Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, NATO is looking peaked and significantly worse for wear. Aggressive and ineffectual, the organization shows signs of premature senility. Despite the smiles and reassuring rhetoric at its annual summits, its internal politics have become fractious to the point of dysfunction. Perhaps like any sexagenarian in this age of health-care crises and economic malaise, the transatlantic alliance is simply anxious about its future.
Frankly, it should be.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175124/feffer_%20john_Afghanistan_NATO%D5s_graveyard
Stumble It!
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/e ... eddon-4438
High time we stopped being a puppet of US military. The cold war is over. Canadian defense should be based on the Swiss model, defending Canadian soil, like the high arctic, and dealing with natural disasters. We'd be far more effective, for a fraction the cost.
The Cold War is on pause. The fall of the Soviet Union may have knocked Russia down but she sure as hell isn't knocked out.
China is also a potential concern.
It would be foolish to remove ourselves from the NATO defence umbrella.
Good point!
Without the protection of the US and NAFTA, do you have any real idea of how much it would cost to actually protect this vast nation? We can't even stop a rickety freighter from dropping human refugees on our shores currently. How in god's name do you propose we defend ourselves from any serious agressor? To properly defend ourselves "based on the Swiss model", every single person would be drafted into the military for 2 years and be in the reserves for the rest of their lives. We would all have automatic weapons in our closets. All highways would need to be redesigned to allow aircraft to land on them. We would need about 250 new ships immediately. Dozens of submarines and ice breakers. Increase to the air force about 1000%. Then we'd be of the "Swiss model" and able to defend ourselves in a per capita and per square kilometre basis. How much do you think that really costs Brent?
Seriously, our geography and population behooves us to make treaties and not live like Switzerland.
The Chinese ? They're coming in, bringing their worthless hoard of US Dollars and buy our oil and resources today and tomorrow the whole country. Why should they invade ?
In any case, wars are not fought between nations, but rulers, priesthoods and governments. This is a historical fact.
Five minutes after the war is over, the "enemies" are the greatest friends
As far the military officers are concerned, they'll serve anybody who gives them the fanciest uniforms and the biggest bangs. Within few years after WW2 the 2 Germanies had armies facing each other, led by former Wehrmacht officers on both sides.
Afghanistan is a lost cause and a criminal waste of human lives, again on both sides, just to build a bloody pipeline ?
The minute the foreign invaders leave, the Taliban will take over.
Ed Deak.
of course, if you want to know who sabotaged our attempt at self-defense:
http://archives.cbc.ca/science_technolo ... opics/275/
But Ed is right. Canadian leaders have been collecting their 30 pieces of silver for the last 3 decades.........
Precisely why Hitler did not invade Switzerland. He knew his army would be bogged down in a long, drawn out affair in terrain that is inhospitable to attackers
Finland and the USSR comes to mind.