Would Ignatieff Prefer They Were Canadian?

A roadside bomb explosion has killed 10 U.S. marines and wounded 11 others near Fallujah, in one of the deadliest attacks on American troops in recent months, military officials announced Friday.

The marines were on foot patrol at the time. They were hit by what the military calls an improvised explosive device, made from several large artillery shells.

I know it's callous to use the deaths of these Marines for my own political purposes, but it's a question the Liberal candidate for Etobicoke-Lakeshore needs to answer: Should Canadians be dying in Iraq for an impossible goal?

If you think "victory" in Iraq is still a possibility, I'll refer you to Steve Gilliard:

Look, guerrillas aren't going to set up a pressure plate with four 122mm shells and wait. They fucking knew these folks were coming. Maybe the cops told them, maybe the Army, but someone observed them, noted the number of men and the pattern and devised the best way to design that trap.

So, come this week, some very unlucky patrol walks into this carefully laid trap and were hit.

The Marine spokesman said some bullshit about how "this is how the insurgents fight". No fucking kidding. They use their ample intelligence resources to deliver the most pain at the lowest risk to themselves. That's what guerrillas do....

We are NEVER going to train an Iraqi Army worth a damn. Why?

Because the first thing the compent Iraqi Army would do is turn on the US like a rabid dog. So we send them out in pickups, while Marines laugh at them for doing so. The problem is that many of them speak some English and most of us don't speak any Arabic. They smile in our faces, they do their jobs, but they hate us. Too many Americans die in ambushes and traps for that to be untrue.

One of the most basic prerequisites for any reasonable argument in favour of humanitarian intervention is this: You need to be able to make the situation better through intervention. This isn't just common sense, it goes back to Just War theory as Christian thinkers have understood it for centuries.

I personally thought at the beginning of this war that, while the war in Iraq was always a "wrong war", there was at least the possibility that the US forces might make things better. The first year or so seemed to back up that belief, in part - the insurgency hadn't really begun to grow until the spring of 2004. In any case, the US shows no ability to control Iraq, much less improve matters. The only thing they've done in the last year is kill (and be killed) unnecessarily.

And before Mr. Ignatieff's defenders respond, there is no evidence Canada's participation in this disaster would have improved things, any more than Britain's participation has helped matters. All it would have done is given Prime Minister Martin a few more funerals to attend, and made us a bigger target for terrorists.