Iggy the warrior

Michael Ignatieff, in his enthusiasm for our military adventure in Afghanistan, seems to be getting carried away with his rhetoric. He is quoted in The Globe as saying, in reference to the Rwanda debacle, "The Liberal government, all Canadians even, promised it would never happen again. We are in Afghanistan to keep that promise."

Did we make that promise? I don't remember any such thing. And how would we be keeping that promise in Afghanistan? It is an entirely different situation. Rwanda was about genocide, Afghanistan about theocracy. I've heard claims we are in Afghanistan to bring democracy to its people or to fight terrorism, but nothing about preventing genocide. I do believe Mr. Ignatieff is making things up.

If the leading candidate for the Liberal leadership needs an analogy, he might try Vietnam. There, too, a Western nation thought it could bring democracy to an Asian country even though the odds were very much against it. They failed, and at least 3,000,000 people died, the greatest slaughter since the Second World War, a monument to good intentions gone catastrophically wrong. How many Afghans is Ignatieff willing to see die for Western hubris?