It’s easy to get into war.  

Chuck Hagel said that, and he’d know.  Hagel is a much-decorated war hero, an ex-Senator, and the former Secretary of Defense in Barack Obama’s administration.

Hagel wasn’t perfect.  As a Senator, he voted to go to war in Iraq. He later admitted that was a mistake.

And, after 9/11 – the twentieth anniversary of which is just days away – Hagel voted to send troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. As the war ground on, however, Hagel started to express concern.  

Said he: “We cannot view U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan through a lens that sees only ‘winning’ or ‘losing.’ Iraq and Afghanistan are not America’s to win or lose.” 

And, fatefully, Hagel also said: “We can help [Iragis and Afghans] buy time or develop, but we cannot control their fates.”

By 2011, Hagel wanted to “start looking for an exit” in Afghanistan.  “We need to start winding this down, “ he said.

They, we, didn’t.  The war – which saw Canadian involvement from 2011 to 2014, and led to the deaths of 158 courageous Canadian troops – continued apace. Until Joe Biden.

Biden, like Donald Trump, had promised to end the presence of the United States in Afghanistan.  It was a popular promise for both men.  The Afghan conflict had been the longest U.S. war, claiming the lives of 6,500 fighters and a trillion American dollars.

But – and it’s a big but – Americans, and the world, expected that the withdrawal would be conducted in an orderly, safe and timely manner.  For those countries who sent young men and women to Afghanistan – many of whom would not come back alive – we expected the winding down of the war, as Chuck Hagel put it, to be done right.

It wasn’t.

In recent days, those of us in the West have watched events unfolding in Afghanistan in horror. The total collapse of the Afghan military.  Chaos and anarchy everywhere.  Terrible tragedies – such as Afghans literally falling off of departing planes, so desperate have they been to get out.

And, most ominously, the Taliban – the biggest and most feared terrorist organization in the world – now runs an entire country. Those who are knowledgeable about the Taliban foresee them returning to what they did so often in the past – repressing women, crushing dissent, and conducting terror attacks in the West.

The government of Justin Trudeau, practically alone in the civilized world, has refused to rule out recognizing the Taliban terrorists as a legitimate government.  Typically, Trudeau has also overpromised and underdelivered on rescuing those Afghans who assisted the Canadians who served there.

But it is the Joe Biden administration that has failed the most spectacularly.

Speaking to the nation this week in a televised address, the U.S. president was simply awful.  He blamed the Taliban victory on Afghans themselves – and he attempted to shift blame to his predecessors.  He sounded defensive, and chippy, and impatient.

Biden – who I worked for during last year’s presidential race – was decidedly unpresidential.

It gives me no pleasure to say that the Afghanistan fiasco will leave an indelible stain on Joe Biden’s administration.  Unlike John F. Kennedy after Bay of Pigs, or Ronald Reagan after the Iran-Contra mess, Biden didn’t take responsibility. He tried to shift blame.  He tried to dodge the truth.

And the truth, as Chuck Hagel also once said, is that it’s easy to get into war.

But it’s never easy to get out.

[Kinsella was Jean Chretien’s special assistant]

 

 

 

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It’s unnecessary. It’s unwanted.

And it’s been imposed on us by a Prime Minister who is unfit.

Because, make no mistake: Unfit he is. Untrustworthy and unethical, too.

He swore he was a “feminist” while neglecting to mention to other Liberals that he’d groped a woman in BC. He pledged to fight racism when he’d remained silent about video evidence that he’d worn racist blackface multiple times.

He insisted he’d be scandal-free and then he became the first sitting Prime Minister to be found guilty of violating federal statutes. Oh, and his myriad other promises, like balancing the budget or getting clean water to Indigenous people?

Those were all untruths, too.

He’s the UnPrime Minister. And this will be the UnElection.

Because we don’t want an election now. We don’t need an election now.

Vast swaths of the country have been literally on fire. Thousands have been forced out of their homes, or — like my brother and his family in rural B.C. — they are waiting for the order to evacuate.

The situation has gotten bad enough that people in Nova Scotia have smelled smoke — smoke that has wafted East from far-away BC.

