Ottawa was warned, before the Libya mission, that that country would descend into civil war
It is sobering to reflect that before our current mission in Iraq, the last two military operations undertaken abroad by Canada have been followed by the violent rise of the black flag of ISIS jihadism in these same conflict zones.
That’s in both Libya and now, even, Afghanistan. Not an encouraging record.
It’s another sign these days that Canada rarely seems to anticipate the depths of chaos that it’s wading into when it unleashes our CF-18s and other combat units on far-flung wars and insurgencies we know very little about.
We plunge in, it seems, even when our own military warns of dire consequences.
- ISIS mission: Jason Kenney says extending Iraq mandate won’t add troops
- Body of Sgt. Doiron, killed by friendly fire in Iraq, returned to Canada
- The Current: Friendly-fire casualty fuels questions about Canada’s Iraq mission
Just last week it was revealed by the Ottawa Citizen newspaper that Canada’s military intelligence had warned the Harper government in March 2011 that Libya would descend into a lengthy civil war if our planes and other Western bombers helped crush dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.
And that was precisely what happened. Following a sage warning that was not made public at the time and was obviously not absorbed by cabinet, the government chose to bomb, and bomb big.
As our government had few diplomatic eyes in Libya back then, and without our own foreign intelligence service, Ottawa depended on the best guesses of British and American intelligence to make its call.
Sometimes, alas, these best bets don’t work out.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
