The Canada at War Issue

Volume 6 Issue 3, February 2007

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War is bad. We all know that. War is one of the worst things that could possibly happen to a country: death, destruction and misery. War is fucking awful. As Canadians, we have very little first hand knowledge of this… war has never happened to us, at least not in the modern era. We have brought war to other peoples; justified in the case of our invasion of Europe in WWII, not so when we backed the American Imperial Project in the Korean War. Blueprint Magazine believes that the current war being fought in Afghanistan is of the second kind; supporting the American Imperial Project. And while our government denies this, the Americans thank us profusely for our assistance.

War is bad. That’s why as Canadians, we fashion ourselves as peacekeepers instead of warriors. But in truth, our country has fewer than 60 deployed UN peacekeepers. In fact, we have more civilian contractors and RCMP officers in Iraq than we do peacekeepers worldwide. Canadian peacekeepers faced abject failure in Rwanda and provided security for blue beret death squads in Haiti. If peacekeeping is our solution to war, we need to be much better at it.

War is bad. The war in Afghanistan is no exception. No war is. None are righteous, but some are necessary. War in Afghanistan is not necessary. They are no threat to us. And while the Taliban were a terribly repressive regime, that cannot justify invading and oc-cupying their country for over 5 years. The notion of reconstruction is a noble one, but the thought that it can be accomplished by soldiers is a fantasy. Also, it’s not up to us to rebuild Afghanistan… it is however in our interest. It is in the interest of the American Imperial Project that Western influence be paramount in the reconstruction of nations in the “Muslim World.”

War is bad. As Canadian citizens we urgently need to rethink our understandings of wars and the war machine, to re-examine our nation’s role in the world, and to reconsider the role of our military. We need to get out of Afghanistan. We need to.

Alex Hundert
Editor-in-Chief