{"id":26367,"date":"2014-06-17T07:17:59","date_gmt":"2014-06-17T12:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26367"},"modified":"2014-06-17T07:17:59","modified_gmt":"2014-06-17T12:17:59","slug":"dont-expect-to-see-canadian-involvement-in-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/06\/17\/dont-expect-to-see-canadian-involvement-in-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"Don&#8217;t expect to see Canadian involvement in Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/politics\/ottawa\/canada-and-iraq-plus-ca-change\/\" target=\"_blank\">Paul Wells<\/a> outlines why nobody is expecting a new Canadian commitment to addressing the situation in Iraq:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The United States is sending hundreds of troops, maybe more, to Baghdad as chaos in Iraq mounts. Canada, John Baird told the Commons today in a 35-second response to a planted question, isn\u2019t. The foreign minister and the prime minister needn\u2019t worry about having to explain themselves further on Iraq, as the Conservative government\u2019s policy of concerned distance from the mess puts it in pretty good harmony with the opposition New Democrats, the Liberals, and Stephen Harper\u2019s predecessor Jean Chr\u00e9tien. <\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t follow Canadian-Iraqi relations overly closely, so I was surprised on Monday when DFAT-D announced it was pulling Canada\u2019s charg\u00e9 out of Baghdad, leaving no Canadian diplomatic presence there. Turns out we don\u2019t have an embassy in Iraq after eight years of Conservative government. Our ambassador to Iraq lives and works in Jordan. The charg\u00e9 who\u2019s been asked to leave for her safety was first posted there a year ago. And though there were several reports in Iraqi media last autumn to the effect that a full embassy would open in Baghdad this year, there\u2019s been no follow-up and I\u2019m not sure how much credence to give the original reports. For one thing they all misspell the Canadian amabassador\u2019s name. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>The absence of a full ambassador in Iraq is a tell, and what it indicates is what you suspected: the prime minister is less excited than he used to be about the potential benefits of military intervention in Iraq. We have to look for hints like this because nobody has seen fit to walk us through Stephen Harper\u2019s reasoning.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>The evolution of Harper\u2019s thinking on Iraq, and on military matters generally, would be fascinating to investigate. It\u2019ll all have to await his memoirs, if any. You could put a good face on things by concluding quite simply that he learns from events: having delivered far more phone calls to the families of soldiers who died in Afghanistan than he\u2019d planned to, and having learned for himself what an amazing schmozzle <em>any<\/em> war and (to a lesser but still substantial degree) <em>any<\/em> equipment procurement becomes, he\u2019s decided to do less by military than he once wanted to. The scale of military cutbacks is getting noticed, although again that leaves Harper vulnerable on his right flank, where there are no opposition parties.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Wells outlines why nobody is expecting a new Canadian commitment to addressing the situation in Iraq: The United States is sending hundreds of troops, maybe more, to Baghdad as chaos in Iraq mounts. Canada, John Baird told the Commons today in a 35-second response to a planted question, isn\u2019t. The foreign minister and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,370],"tags":[432,333,902],"class_list":["post-26367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-middle-east","tag-diplomacy","tag-iraq","tag-jordan"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6Rh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26368,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26367\/revisions\/26368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}