本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Stephen Harper is an American ass kisser plain and simple. His desire
is to have the new Conservative Party of Canada emulate the American
Republican Party as much as possible.
If Stephen Harper had been Prime Minister in 2003, Canada would most
likely have soldiers
fighting and dieing in Iraq right now.
The 2003 American invasion of Iraq, which was totally illegal under
international law, has proved to be a complete disaster and failure.
The only motive of the Iraq War was to advance American global
domination and the profits of oil corporations and defence contractors.
There have been close to 2,200 American soldiers killed in Iraq and
over 20,000 American soldiers severely injured as a direct result of
the illegal American invasion and occupation of Iraq over the course of
the last 3 years. It has been reported within the past few days that
the Iraq War will apparently cost the American taxpayer close to $2
Trillion dollars by the time its all over, and for what?.
George W. Bush's stated goal in deciding to illegally invade and occupy
Iraq was to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction. After 3 years,
there have never been any weapons of mass destruction ever found in
Iraq. George W. Bush's justification for his illegal and immoral war
was a flat out lie, a lie that Stephen Harper totally supported and
continues to support.
If Stephen Harper becomes Canada's next Prime Minister, how many of
George W. Bush's future illegal wars to benefit oil corporations and
the military-industrial complex will he support. How many Canadian
soldiers will Stephen Harper send to fight and die to support his
fellow Conservative ally, George W. Bush's future illegal wars?. What
will Stephen Harper's support for George W. Bush's future illegal wars
cost the Canadian taxpayer?.
The American economy is already practically in a recession as a result
of the hundreds of billions of dollars that George W. Bush has spent on
his illegal and immoral war in Iraq.
Do you think there won't be any future wars?. Do you think Stephen
Harper will never support another of George W. Bush's illegal and
immoral future wars if he becomes Canada's next Prime Minister?. Think
again. If elected as Canada's next Prime Minister, Stephen Harper will
become the most pro-American leader in the western world. Stephen
Harper will become an obedient lackey of George W. Bush and American
foreign and defence policy. The new Conservative Party of Canada is
already practically a proxy of the American Republican Party.
What future wars has George W. Bush already planned?. A war with Iran
within the next few months?. Given the level of threats and ultimatums
toward Iran coming from the White House within the last few weeks, it
looks increasingly likely. A war with Syria in 2007?. A war with North
Korea in 2008?.
Let's take a look at Syria. Stephen Harper would love to prove his
pro-American credentials by supporting such a war I'm quite sure. In
terms of Syria, the whole build up to another illegal and immoral war
by George W. Bush seems to be happening again. It all sounds
depressingly familiar, and it is. The Bush administration accuses the
leader of a major Arab country of supporting terrorism and harboring
weapons of mass destruction. The stable of neo-conservative pundits
begins beating the drums of war. American forces begin massing on the
country's border, amid ominous talk of cross-border attacks. Top U.S.
officials warn that American patience with the country's leader is
running out, and the United States imposes economic sanctions
unilaterally. There are threats about taking the whole thing to the
United Nations Security Council. And, in Washington, an exile leader
with questionable credentials begins making the rounds of official
Washington and finds doors springing open at the Pentagon, the National
Security Council, and at Elizabeth Cheney's shop at the State
Department.
This time it is Syria. The pressure is on, and it will likely get a lot
worse very soon. On Dec. 15, the second installment of the report by a
UN team investigating the assassination of former Lebanese Prime
Minister Rafiq Hariri is delivered. The first report, released in
October, implicated several members of President Bashar Assad's
family in the Hariri murder, though without hard evidence. It would be
wrong, however, to see the Bush administration's campaign against
Syria only through the lens of the Hariri case. Like the attack on
Iraq,
it is a longstanding vendetta.
