CBC
On Tuesday April 11, during the visit of Ukraine’s Prime Minster Denys Shmyhal to Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said something so quantifiably dumb that I had to replay the video clip to ensure I had not misunderstood his comments.
A reporter had posed a question to Trudeau asking if he was willing to “state publicly to Canadians, that Canada is now in a proxy war with Russia?” The journalist asked for a “yes” or “no” reply, plus a brief reasoning as to why or why not.
The response from Trudeau – and this, I assure you, is a verbatim transcript – was the following: “Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine upended 80 years of peace, stability and security around the world. One of the most prosperous eras the world has ever known — we have all benefited from that immeasurably everywhere around the world. Russia’s decision to end that peace, to violate the UN Charter, to overturn international law, to arbitrarily choose to redraw lines on a map, is of course of deep concern to Canada.”
While I am certainly in agreement with Trudeau over the fact that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal, to claim this act of aggression shattered eight decades of world peace is just dumb.
Using the starting point of the end of hostilities in WWII, there have been no fewer than 74 interstate wars since 1945.
That list does not include internal civil wars or the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, or the US invasion of Panama in 1989.
Surely Trudeau is aware that Canadian troops fought in the Korean War, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq?
In 1956, Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson was credited with the invention of the United Nations Peacekeeping when he deployed Canadian soldiers with Blue Helmets to defuse the Suez Crisis in the Middle East.
Since that juncture, Canadian peacekeepers saw action in Cyprus, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Somalia, East Timor, Namibia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Western Sahara, Rwanda, Haiti and numerous other far flung global hotspots.
Since 2015, Canada has also been actively training and equipping the Armed Forces of Ukraine to battle a separatist rebellion in the eastern Donbas region.
Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine did not spark the violence in Ukraine, it simply poured gasoline on an already lit fire and turned a localized Ukraine civil war into an inter-state war.
Putin also has no monopoly on “violating the UN Charter” or “overturning international law.”
The US had no UN Resolution authorizing their 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. In 2003, the US famously tried, and failed, to get a UN Resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq under the guise of self-defense.
The US went ahead, and invaded Iraq anyway and subsequently failed to find the trumped-up weapons of mass destruction which would have justified their illegal war.
A conservative estimate would put the resultant death toll of Iraqi civilians at close to 1 million – and counting. So much for Trudeau’s world enjoying 80 years of peaceful harmony.
In 2011, Canada led the charge to use NATO airpower to assist Libyan rebels to oust President Muammar Gaddafi.
Only after NATO had achieved that goal did anyone closely examine the composition of the Libyan rebels that we were allied with. When it turned out they were a fractious collection of thugs and Islamic extremists, the Western countries – including Canada – simply walked away from the violent anarchy that we created.
For the record, Libya continues to be a failed state with no light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
The other talking point that Trudeau tossed out was the line about Putin not being able to change the lines on a map – particularly the map of Europe. In my lifetime, the map of the world has changed many times over.
When I was a soldier stationed in Europe we were in West Germany and East Germany was a separate country.
Czechia and Slovakia were a unified nation called Czechoslovakia. What was then Yugoslavia is now the seven states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.
For the record, Canada participated in the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against the former Yugoslavia which eventually resulted in the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo in 2007.
This was indisputably Serbian sovereign territory, so it seems it is possible to change the lines on a map as long as it is the US wielding the Sharpie.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created 15 new republics. As a result, the map of Europe now includes Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine.
Little understood by Western media is that in many cases, the creation of the former Soviet Republics as independent states led to many bloody territorial disputes.
To date there remains simmering armed standoffs in the territories of Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabagh.
Suffice it to say that Trudeau’s response to the reporter should have been a simple “yes.” By every conventional measure, Canada is involved in a proxy war with Russia.
It is one thing to dumb down a complex conflict into simple soundbites – and with apologies to the film Tropic Thunder, Trudeau went “full dumb,” and you never go “full dumb.”
