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Ive heard, they calling off all major tours / operations for a wile. Once they boys get back from kabul.
Canadian Military involvment in Iraq, and Canadian political support. - The Canadian Forces going to Iraq?
- Thread starter McG
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The Afghanistan deployment is helping our American allies. And its as close to combat as your going get. Its not like if Canadian troop were deployed to Iraq that they would be sent out on search and destroy missions ( sorry not sure what the US is calling thses types missions). Canada woudl most likely be in one sector and a very small one at that.
Not trying to get on you, but why are you some keen on getting out there and killing someone?
Not trying to get on you, but why are you some keen on getting out there and killing someone?
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Brent: Canada isn‘t just going to pick up and deploy to Iraq just because you feel like seeing combat. The decision to not go to Iraq was made for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the CF is drastically short of manpower, equipment, funds, and most of all, public support. Despite your personal desire to go overseas and be a cowboy, not everyone else in Canada shares your desire. And the funny thing about being in a democracy, the majority rules.
Why don‘t you get though your training, get a little time in and a little experience , and maybe you‘ll reevaluate your stance. All the vets I‘ve spoken to who‘ve seen active combat have said that they would never want to do it again. They all speak of it as the worst thing they‘ve ever done, and many have nightmares still, 60 years later.
Why don‘t you get though your training, get a little time in and a little experience , and maybe you‘ll reevaluate your stance. All the vets I‘ve spoken to who‘ve seen active combat have said that they would never want to do it again. They all speak of it as the worst thing they‘ve ever done, and many have nightmares still, 60 years later.
B
babicma
Guest
Are you serious!!??
Go to Iraq to support our American Brothers!!
Why dont you go and join the US Army or even the Royal Marines if you really want to go fight a war that is‘nt even in the interests of Canada or its citizens.
Iraq, as the Americans are seeing it now, is one big waste of time, money, and most of all LIFE!
Do you honestly believe that the CF is in the position for such a deployment??
Here are the links to the US Army and the Royal Marines, I think its easier to join the Royal Marines if you really are Canadian:
http://www.goarmy.com/index07.htm
http://www.royal-navy.mod.uk/static/pages/2650.html
Go to Iraq to support our American Brothers!!
Why dont you go and join the US Army or even the Royal Marines if you really want to go fight a war that is‘nt even in the interests of Canada or its citizens.
Iraq, as the Americans are seeing it now, is one big waste of time, money, and most of all LIFE!
Do you honestly believe that the CF is in the position for such a deployment??
Here are the links to the US Army and the Royal Marines, I think its easier to join the Royal Marines if you really are Canadian:
http://www.goarmy.com/index07.htm
http://www.royal-navy.mod.uk/static/pages/2650.html
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I think Brent has been playing too much Ghost Recon
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Brent, I agree with you to a point. i feel Canada should have gone to iraq to help out in some ways, even if it were logistics contributing a CC-130 would show we cared. But im also aware the Canadian Army has neither the resources nor the people to do so as others have said.
I want to see some "action" now, but im not stupid. I know that what i want now wont be what i‘ll want when Im actually sitting behind a mound of sand with zips and hisses going over my head. I more or less want the experience, so I can sit back and say I‘ve experienced it and have come to the conclusion that its not a nice thing. im stubborn, and need to figure this stuff out first-hand. otherwise i‘ll have regrets, but I doubt this will happen in the CF.
Simply going into combat isnt as easy as you make it sound. its a whole different picture when you‘re life is on the line, and people are actually trying to take it. And if thats my opinion on it with the odd fist fight as my only fighting experience, really try to comprehend what those who HAVE experienced it feel.
Y
Yllw_Ninja
Guest
Brent i got an idea...play paintball and/or Airsoft just so you can get a semi-realistic idea of whats going to happen to you once you do see combat...i play paintball on a regular basis and if real combat is anything like paintball (i get shot alot) then i‘d like to avoid the combat part as much as possible...
Y
Yllw_Ninja
Guest
Yet another good reason to avoid combat *nods*
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Are you sure about that. I think upon reflection that the War on Terrorism, Middle East stability, oil, and the spread of democracy to an area dominated by militant autocracies are legitimate security interests for Canada and its citizens.