Three years ago, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was widely viewed as the
first chapter of a region-wide strategy to redraw the entire map of the
Middle East. After Iraq, Syria and Iran would be the next targets,
after which the oil-rich states of the Arabian Gulf, including Saudi
Arabia, would follow. It was a policy driven by neoconservatives in and
out of the Bush administration, and they didn't exactly make an
effort to keep it secret. In April 2003, in an article in The American
Prospect entitled "Just the Beginning," stated that "Those who
think that U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without
the battle spreading beyond Iraq's borders, are likely to be
mistaken." The article quoted various neocon strategists who sought
precisely that. Among them was Michael Ledeen, the arch-Machiavellian
and Iran-Contra manipulator-in-chief, who argued from his perch at the
American Enterprise Institute: "I think we're going to be obliged
to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not. As soon as we land
in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network. It may turn
out to be a war to remake the world."
Since then, of course, the conventional wisdom has evolved in a rather
different direction. As the war in Iraq bogged down, and as a public
outcry developed against the neoconservatives over the bungled war, the
belief took hold that the United States had bitten off more than it
could chew in Iraq-so that Syria, Iran, and the rest of President
Bush's evildoers can rest easy. According to this theory, the United
States no longer has the stomach, or the capability, to spread the war
beyond Iraq as originally intended. Our troops are stretched too thin,
our allies are reining us in, and cooler heads are prevailing in
Washington-or so the theory goes.
But the news from Syria shows that the conventional wisdom is wrong.
The United States is indeed pursuing a hard-edged regime-change
strategy for Syria. And it isn't necessarily going to be a Cold
War-in fact, it could well get very hot very soon. In Washington,
analysts disagree over exactly how far the Bush administration is
willing to go in pursuing its goal of overthrowing the Assad
government. In the view of Flynt Leverett, a former CIA Syria analyst
now at the Brookings Institution, the White House favors a kind of
slow-motion toppling. In a forum at Brookings, Leverett, author of
Inheriting Syria: Bashar's Trial by Fire, announced his conclusion
that Bush was pursuing "regime change on the cheap" in Syria. But
others disagree, and believe that Syria could indeed be the next Iraq.
For neoconservatives, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. For
the rest of us-watching the war in Iraq unfold in horror, lurching
toward breakup and civil war-the prospect ought to be both tragic and
alarming.
The fall of the Assad regime could open Syria, and the region, to
widespread instability. "No one knows what is going to come out of
it," says Wayne White, the former deputy director of the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research on Middle East
issues. "It's making me nervous. What, exactly, is 'Syria'?
There are cleavages there. The place could just break up." White says
that no one knows the extent to which Sunni Islamic radicals have
organized themselves in Syria, especially through the Muslim
Brotherhood. "There could be a lot more Islamic militancy there than
we're aware of."
For Assad, none of this is exactly a surprise. On March 1, 2003, as
U.S. forces massed for the attack on Iraq, Assad addressed an emergency
summit meeting of the Arab League. "We are all targeted," he said.
"We are all in danger."
On Oct. 6, in his saber-rattling declaration of war against
"Islamofascism," President Bush not-so-subtly warned Syria that it
might be next. "State sponsors [of terrorism] like Syria and Iran
have a long history of collaboration with terrorists, and they deserve
no patience from the victims of terror," said Bush, speaking to the
National Endowment for Democracy. "The United States makes no
distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who
support and harbor them, because they're equally as guilty of murder.
Any government that chooses to be an ally of terror has also chosen to
be an enemy of civilization. And the civilized world must hold those
regimes to account." Echoing Bush, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay
Khalilzad warned bluntly that "our patience is running out with
Syria," and like other U.S. officials Khalilzad blamed the Assad
government for America's troubles in Iraq.
Over the past several weeks, U.S. forces in Iraq have conducted massive
air and ground attacks in cities along the Iraq-Syria border, in a
sweeping offensive in advance of the Dec. 15 election in Iraq. In
Syria-whose military is already in turmoil over its hurried
evacuation from Lebanon and whose government is rattled to the core
because of charges that top Syrian officials may have been involved in
the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri-the
prospect of a second front along its eastern border is raising alarm.
Although intelligence analysts assert that Syria could weather a series
of limited strikes along its border without undue consequences for the
regime, in fact such attacks could have unforeseen results, even if
they don't presage a wider war by the United States. Still, in his
Washington Post online column "Early Warning," William M. Arkin
wrote on Nov. 8 that the U.S. Central Command has been "directed by
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to prepare a 'strategic
concept' for Syria, the first step in the creation of a full-fledged
war plan."
