ninme

Western Standard - Harmed Forces
In the homefront battle between militant pacifists in the East and passive militants in the West, Canada is the big loser, by Mark Steyn

There was a poll reported in the Globe and Mail — page 18 — that 71% of Quebecois want to “scrap any combat role for the Canadian Forces” and, “by contrast, only four in 10 Albertans want a ‘peacekeeping only’ military,” leading to:

That’s the good news? “Only” four in ten Albertans are opposed to a combat-capable military?

Okay, next to Quebec that makes Albertans bloodcurdling Mongol hordes twitching for a continent or two to rape and pillage.

and:

58 per cent of Canadians favour a peacekeeping-only military. Not just for Afghanistan, or Iraq, but for everything, including presumably if the enemy were scrambling ashore at Halifax or Vancouver. …If this poll is correct, it’s fascinating. Fascinating in the sense that a terminal illness is fascinating. First, if it’s any consolation to those six out of ten warmongering Albertans, the numbers in most Continental countries would probably be even worse.

So:

It seems to me Washington is noticing this rather more than it used to. On recent visits to both the Pentagon and the White House, I was struck by both subtle and not so subtle distinctions between allies. The Americans don’t mind (or can live with) allies whose militaries are extremely small but they would appreciate it if the token detachments sent were at least prepared to join the fight. In part, this is a natural revulsion against a postmodern assault on language: an army with no combat capability is not, in any sense, an army. As for the notion that they would instead be enthusiastic peacekeepers, that’s just a bit of face-saving cover. There isn’t a lot of peace to keep these days, and the spots on the map that could use a bit of it–Darfur, for one–are far too dangerous for the blue-helmet crowd. So, unless you’re one of those Third World militaries who see UN missions as a non-stop child-sex party, a belief in the virtues of “peacekeeping” is a dodge. Even in humanitarian crises, as we saw in the tsunami, when people are dying the first folks with boots on the ground are serious militaries, like the Americans and Australians.

It’s often said that Canada came of age at Vimy, in northern France, in the Easter of 1917, when a nation of seven million lost over three-and-a-half thousand in a few days. Ninety years later, a nation of 30 million cannot absorb four dozen dead in half a decade without recoiling from the very notion of soldiering, which is–as our forebears understood at Vimy and the Somme–central to the idea of nationhood: “It was Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade,” recalled Brigadier-General Alexander Ross of the Dominion troops’ advance in the dawn of Easter Monday. “In those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation.” It is perhaps crediting too much to Ipsos-Reid to read into the few minutes of a poll respondent’s time the death of a nation. Nonetheless, in the space of one human life–four score and ten–we have gone from “coming of age” to a descent into a second adolescence full of frivolous posturing. …

Forgetfulness occurs very easily. It should not be asking too much of a rich nation of 30 million to allow a small, tough, honourable soldiery to go about its mission with the support of a people mature enough to understand the stakes. As my old colleague Sir John Keegan once wrote, “Without armed forces a state does not exist.”

So. That’s depressing, eh?

Back-quoting for something slightly off-topic:

When it comes to hunting down and killing the enemy, it’s pretty much down to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia (which isn’t even in NATO). So much for multiculturalism. That quartet’s about as unicultural as you can get, not to say, given that three of them share the same head of state, uniregal.

I wonder how that’ll be seen by historians. Not in, like, fifty years, but in a thousand, or whatever, when things happening now are filed away by monarch as things a thousand years ago are by us. I mean, sure, the monarch is a little thing compared to what she used to be, but perhaps they’ll think that since we had one at all, or, alternatively, they’ll have one again and will tend to see things through that prism… But at any rate, if they’ll see this whole War on Terror thing as HM Elizabeth avenging her wayward cross-Atlantic subjects.