I am sure the 25 million liberated people of Iraq think that....
You‘re right...that does present us with a problem. Why do we say we have three Brigade‘s in the Army when I personally heard from the mouth of the Chief of Defence Staff that we could not deploy one. Someone should be accountable for the poor level of our preparedness. The Aussies and Brits can sustain such commitments, so there is no excuse for us to shirk from duties as a world leader (Australia isn‘t even a member of the G-8)
Brent_B, try joining the USMC or Royal Marines, and cut down on the SOCOM II.
And, yes Infanteer, the people of Iraq must be overjoyed with their present situation. Recently David Kay admitted that everyone was wrong, about WMD‘s and the threat Iraq posed. Turns out Bush and Rummy lied with premeditation and the Pentagon fed false and wildly exaggerated reports about Iraq.
Confronted by these nasty facts, Bush tried to rebrand the unprovoked war by claiming it was justified because Saddam was such a horrid man. That is arrant hipocrisy. When Saddam comitted his worst atrocities - in the 80‘s - he was a close U.S. ally keeping the fundamentalist revolution at bay for the U.S., secretly supported with weapons and intelligence.
Do you honestly still believe in what you are saying? Aren‘t you ashamed of yourself? How could you say bombing some country for no reason is in the interest of Canadian citizens.
Though I strongly detest Saddam, I hate propaganda of any kind - especially when it comes from a western democracy. It‘s good that Canadians did not join the U.S., at least we still have our honor and reputation serving a worthy cause in Afghanistan. But it is scary that people like you approve aggression that violates international law nad basic norms of civilized behaviour.
Back in March I supported the war. I knew it was not to "liberate" the poor people of Iraq, but getting rid of Saddam sounded like the right thing to do at the time. But when I first saw M1A1‘s raiding Baghdad (CNN gun camera footage), blowing HEAT shells into every building, and anything that moved I could recall the Warsaw uprising in 1944, when Nazi armour acted in the same way trying to suppress the insurgency. That just wasn‘t right. My support slowly started to deteriorate.
And, yes Infanteer, the people of Iraq must be overjoyed with their present situation. Recently David Kay admitted that everyone was wrong, about WMD‘s and the threat Iraq posed. Turns out Bush and Rummy lied with premeditation and the Pentagon fed false and wildly exaggerated reports about Iraq.
Confronted by these nasty facts, Bush tried to rebrand the unprovoked war by claiming it was justified because Saddam was such a horrid man. That is arrant hipocrisy. When Saddam comitted his worst atrocities - in the 80‘s - he was a close U.S. ally keeping the fundamentalist revolution at bay for the U.S., secretly supported with weapons and intelligence.
Do you honestly still believe in what you are saying? Aren‘t you ashamed of yourself? How could you say bombing some country for no reason is in the interest of Canadian citizens.
Though I strongly detest Saddam, I hate propaganda of any kind - especially when it comes from a western democracy. It‘s good that Canadians did not join the U.S., at least we still have our honor and reputation serving a worthy cause in Afghanistan. But it is scary that people like you approve aggression that violates international law nad basic norms of civilized behaviour.
Back in March I supported the war. I knew it was not to "liberate" the poor people of Iraq, but getting rid of Saddam sounded like the right thing to do at the time. But when I first saw M1A1‘s raiding Baghdad (CNN gun camera footage), blowing HEAT shells into every building, and anything that moved I could recall the Warsaw uprising in 1944, when Nazi armour acted in the same way trying to suppress the insurgency. That just wasn‘t right. My support slowly started to deteriorate.
D
dwild40
Guest
Bravo FUBAR
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FUBAR must right dialouge for the Toronto Sun, because a few days ago someone said that exact paragraph, or atleast all the key points on a report. The report may have said the other parts of what fubar said, but I specificaly remember that exact part.
My bad, I thought it was from the CBC, but I realized after I posted it that it was from the Toronto Sun.
Y
Yllw_Ninja
Guest
yeah looks alot like this one...