The wider war that the Bush administration seems to be pursuing was
telegraphed long ago by the various neocon pundits and prognosticators.
Charles Krauthammer used his Washington Post column in March to suggest
that the way to advance the "glorious, delicate, revolutionary moment
in the Middle East" is to go after Syria. "This is no time to
listen to the voices of tremulousness, indecision, compromise, and
fear," he wrote. Instead, the Bush administration's commitment to
spreading democracy should take it "through Beirut to Damascus."
William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and co-author of The War
in Iraq ("The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end
there"), helpfully suggested some options that the Bush
administration is clearly thinking about now. In The Weekly Standard
last year, Kristol wrote, "We could bomb Syrian military facilities;
we could go across the border in force to stop infiltration; we could
occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, a few miles from the
border, which seems to be the planning and organizing center for Syrian
activities in Iraq; we could covertly help or overtly support the
Syrian opposition. ... It's time to get serious about dealing with
Syria as part of winning in Iraq, and in the broader Middle East."
Are Canadians ready to see our young men and women in uniform dieing in
yet another one of George W. Bush's illegal and immoral wars in the
Middle East?. Are Canadians ready to have their country likely targeted
by terrorists in retaliation for us sending troops to support George W.
Bush's next war in the Middle East. Do you still think everything I am
saying here is just fear mongering?. Take a look for yourself at some
of Stephen Harper's very public comments on the illegal and immoral
American invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Stephen Harper on the Iraq War:
"I don't know all the facts o­n Iraq, but I think we should work
closely with the Americans." (Report Newsmagazine, March 25 2002)
"We should have been there shoulder to shoulder with our allies. Our
concern is the instability of our government as an ally. We are playing
again with national and global security matters.'' (Canadian Press
Newswire, April 11, 2003)
"On the justification for the war, it wasn't related to finding any
particular weapon of mass destruction. In our judgment, it was much
more fundamental. It was the removing of a regime that was hostile,
that clearly had the intention of constructing weapons systems. ... I
think, frankly, that everybody knew the post-war situation was probably
going to be more difficult than the war itself. Canada remains
alienated from its allies, shut out of the reconstruction process to
some degree, unable to influence events. There is no upside to the
position Canada took." (Maclean's, August, 25, 2003)
"The world is now unipolar and contains o­nly o­ne superpower. Canada
shares a continent with that superpower. In this context, given our
common values and the political, economic and security interests that
we share with the United States, there is now no more important
foreign policy interest for Canada than maintaining the ability to
exercise effective influence in Washington so as to advance unique
Canadian policy objectives." (Canadian Alliance Defence Policy Paper:
The New North Strong and Free, May 5, 2003)
"This party will not take its position based o­n public opinion polls.
We will not take a stand based o­n focus groups. We will not take a
stand based o­n phone-in shows or householder surveys or any other
vagaries of pubic opinion... In my judgment Canada will eventually join
with the allied coalition if war o­n Iraq comes to pass. The
government will join, notwithstanding its failure to prepare, its
neglect in co-operating with its allies, or its inability to
contribute. In the end it will join out of the necessity created by a
pattern of uncertainty and indecision. It will not join as a leader but
unnoticed at the back of the parade." (Hansard, January 29, 2003)
"While there are Canadians who oppose the invasion, Harper said, they
are a minority, as are those who are anti-American. It certainly
exists. But in fairness, there's an anti-American sentiment among the
American left in the United States itself. We have some of that here.
But that's a minority sentiment.'" o­nly in Quebec, with its "pacifist
tradition," are most people opposed to the war, Harper said. "Outside
of Quebec, I believe very strongly the silent majority of Canadians is
strongly supportive." (Halifax Daily News, April 4, 2003)
"we support the war effort and believe we should be supporting our
troops and our allies and be there with them doing everything necessary
to win" (Montreal Gazette, April 2, 2003)更多精彩文章及讨论,请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
is to have the new Conservative Party of Canada emulate the American
Republican Party as much as possible.
