THE IDIOTS' AGENDA

ARMS AND THE GOVERNMENT MEN

FLIGHT OF FANCY

There are rumours floating around the Canadian capital city, that General Rick Hillier wants us paeons to cough up several billion dollars for fancy new fighter aircraft.

They will be built by Lockeed Martin at a per-unit cost of approximately 100 million dollars. A few components and parts and some assembly will be farmed out to Canadian companies friendly to the Harper regime.

These aircraft do not fit into any useful role in the Canadian military machine. They will however, drag us deeper into the arms of American military policy. (In fact, the Americans need Canada to be on board, so this ridiculous project can be financed.)

(NB: Lockheed Martin Corp.’s chief executive has acknowledged its $245-billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet program could suffer because of strains on the U.S. defense budget but insisted the projects future was secure. )

General Hillier and the erratic Defence Minister, Gordon O’Connor- both have shown that they are all over the map when it comes to sensible strategic planning in terms of our national security. The only people who will benefit from the purchase of these expensive new fighter planes, will be their friends in the arms trade.

Hillier and O’Connor and for that matter, the Prime Minister  too- have lost sight of Canadian values, objectives and strategic interests. Like their Liberal predecessors, the present government has developed no logical strategy to deal with the number one threat we face today, namely terrorism.

Two years ago, Hillier, for example, was busy having lunch with a group of tame and fawning reporters. He said then that Canada was in Afghanistan to hunt down and kill terrorist "scumbags". The syncophantic scribes loved it.

His rhetoric was soon picked up by a neophyte Prime Minister and an inexperienced Foreign Minister, both of whom seemed unduly anxious to do the military thing. To complete this group, the aging former military lobbyist, with ties to the world of arms manufacturing, was made Defence Minister.

Together, this quartet of blowhards continued what the Liberals had started, namely the transformation of the Canadian military – famed for its history of peacekeeping- into a scaled-down copy of the U.S. military machine.Together, they imported to Canada, the aggressive military cultism of the Bush administration, along with its bellicose language…right down to and including the yellow ribbons, which are the symbols of aggression to many war-fighting supporters. (Personally, I prefer to wear a black armband to mourn our lost soldiers and grieve for our wounded).

These men have led our country along the path marked out by George Bush, Dick Cheney and the other men who have turned the United States into the most hated nation on earth. They have done this and continue to do it, at a time when a growing majority of American citizens are beginning to see the folly and absurdity of their own country’s policies. Our sheeplike leaders seem to have missed the fact that the U.S. military has been "broken" by the very policies they have adopted.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with their clumsy and foolish "kill-terrorist-scumbags- approach", are actually creating more terrorists. They are undermining our international credibility and destroying the standing of western governments, (including our own), in the world.

Canada is presently spending something in the neighbourhood of one billion dollars a year fighting an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Our military men and women are not fully trained for this conflict, they are not properly armed and equipped to fight the shadowy forces of Afghan guerilla groups in unfriendly terrain and Afghan civilians are dying by the hundreds in poorly planned military operations, which rely on aerial bombardment and indiscriminate attacks.

Now the men who escalated this conflict into a war of aggression and occupation apparently have already given up on attempting to confront the growing problem of terror. Now they have decided to spend billions more dollars on fancy, high tech figter jets, thus diverting resources away from the main threat.

It just doesn’t make sense.