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_feb1.html
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_feb1.html
L
logau
Guest
Suggest you all get a copy of Stalin‘s Secret War by Nikolai Tolstoy - which explains what a Stalinist State is - which is what Iraq under Saddam was. Its what Syria is and same for North Korea and before that Cambodia under Pol Pot.
This is what you can expect in a Stalinist State
The Russians under Stalin are estimated to have lost 35 million of their own people in WW2. At least 7.5 million of these were from abuse by the Russian government try this link on a gold mining cmplex known as Kolyma http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/sjk/kolyma.html
Would you be surprised if I told you we sent a few battalions from Victoria to Validivostok in 1919 to chase Commies? I‘m not kidding!
Draw your own conclusions - but just because it gets messy in Iraq or Afghanistan is no reason not to take out governments that would throw you in a dirty hole forever without batting an eyelash then go back to the Swedish Bikini Tean on MTV.
Globe and Mail today
Mark MacKinnon
In Russia‘s icebound north, Stalin‘s victims are still serving time
By MARK MacKINNON
From Monday‘s Globe and Mail
Vorkuta, Russia â †Her treasured black-and-white photographs testify that Lyubov Kalashnikova was a lithe 21-year-old student when she first arrived in Vorkuta aboard a prison train from Moscow.
At the height of wartime paranoia, the Young Communist was arrested as the Nazis approached the capital. It was 1942, and she was sentenced to 10 years in the gulag for allegedly betraying her country.
Sixty-two years later, Ms. Kalashnikova lies in her tiny bed and dreams of the world outside this icebound Arctic outpost. Impoverished and half-paralyzed, she still hopes to get back her old apartment in Moscow and reclaim the remaining years of her life.
"I wish I had never come to Vorkuta, this cursed place," the 83-year-old said, clutching angrily with her good right hand at the tattered blanket wrapped around her.
Although she was "rehabilitated" decades ago â †the charges against her were dismissed as false â †she was prevented first by law and then by her economic situation from leaving her urban prison.
"I‘ve been in jail my whole life. Now, it is worse than when I was in the gulag," she said.
"Then, at least I was with other people. Now, I am alone and still in Vorkuta."
Ms. Kalashnikova is among the hundreds of gulag survivors who never left this grey city where the snow melts for just two months of the year and winter temperatures often hit â â€50 C. They are Stalin‘s forgotten victims, still serving time for offending a dictator who died half a century ago.
Now, as the Russian government prepares a mass retreat from its overpopulated north, some are at last being offered the chance to return south.
Under a project sponsored by the World Bank, the beginning of a mass population transfer that could eventually involve hundreds of thousands of people, some of those trapped in Vorkuta and other dying Arctic settlements are being offered cash to move south and start over.
Yet even though the chance to leave finally looms, Ms. Kalashnikova wants more than what they‘re offering. She wants her old life back.
Moscow is not on the list of destinations available under the World Bank-sponsored program, and Ms. Kalashnikova has no interest in moving to an unfamiliar city just to start over again at her age and in her physical condition. "I am a Muscovite," she said. "I want to go back to my beloved Moscow, to see the Bolshoi Theatre again and visit the graves of my relatives before I die."
The government and the World Bank are running into this unexpected stumbling block repeatedly as their efforts pick up steam.
Of the 700-plus former gulag inmates still living in Vorkuta, many say that although they want to leave, they feel they‘re owed a little more than a fistful of money and a train ticket to an unfamiliar destination.
They don‘t want apartments in southern Siberia; they want to go back to their homes in Ukraine, Tatarstan, Belarus and Germany. If they can‘t, they‘d rather stay.
It‘s not just the gulag veterans who are resisting. Although Vorkuta deputy mayor Valeri Belyaev talks of the need to slice the city‘s population to something like 80,000 from its current 130,000, of whom about 40,000 are pensioners who strain the municipal budget, the World Bank program has seen few takers.
Only a quarter of the first 6,000 available places on the city‘s relocation list have been filled. Many other residents want a deal, most of them mining families who flocked here after coal was discovered under the tundra in the 1940s but now find themselves put out of work by the gradual closing of the mines.
While the Russian government‘s resettlement efforts have been under way for several years now, the $80-million (U.S.) pilot project sponsored by the World Bank is the most determined effort so far to start moving people south.