If Stephen Harper had been Prime Minister in 2003, Canada would most
likely have soldiers
fighting and dieing in Iraq right now.
The 2003 American invasion of Iraq, which was totally illegal under
international law, has proved to be a complete disaster and failure.
The only motive of the Iraq War was to advance American global
domination and the profits of oil corporations and defence contractors.
There have been close to 2,200 American soldiers killed in Iraq and
over 20,000 American soldiers severely injured as a direct result of
the illegal American invasion and occupation of Iraq over the course of
the last 3 years. It has been reported within the past few days that
the Iraq War will apparently cost the American taxpayer close to $2
Trillion dollars by the time its all over, and for what?.
George W. Bush's stated goal in deciding to illegally invade and occupy
Iraq was to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction. After 3 years,
there have never been any weapons of mass destruction ever found in
Iraq. George W. Bush's justification for his illegal and immoral war
was a flat out lie, a lie that Stephen Harper totally supported and
continues to support.
If Stephen Harper becomes Canada's next Prime Minister, how many of
George W. Bush's future illegal wars to benefit oil corporations and
the military-industrial complex will he support. How many Canadian
soldiers will Stephen Harper send to fight and die to support his
fellow Conservative ally, George W. Bush's future illegal wars?. What
will Stephen Harper's support for George W. Bush's future illegal wars
cost the Canadian taxpayer?.
The American economy is already practically in a recession as a result
of the hundreds of billions of dollars that George W. Bush has spent on
his illegal and immoral war in Iraq.
Do you think there won't be any future wars?. Do you think Stephen
Harper will never support another of George W. Bush's illegal and
immoral future wars if he becomes Canada's next Prime Minister?. Think
again. If elected as Canada's next Prime Minister, Stephen Harper will
become the most pro-American leader in the western world. Stephen
Harper will become an obedient lackey of George W. Bush and American
foreign and defence policy. The new Conservative Party of Canada is
already practically a proxy of the American Republican Party.
What future wars has George W. Bush already planned?. A war with Iran
within the next few months?. Given the level of threats and ultimatums
toward Iran coming from the White House within the last few weeks, it
looks increasingly likely. A war with Syria in 2007?. A war with North
Korea in 2008?.
Let's take a look at Syria. Stephen Harper would love to prove his
pro-American credentials by supporting such a war I'm quite sure. In
terms of Syria, the whole build up to another illegal and immoral war
by George W. Bush seems to be happening again. It all sounds
depressingly familiar, and it is. The Bush administration accuses the
leader of a major Arab country of supporting terrorism and harboring
weapons of mass destruction. The stable of neo-conservative pundits
begins beating the drums of war. American forces begin massing on the
country's border, amid ominous talk of cross-border attacks. Top U.S.
officials warn that American patience with the country's leader is
running out, and the United States imposes economic sanctions
unilaterally. There are threats about taking the whole thing to the
United Nations Security Council. And, in Washington, an exile leader
with questionable credentials begins making the rounds of official
Washington and finds doors springing open at the Pentagon, the National
Security Council, and at Elizabeth Cheney's shop at the State
Department.
This time it is Syria. The pressure is on, and it will likely get a lot
worse very soon. On Dec. 15, the second installment of the report by a
UN team investigating the assassination of former Lebanese Prime
Minister Rafiq Hariri is delivered. The first report, released in
October, implicated several members of President Bashar Assad's
family in the Hariri murder, though without hard evidence. It would be
wrong, however, to see the Bush administration's campaign against
Syria only through the lens of the Hariri case. Like the attack on
Iraq,
it is a longstanding vendetta.
