A rchive Date
[ 05-03-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/macdonald.html
The Liberal dismantling of our military
By BOB MACDONALD -- Toronto Sun
Give Prime Minister Jean Chretien credit for one thing: He and his Liberal regime have no shame. Lots of gall - but no shame.
Otherwise, why would this chronically poor excuse for a government send off its destroyer HMCS Iroquois to the Middle East without one of its main components - its helicopter?
After all, the helicopter is the eyes and ears of such a destroyer - especially when the Iroquois was assigned to be the command-and-control ship of Canadian Commodore Roger Girouard in his job of heading up an international coalition task force in the Arabian Sea.
That's the same Iroquois whose lone, 31-year-old Sea King helicopter crashed on the ship's deck last week after engine failure, injuring two men, wrecking the chopper, and damaging the warship. The destroyer was forced to limp back into port after being at sea for three days en route to its anti-terrorism assignment in the the Arabian Sea.
Many Canadians were embarrassed and angry over the crash because it was emblematic of the longstanding lack of support for the armed forces by Chretien and his one-time mentor, former Grit PM Pierre Trudeau.
Back in 1969, Trudeau tried to pull Canada out of NATO, the West's main defensive alliance against aggression from the Soviet Union and its communist ambitions. When strong objections from most Canadians and NATO allies blocked that move, he chopped the strength of our armed forces and allowed its equipment to become dangerously obsolete.
I recall being on NATO manoeuvres in Germany when Canadian tank commanders complained to me that it took three days to replace the engine of an aging Centurion tank in the field - compared to three hours for the newer American tanks. Only after the Conservatives gained power for nine brief months in 1979 were badly needed new tanks ordered - the ones Canada still uses.
That same anti-armed forces attitude came to play in 1993 when former Trudeau minister Chretien came to power. The first thing he did was cancel a contract for new, badly-needed helicopters to replace the aging Sea Kings. His main reason: He'd campaigned against the contract that had been awarded by the previous Tory government.
$500 MILLION IN PENALTIES
And Chretien, sporting an unchallengeable majority government, mostly due to Ontario's voters, didn't care a whit that killing the chopper contract cost $500 million in cancellation penalties. After all, it was just taxpayers' money.
So, for a decade, the armed forces have been taking a licking from the Chretienites - cut even more in strength and forced to use increasingly obsolete equipment. The Sea Kings require as much as 45 hours of maintenance for every hour in the air. They're sometimes called flying coffins.
And during the U.S.-led coalition operations against Osama bin Laden's fanatical Muslim al-Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan, Chretien finally and reluctantly sent in some of our armed forces. But they were sent without the proper sand-coloured battledress for desert warfare. The Americans had to provide air transport to get them there and helicopter service to get them to the battle areas. We lacked such aircraft.
Today we have Chretien once more doing everything he can to drag his feet and even sabotage the efforts of U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Here they are ready to go after the terroristic regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his hidden weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological and nuclear.
DELAY THE ATTACK
So what does our retiring (?) prime minister do? Why, there he is feverishly peddling his own resolution among UN Security Council members to delay any attack against Saddam.
And he didn't even censure one of his own Liberal MPs, Carolyn Parrish of Mississauga Centre, for declaring: "Damn Americans. I hate those bastards!"
He permitted another Mississauga area Grit MP, Colleen Beaumier, to take a trip to Baghdad some weeks back where she fell for the propaganda campaign of Saddam's flunkies: As she told The Calgary Herald: "Am I enamoured with these people? They are extremely charming."
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that Saddam and his charming gang have jailed, tortured, raped and murdered. Oh, and the 5,000 men, women and children they slaughtered in a poison gas attack in northern Iraq.
Ah, well, Commodore Girouard will just have to struggle alone in the Arabian sea with no Canadian helicopter.
As usual for today's Canadian forces, he'll probably have to depend on choppers supplied by what some Liberals call those "hated American bastards" in order to get around safely.
Read Bob MacDonald on Wednesdays and Sundays. Reach him at bob.macdonald@tor.sunpub.com or 416-947-2236. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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