Terry Glavin

In case you missed the announcement the first time around, I'll point out that one of the blogs on my blogroll is the Canada-Afghanistan Blog written by someone named "Brian." Contrary my own stated position on "the mission" (tm.), this blogger supports Canada's involvement there. I put it on my roll because I've long been trying to find a convenient source for a more intelligent defence of "the mission" than it's been my experience from rabid Blogging Tory jingoists or essentially braindead mainstream media sources. Like some few progressive bloggers I've encountered over the years, Brian supports Canada's actions there for all the right reasons. To elevate living standards, to prevent the fundamentalist-misogny of the Taliban from robbing half the population of almost their entire civil rights, to fostering democracy within that country. My disagreement with "the mission" stems from my belief that amoral psychopaths like Paul Martin jr. and harpo, bush II and his criminal regime etc., cannot successfully build a nation because they have no genuine intention to do so in the first place. Any "nation-building" that is primarily motivated by imperialist ambitions and only secondly (or ninthly or whatever) by humanitarianism is going to inevitably fail. Whatever good that is done by individual efforts will be drowned in an ocean of corruption and brutality and cynicism.

I think that I might add another "pro-war" blog now. Terry Glavin's blog ("Terry Glavin: Chronicles and Dissent"). During an exchange on the Canada-Afghanistan Blog, Mr. Glavin showed up and critiqued my position with what I must confess was a supremely incoherent argument. Brian and I have been going back and forth about the significance of various horrific actions by the Taliban on one side and the Afghan Security Force on the other. Brian points to the sickening incident where Taliban scum threw acid into the faces of girls on their way to school, and I counter with the allegations of child rape against Karzai's military, alleged by our own Canadian Forces.

Glavin also writes for The Tyee and in his opening editorial displays all the brilliant incoherence that should make for interesting exchanges in the future.