Three years ago, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was widely viewed as the
first chapter of a region-wide strategy to redraw the entire map of the
Middle East. After Iraq, Syria and Iran would be the next targets,
after which the oil-rich states of the Arabian Gulf, including Saudi
Arabia, would follow. It was a policy driven by neoconservatives in and
out of the Bush administration, and they didn't exactly make an
effort to keep it secret. In April 2003, in an article in The American
Prospect entitled "Just the Beginning," stated that "Those who
think that U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without
the battle spreading beyond Iraq's borders, are likely to be
mistaken." The article quoted various neocon strategists who sought
precisely that. Among them was Michael Ledeen, the arch-Machiavellian
and Iran-Contra manipulator-in-chief, who argued from his perch at the
American Enterprise Institute: "I think we're going to be obliged
to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not. As soon as we land
in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network. It may turn
out to be a war to remake the world."
Since then, of course, the conventional wisdom has evolved in a rather
different direction. As the war in Iraq bogged down, and as a public
outcry developed against the neoconservatives over the bungled war, the
belief took hold that the United States had bitten off more than it
could chew in Iraq-so that Syria, Iran, and the rest of President
Bush's evildoers can rest easy. According to this theory, the United
States no longer has the stomach, or the capability, to spread the war
beyond Iraq as originally intended. Our troops are stretched too thin,
our allies are reining us in, and cooler heads are prevailing in
Washington-or so the theory goes.
But the news from Syria shows that the conventional wisdom is wrong.
The United States is indeed pursuing a hard-edged regime-change
strategy for Syria. And it isn't necessarily going to be a Cold
War-in fact, it could well get very hot very soon. In Washington,
analysts disagree over exactly how far the Bush administration is
willing to go in pursuing its goal of overthrowing the Assad
government. In the view of Flynt Leverett, a former CIA Syria analyst
now at the Brookings Institution, the White House favors a kind of
slow-motion toppling. In a forum at Brookings, Leverett, author of
Inheriting Syria: Bashar's Trial by Fire, announced his conclusion
that Bush was pursuing "regime change on the cheap" in Syria. But
others disagree, and believe that Syria could indeed be the next Iraq.
For neoconservatives, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. For
the rest of us-watching the war in Iraq unfold in horror, lurching
toward breakup and civil war-the prospect ought to be both tragic and
alarming.
The fall of the Assad regime could open Syria, and the region, to
widespread instability. "No one knows what is going to come out of
it," says Wayne White, the former deputy director of the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research on Middle East
issues. "It's making me nervous. What, exactly, is 'Syria'?
There are cleavages there. The place could just break up." White says
that no one knows the extent to which Sunni Islamic radicals have
organized themselves in Syria, especially through the Muslim
Brotherhood. "There could be a lot more Islamic militancy there than
we're aware of."
For Assad, none of this is exactly a surprise. On March 1, 2003, as
U.S. forces massed for the attack on Iraq, Assad addressed an emergency
summit meeting of the Arab League. "We are all targeted," he said.
"We are all in danger."
On Oct. 6, in his saber-rattling declaration of war against
"Islamofascism," President Bush not-so-subtly warned Syria that it
might be next. "State sponsors [of terrorism] like Syria and Iran
have a long history of collaboration with terrorists, and they deserve
no patience from the victims of terror," said Bush, speaking to the
National Endowment for Democracy. "The United States makes no
distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who
support and harbor them, because they're equally as guilty of murder.
Any government that chooses to be an ally of terror has also chosen to
be an enemy of civilization. And the civilized world must hold those
regimes to account." Echoing Bush, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay
Khalilzad warned bluntly that "our patience is running out with
Syria," and like other U.S. officials Khalilzad blamed the Assad
government for America's troubles in Iraq.
Over the past several weeks, U.S. forces in Iraq have conducted massive
air and ground attacks in cities along the Iraq-Syria border, in a
sweeping offensive in advance of the Dec. 15 election in Iraq. In
Syria-whose military is already in turmoil over its hurried
evacuation from Lebanon and whose government is rattled to the core
because of charges that top Syrian officials may have been involved in
the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri-the
prospect of a second front along its eastern border is raising alarm.
Although intelligence analysts assert that Syria could weather a series
of limited strikes along its border without undue consequences for the
regime, in fact such attacks could have unforeseen results, even if
they don't presage a wider war by the United States. Still, in his
Washington Post online column "Early Warning," William M. Arkin
wrote on Nov. 8 that the U.S. Central Command has been "directed by
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to prepare a 'strategic
concept' for Syria, the first step in the creation of a full-fledged
war plan."
