military hardware to India right now, to include top of the line equipment like P-8 Poseidon MPA's and Apache attack helicopters.

And furthermore the Harper government in the first place did not want to bring him back, because it was very likely he would have to be freed by the Canadian courts, while at the time Canadian soldiers were fighting and dying in Afghanistan, which is why I think the assertion of a conspiracy is probably true. But this is all political, which is why I don't really have a problem with Kadr being duly compensated, because as per my post above, Canada was not just complicit in a minor offence here, but rather the second most egregious offence on this earth, the only thing above being Crimes Against Humanity, and as a classically liberal limited government conservative, I place the rule of law over and above cynical political calculation, and furthermore, if they can operate lawlessly vis a vis Kadr, they could operate lawlessly against any of us, so I want some deterrence against that sort of thing.

The United States did not violate national/international law and the laws of armed conflict by invading Afghanistan per se, that was backed up by several international mandates, the legality issue starts with the United States giving terrorists legitimacy by arresting them and charging them as civil criminals. See, terrorists have no standing under the laws of armed conflict on the battlefield, so the United States could have charged them thusly and had them executed as unlawful combatants, but, that's a very old statute, and in this day and age, politically radioactive, so instead the United States charged them with other crimes, split the baby, at which point you have to treat them as de facto POW's under Geneva, which the United States did not do, ergo, legal jeopardy, war crime. POW's under Geneva have a lot of rights, you can't even put them in civilian jail, civilian jail is a war crime if imposed on a lawful combatant in a war, they have to put in special POW camps where they get all sorts of privileges and whatnot and can pretty much run their own affairs inside the camp as a de facto military unit, like Hogan's Heroes kind of thing. So if you invade Afghanistan under the laws of armed conflict, so be it, but then you have to operate under the laws of armed conflict, you can't go back and forth and have it both ways, US domestic criminal law cannot be imposed on combatants in a war, because war itself, is not actually illegal, thus there is only two options, you either charge them as unlawful combatants and shoot them, or you treat them as POW's with all that that entails, because under Geneva, any civilians you intern have to be treated as de facto POW's, which, yes, international law is capricious, but it is what it is. So, if you run a concentration camp like Gitmo, you're doing what the Nazis did on the Eastern Front basically "extra-judicial black hole", and whatever justifications the Americans have invoked, rest assured the Nazi's invoked all those justifications as well "new kind of war, old rules don't apply, blah, blah, blah"

Bear in mind though, I don't think we're there yet, but if we are in fact witnessing the break up of Chimerica, then yes, that would mean we are going to back to cold war, with all that that entails, to include realpoiltik by two stage fission-fusion tritium boosted critical mass.

I included the caveat of asymmetrical nuclear weapons as a nod to India, because India is actually China's primary adversary, so in extremis, India could give the Chinese pause by those means.

Well, folks these days like to say "America is no longer the leader of the free world!", which, if that is the case, they should prepare themselves to start sucking some Chinese dick, because absent the Leader of the Free World, China can pretty much do whatever the fuck they want, that's how big they are now.

The reality is, absent the asymmetrical use of nuclear weapons, the United States is the only country with the leverage to stand up to China, because the EU is not a country, and Russia, while heavily armed, is an economic pipsqueak.

And that is basically his only leverage, and as it is a PM's only leverage, should be reserved for when they really need it rather than for this.

Bottom line, people who are waiting for a Canadian Prime Minister to act tough, talk tough, or take any hard line at all, with either of the two global military and economic superpowers, simply have an inflated sense of Canada's importance and leverage, and so should not hold their breath.