Vorkuta residents who fit the bill â †the disabled and the war veterans first, the pensioners next â †are being offered $2,000 to $4,000 each as start-up cash, as well as help finding an apartment in the south.
"It‘s too little money, but this is what‘s available," Mr. Belyaev said. "It‘s a free choice. Nobody is making anybody take this offer. Nobody is being forced to move from Vorkuta."
The same experiment is being carried out with World Bank help in the areas of Norilsk and Magadan, two other regions synonymous with the gulag system through which an estimated 18 million people passed in 50 years.
According to some estimates, a proper program to shut down the antiquated mining towns and prison settlements that dot Russia‘s Arctic would cost as much as $5-billion. There simply isn‘t that kind of money available in federal coffers.
Andrei Markov, project manager for the World Bank, says Russia‘s north may be overpopulated by as many as 800,000 people, a relic of the period when settling the region seemed a laudable national goal. Vorkuta, he says, is a perfect example of the problem.
He calls it a "completely artificial" settlement that never should have been built. "With normal economic rationale, nobody would have ever built a city of 250,000 [Vorkuta‘s population at the height of the Soviet era] in the Arctic, on permafrost," he said.
Although there‘s coal in the region, he noted sardonically, the city‘s heating system is fired by oil that has to be brought in from hundreds of kilometres away.
Vorkuta now is little more than a city of ghosts, haunted by its terrible past. The tens of thousands who died here seem to linger accusingly in the empty apartment blocks at the end of every street, and in the graveyards that surround this city like an army laying siege.
Nonetheless, there‘s a sense of community among the survivors who remain here, one that springs from the shared experience of having lived through the horrors of the labour camps. They say they hate Vorkuta, but it‘s become their home.
"It‘s not quite a prison any more, but they can‘t imagine any other life," said Yevgenia Khaidarova, head of the local branch of Memorial, a human-rights group that represents gulag victims.
"Here, they are among their own. They‘ve adopted this place."
Even if the government ever made the perfect relocation offer, some aren‘t sure they would take it.
Alexander Ilin has taken some pride in recent years in serving as an unwelcome reminder to those who would rather forget an ugly part of this country‘s past. He knows a better life â †certainly an easier retirement, in a more livable climate â †lies waiting for him in the south, but he feels uncomfortable with the idea of leaving.
Mr. Ilin moved here in 1946 as a teenager to be with his father, who was sentenced to hard labour as a "traitor" for surrendering to superior German troops.
He grew up behind the barbed wire of the Vorkutlag prison camp, his every move seen from above by the armed guards who manned the sinister watchtowers at each corner of the camp.
Now 71, he‘s afraid that Vorkuta, a part of history scarcely mentioned in the history books used in most Russian schools today, will die if he and others like him leave.
"There are seven man-made wonders in the world, seven beautiful things. Vorkuta is not a monument like the pyramids, but it is our history, our bitter history, and we can‘t leave it behind," he said.
"Rather than let this place die, we should make this place into a monument so that we never repeat these events in the future."
This is what you can expect in a Stalinist State
The Russians under Stalin are estimated to have lost 35 million of their own people in WW2. At least 7.5 million of these were from abuse by the Russian government try this link on a gold mining cmplex known as Kolyma http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/sjk/kolyma.html
Would you be surprised if I told you we sent a few battalions from Victoria to Validivostok in 1919 to chase Commies? I‘m not kidding!
Draw your own conclusions - but just because it gets messy in Iraq or Afghanistan is no reason not to take out governments that would throw you in a dirty hole forever without batting an eyelash then go back to the Swedish Bikini Tean on MTV.
Globe and Mail today
Mark MacKinnon
In Russia‘s icebound north, Stalin‘s victims are still serving time
By MARK MacKINNON
From Monday‘s Globe and Mail
Vorkuta, Russia â †Her treasured black-and-white photographs testify that Lyubov Kalashnikova was a lithe 21-year-old student when she first arrived in Vorkuta aboard a prison train from Moscow.
At the height of wartime paranoia, the Young Communist was arrested as the Nazis approached the capital. It was 1942, and she was sentenced to 10 years in the gulag for allegedly betraying her country.