And the virus, the cruel, unkillable virus. It’s surging again, pretty much everywhere. And Canadians are getting sick again — and some are dying from it.

In the past week alone, due to the Delta variant, Covid infections have exploded by 60% across Canada. That’s the worst it has been in months.

As former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould put it on Twitter, it’s the “#DeltaElection.”

In Afghanistan, the people who helped saved Canadian lives when we had troops there desperately need our help – but Justin Trudeau is doing less than zero.  And his Foreign Affairs minister is refusing to rule out recognizing the Taliban as a legitimate government.

And into this morass Justin Trudeau wants to force an election? Why?

Because he thinks he can win back the majority government he squandered. Because he thinks his opponents aren’t as good as him.

Because of his ego, essentially.

His ego is immense. It is vast. It is without limit. He is known to sit on government jets, reviewing his Instagram photos. Not his briefing books.

And the evidence was right there, for all to see. For months, his vaccine acquisition effort was an unmitigated fiasco.

He tried to do a deal with a hostile foreign power, the Chinese while the Chinese were illegally detaining two innocent Canadian men. And when that vaccine deal predictably fell apart, he hid the evidence from us for months, thereby losing critical time. And Canadian lives.

For months, we lagged far behind our allies in vaccinating citizens. And we are only now near the front of the vaccination pack because of the determination of Canadians themselves, not the feckless, reckless Prime Minister.

His record, his performance, his values all combine to produce one irreducible, irrefutable truth: he is unfit of the high office he has held, improbably, for half a decade. He is unqualified and unfit.

Is he unelectable? Only you, Canadian voters, can answer that question.

Because the unElection has begun.

Kinsella was chairman of the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.

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Comments (9)

It’s unnecessary. It’s unwanted.

And it’s been imposed on us — commencing this weekend, according to a Reuters report — by a Prime Minister who is unfit.

Because, make no mistake: Unfit he is. Untrustworthy and unethical, too.

He swore he was a “feminist” while neglecting to mention to other Liberals that he’d groped a woman in BC. He pledged to fight racism when he’d remained silent about video evidence that he’d worn racist blackface multiple times.

He insisted he’d be scandal-free and then he became the first sitting Prime Minister to be found guilty of violating federal statutes. Oh, and his myriad other promises, like balancing the budget or getting clean water to Indigenous people?

Those were all untruths, too.

He’s the UnPrime Minister. And this will be the UnElection.

Because we don’t want an election now. We don’t need an election now.

Vast swaths of the country have been literally on fire. Thousands have been forced out of their homes, or — like my brother and his family in rural B.C. — they are waiting for the order to evacuate.

The situation has gotten bad enough that people in Nova Scotia have smelled smoke — smoke that has wafted East from far-away BC.

And the virus, the cruel, unkillable virus. It’s surging again, pretty much everywhere. And Canadians are getting sick again — and some are dying from it.

In the past week alone, due to the Delta variant, Covid infections have exploded by 60% across Canada. That’s the worst it has been in months.

As former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould put it on Twitter, it’s the “#DeltaElection.”

And into this morass Justin Trudeau wants to force an election? Why?

Because he thinks he can win back the majority government he squandered. Because he thinks his opponents aren’t as good as him.

Because of his ego, essentially.

His ego is immense. It is vast. It is without limit. He is known to sit on government jets, reviewing his Instagram photos. Not his briefing books.

And the evidence was right there, for all to see. For months — and as this newspaper regularly documented — his vaccine acquisition effort was an unmitigated fiasco.

He tried to do a deal with a hostile foreign power, the Chinese while the Chinese were illegally detaining two innocent Canadian men. And when that vaccine deal predictably fell apart, he hid the evidence from us for months, thereby losing critical time. And Canadian lives.

For months, we lagged far behind our allies in vaccinating citizens. And we are only now near the front of the vaccination pack because of the determination of Canadians themselves, not the feckless, reckless Prime Minister.

His record, his performance, his values all combine to produce one irreducible, irrefutable truth: he is unfit of the high office he has held, improbably, for half a decade. He is unqualified and unfit.

Is he unelectable? Only you, Canadian voters, can answer that question.

Because the unElection is about to begin.

Kinsella was chairman of the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.

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