In Ezra Levant’s column today in the Calgary Sun he writes that Canada’s “soft power” is heavy on the “soft”, and light on the “power”. I’m still looking for anything resembling “power” amongst all the dithering muck and feel-good liberal-promoting politics and photo-ops.
By the way, the “DART” team, which is the (get this) “quick response”, “emergency” aid team, will be ready to “quickly” respond in “maybe about” 48 hours, now that the bureaucratic advance team/committee has reported back and confirmed that, yup, it does seem to be a bit of a mess down there. Who knew? By the way, the DART team will be getting there by rented RUSSIAN planes. They will be there on Saturday. Nearly two WEEKS after the disaster. Vote Liberal.
So this is what Paul Martin’s “soft power” foreign affairs policy looks like in action.
In the aftermath of the tsunami disaster—with more than 100,000 confirmed dead and some reports out of Indonesia indicating the number may actually exceed 400,000—Canada decided to send a 12-man “reconnaissance” team. You know, to check things out. Write up reports. Send some memos.
Canada does allegedly have a “rapid response” team, designed just for occasions like this, consisting of 200 people who can be called up on short notice.
Short notice is the key—the team is even called “DART,” just in case there was any confusion about how quickly they were designed to respond. But Canada does not have any strategic airlift capacity—we have no big airplanes to send our DARTs darting.
When we sent aid to Turkey after their earthquake, we had to rent jets—from Russia.
And, as far as sealift goes—not that ships would be quick enough to help in this case—we needed U.S. and British ships to rescue our burnt-out submarine.
The real reason we haven’t sent our DARTs is because we can’t. It’s the same reason we didn’t send fighting troops to Afghanistan until the country had fallen, and that we aren’t sending troops to Iraq, either: We just plain can’t. We don’t have enough of them. Those we do have are ill-equipped. And those who are equipped, we can’t get over to there.
[…Read on…]
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