Sixty-two years later, Ms. Kalashnikova lies in her tiny bed and dreams of the world outside this icebound Arctic outpost. Impoverished and half-paralyzed, she still hopes to get back her old apartment in Moscow and reclaim the remaining years of her life.
"I wish I had never come to Vorkuta, this cursed place," the 83-year-old said, clutching angrily with her good right hand at the tattered blanket wrapped around her.
Although she was "rehabilitated" decades ago â †the charges against her were dismissed as false â †she was prevented first by law and then by her economic situation from leaving her urban prison.
"I‘ve been in jail my whole life. Now, it is worse than when I was in the gulag," she said.
"Then, at least I was with other people. Now, I am alone and still in Vorkuta."
Ms. Kalashnikova is among the hundreds of gulag survivors who never left this grey city where the snow melts for just two months of the year and winter temperatures often hit â â€50 C. They are Stalin‘s forgotten victims, still serving time for offending a dictator who died half a century ago.
Now, as the Russian government prepares a mass retreat from its overpopulated north, some are at last being offered the chance to return south.
Under a project sponsored by the World Bank, the beginning of a mass population transfer that could eventually involve hundreds of thousands of people, some of those trapped in Vorkuta and other dying Arctic settlements are being offered cash to move south and start over.
Yet even though the chance to leave finally looms, Ms. Kalashnikova wants more than what they‘re offering. She wants her old life back.
Moscow is not on the list of destinations available under the World Bank-sponsored program, and Ms. Kalashnikova has no interest in moving to an unfamiliar city just to start over again at her age and in her physical condition. "I am a Muscovite," she said. "I want to go back to my beloved Moscow, to see the Bolshoi Theatre again and visit the graves of my relatives before I die."
The government and the World Bank are running into this unexpected stumbling block repeatedly as their efforts pick up steam.
Of the 700-plus former gulag inmates still living in Vorkuta, many say that although they want to leave, they feel they‘re owed a little more than a fistful of money and a train ticket to an unfamiliar destination.
They don‘t want apartments in southern Siberia; they want to go back to their homes in Ukraine, Tatarstan, Belarus and Germany. If they can‘t, they‘d rather stay.
It‘s not just the gulag veterans who are resisting. Although Vorkuta deputy mayor Valeri Belyaev talks of the need to slice the city‘s population to something like 80,000 from its current 130,000, of whom about 40,000 are pensioners who strain the municipal budget, the World Bank program has seen few takers.
Only a quarter of the first 6,000 available places on the city‘s relocation list have been filled. Many other residents want a deal, most of them mining families who flocked here after coal was discovered under the tundra in the 1940s but now find themselves put out of work by the gradual closing of the mines.
While the Russian government‘s resettlement efforts have been under way for several years now, the $80-million (U.S.) pilot project sponsored by the World Bank is the most determined effort so far to start moving people south.
Vorkuta residents who fit the bill â †the disabled and the war veterans first, the pensioners next â †are being offered $2,000 to $4,000 each as start-up cash, as well as help finding an apartment in the south.
"It‘s too little money, but this is what‘s available," Mr. Belyaev said. "It‘s a free choice. Nobody is making anybody take this offer. Nobody is being forced to move from Vorkuta."
The same experiment is being carried out with World Bank help in the areas of Norilsk and Magadan, two other regions synonymous with the gulag system through which an estimated 18 million people passed in 50 years.
According to some estimates, a proper program to shut down the antiquated mining towns and prison settlements that dot Russia‘s Arctic would cost as much as $5-billion. There simply isn‘t that kind of money available in federal coffers.
Andrei Markov, project manager for the World Bank, says Russia‘s north may be overpopulated by as many as 800,000 people, a relic of the period when settling the region seemed a laudable national goal. Vorkuta, he says, is a perfect example of the problem.
He calls it a "completely artificial" settlement that never should have been built. "With normal economic rationale, nobody would have ever built a city of 250,000 [Vorkuta‘s population at the height of the Soviet era] in the Arctic, on permafrost," he said.
Although there‘s coal in the region, he noted sardonically, the city‘s heating system is fired by oil that has to be brought in from hundreds of kilometres away.
