Let's get interactive

Great comment here in response to one of last week's posts about the anti-war movement. This is one of the most cogent arguments for Canada to withdraw from Afghanistan, and can easily be adapted to address the U.S.-Iraq situation. 

The commenter points out (and hopefully doesn't mind my paraphrasing and extrapolating a bit) that Canadian and U.S. governments have asked the public to simply assume that the troops are in Afghanistan in Iraq for the right reasons, and that they're on the way to victory, without offering much in the way of proof. Commenter rightly wonders when we're ever going to find out how "victory" is to be defined in these conflicts and what benchmarks are in place to measure progress toward our objectives, and suggests that until our government(s) come clean with the public about these things, they have little claim on our support.

No argument here, and I think commenter has cut to the heart of what has made Afghanistan and Iraq so controversial and in some cases catastrophic. While I happen to think there were some good, principled reasons for intervention in both cases, Canada and the U.S.-led Coalition has thoroughly squandered the opportunity to do much good to this point. Furthermore, these governments have poisoned any future attempt at positive intervention with their incompetent and dishonest attempts to both wage these wars and sell them to the public.

The commenter's argument seems to be more about practice - how the interventionist West has gone about its missions - than an objection to intervention in principle. This is a fair and necessary line of attack, one that Bush, Harper and company should be forced to confront. It's also the kind of reasoned argument that tends to get buried under too much reflexive "give peace a chance" sloganeering.