The wider war that the Bush administration seems to be pursuing was
telegraphed long ago by the various neocon pundits and prognosticators.
Charles Krauthammer used his Washington Post column in March to suggest
that the way to advance the "glorious, delicate, revolutionary moment
in the Middle East" is to go after Syria. "This is no time to
listen to the voices of tremulousness, indecision, compromise, and
fear," he wrote. Instead, the Bush administration's commitment to
spreading democracy should take it "through Beirut to Damascus."
William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and co-author of The War
in Iraq ("The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end
there"), helpfully suggested some options that the Bush
administration is clearly thinking about now. In The Weekly Standard
last year, Kristol wrote, "We could bomb Syrian military facilities;
we could go across the border in force to stop infiltration; we could
occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, a few miles from the
border, which seems to be the planning and organizing center for Syrian
activities in Iraq; we could covertly help or overtly support the
Syrian opposition. ... It's time to get serious about dealing with
Syria as part of winning in Iraq, and in the broader Middle East."
Are Canadians ready to see our young men and women in uniform dieing in
yet another one of George W. Bush's illegal and immoral wars in the
Middle East?. Are Canadians ready to have their country likely targeted
by terrorists in retaliation for us sending troops to support George W.
Bush's next war in the Middle East. Do you still think everything I am
saying here is just fear mongering?. Take a look for yourself at some
of Stephen Harper's very public comments on the illegal and immoral
American invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Stephen Harper on the Iraq War:
"I don't know all the facts o­n Iraq, but I think we should work
closely with the Americans." (Report Newsmagazine, March 25 2002)
"We should have been there shoulder to shoulder with our allies. Our
concern is the instability of our government as an ally. We are playing
again with national and global security matters.'' (Canadian Press
Newswire, April 11, 2003)
"On the justification for the war, it wasn't related to finding any
particular weapon of mass destruction. In our judgment, it was much
more fundamental. It was the removing of a regime that was hostile,
that clearly had the intention of constructing weapons systems. ... I
think, frankly, that everybody knew the post-war situation was probably
going to be more difficult than the war itself. Canada remains
alienated from its allies, shut out of the reconstruction process to
some degree, unable to influence events. There is no upside to the
position Canada took." (Maclean's, August, 25, 2003)
"The world is now unipolar and contains o­nly o­ne superpower. Canada
shares a continent with that superpower. In this context, given our
common values and the political, economic and security interests that
we share with the United States, there is now no more important
foreign policy interest for Canada than maintaining the ability to
exercise effective influence in Washington so as to advance unique
Canadian policy objectives." (Canadian Alliance Defence Policy Paper:
The New North Strong and Free, May 5, 2003)
"This party will not take its position based o­n public opinion polls.
We will not take a stand based o­n focus groups. We will not take a
stand based o­n phone-in shows or householder surveys or any other
vagaries of pubic opinion... In my judgment Canada will eventually join
with the allied coalition if war o­n Iraq comes to pass. The
government will join, notwithstanding its failure to prepare, its
neglect in co-operating with its allies, or its inability to
contribute. In the end it will join out of the necessity created by a
pattern of uncertainty and indecision. It will not join as a leader but
unnoticed at the back of the parade." (Hansard, January 29, 2003)
"While there are Canadians who oppose the invasion, Harper said, they
are a minority, as are those who are anti-American. It certainly
exists. But in fairness, there's an anti-American sentiment among the
American left in the United States itself. We have some of that here.
But that's a minority sentiment.'" o­nly in Quebec, with its "pacifist
tradition," are most people opposed to the war, Harper said. "Outside
of Quebec, I believe very strongly the silent majority of Canadians is
strongly supportive." (Halifax Daily News, April 4, 2003)
"we support the war effort and believe we should be supporting our
troops and our allies and be there with them doing everything necessary
to win" (Montreal Gazette, April 2, 2003)更多精彩文章及讨论,请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net