Vorkuta now is little more than a city of ghosts, haunted by its terrible past. The tens of thousands who died here seem to linger accusingly in the empty apartment blocks at the end of every street, and in the graveyards that surround this city like an army laying siege.
Nonetheless, there‘s a sense of community among the survivors who remain here, one that springs from the shared experience of having lived through the horrors of the labour camps. They say they hate Vorkuta, but it‘s become their home.
"It‘s not quite a prison any more, but they can‘t imagine any other life," said Yevgenia Khaidarova, head of the local branch of Memorial, a human-rights group that represents gulag victims.
"Here, they are among their own. They‘ve adopted this place."
Even if the government ever made the perfect relocation offer, some aren‘t sure they would take it.
Alexander Ilin has taken some pride in recent years in serving as an unwelcome reminder to those who would rather forget an ugly part of this country‘s past. He knows a better life â †certainly an easier retirement, in a more livable climate â †lies waiting for him in the south, but he feels uncomfortable with the idea of leaving.
Mr. Ilin moved here in 1946 as a teenager to be with his father, who was sentenced to hard labour as a "traitor" for surrendering to superior German troops.
He grew up behind the barbed wire of the Vorkutlag prison camp, his every move seen from above by the armed guards who manned the sinister watchtowers at each corner of the camp.
Now 71, he‘s afraid that Vorkuta, a part of history scarcely mentioned in the history books used in most Russian schools today, will die if he and others like him leave.
"There are seven man-made wonders in the world, seven beautiful things. Vorkuta is not a monument like the pyramids, but it is our history, our bitter history, and we can‘t leave it behind," he said.
"Rather than let this place die, we should make this place into a monument so that we never repeat these events in the future."
- Reaction score
- 11,270
- Points
- 1,260
Wow, you never cease to amaze me Fubar, did you borrow tmbluesflats tin-foil hat.
While performing routine house searches in Bosnia, I talked to a man holding his infant who‘s house we were going through. He seemed genuinely happy to help us go through his stuff because he knew we were there to get rid of weapons. He supported us because he lost his mother, brothers, and a kid in the war and was sick of all of it. He was happy that the West bombed his country in 1995 because we were there to do the right thing, and ensure that with the creation of a civil society, his kids would not have to live through that.
So if the endstate of the Iraq War means another country free of authoritarian dictatorship and a backwards political society, then as a human being I am happy with the actions the Coalition has taken.
And your point is? Regardless of what the original intention was, does it change the fact that an Iraqi citizen doesn‘t have to worry about Uday and Qusay cruising by and shooting him and taking his daughter to their sex palace.
Your trying to prove a point by painting the world in black and white. Do you consider the Allied Lend Lease Act with the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazi‘s to be an act of errant hypocrisy, despite the fact that Stalin turned out to be a bigger monster?
Yes, I do, because I‘ve seen first hand what 90% of the world is like.
While performing routine house searches in Bosnia, I talked to a man holding his infant who‘s house we were going through. He seemed genuinely happy to help us go through his stuff because he knew we were there to get rid of weapons. He supported us because he lost his mother, brothers, and a kid in the war and was sick of all of it. He was happy that the West bombed his country in 1995 because we were there to do the right thing, and ensure that with the creation of a civil society, his kids would not have to live through that.
So if the endstate of the Iraq War means another country free of authoritarian dictatorship and a backwards political society, then as a human being I am happy with the actions the Coalition has taken.
And the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq was what, US led coalition to replace an unfriendly an unacceptable regime in the Middle East? I find it scary that people like you have the moral cowardice to sit and hide under the umbrella of freedoms you were fortunate to be accorded by living here, and yet say that we‘re wrong to bring them to others.
Geez, maybe you shouldn‘t pay attention to the propaganda than, eh?
FUBAR, you raise good points, but your passages are word for word from Eric Margolis‘ article, as noted in another post above. Are you Eric Margolis? If not, I would suggest that when you decide to plagiarize something you give full credit where credit is due. I‘m sure Mr. Margolis is flattered by your choice to use his words, but I‘m sure he would be even happier to know you noted where they came from.
Thanks to scm77 and Yllw_Ninja who did the busting work on this.
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