There’s nothing childish about military debate

Re: Time to end childish military debate, Opinion, Jan. 29

I was stunned to open my paper this morning to find an opinion piece decrying Canada’s “childish” debate over the role of its armed forces in Iraq.

In the article, Matthew Fisher laughs at the notion that Canadian troops would ever stick to the mission parameters laid out by the Harper government for their deployment to Iraq. He attempts to justify this position with the argument that the Americans and British have already conducted such operations in secret, so why complain?

The answer is historical; Canada’s war in Afghanistan started much the same way, with a small special forces deployment turning into a decade of bitter fighting which cost the lives of 158 Canadian soldiers, wounded thousands more, and did little to improve security for either country.

While Fisher attacks “elites” for misunderstanding military matters, he himself peddles the very dangerous falsehood that the attacks in Quebec and on Parliament Hill were carried out directly by a “bunch of zealots under the banner of the Islamic State.” In truth, both tragic attacks were carried out by deranged individuals with no ties to the Islamic State beyond an adopted ideology.

A lack of oversight and criticism of the military led to the debacle that was the Iraq War, the very conflict that gave birth to the Islamic State, and to ridicule such criticism as childish is to condemn Canada’s military to another long, bloody, and ultimately futile war in foreign lands.