The Commons: Let’s be frank

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 5:44 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. The NDP’s David Christopherson stood and, sounding serious, informed the House that the official opposition’s joined all Canadians in mourning the loss of Master Corporal Byron Greff, who died this weekend after a suicide bomber struck the convoy in which he was travelling near Kabul. The House was quiet.

The Prime Minister was absent this day, but Mr. Christopherson proceeded to direct his question to him nonetheless. “Will the Prime Minister,” he asked, “update this House on his current view of the security situation our troops are now facing in Afghanistan?”

Defence Minister Peter MacKay duly stood and added his condolences. “It is a reminder,” Mr. MacKay then said, “of the unlimited liability assumed by members of the Canadian Forces and our allies in that mission.”

Indeed, the Defence Minister seemed to sense where Mr. Christopherson was going with this. “No one would suggest,” he said with his next breath, “that the risks will ever be zero in that country, given the current security climate.”

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The science and politics of risk

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

The first death since the Canadian Forces transitioned to a training mission in Afghanistan prompts consideration of risk.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says “significant risks” remain for Canadians serving as military trainers in Afghanistan. He made his comments Sunday after the death of a Canadian military trainer — the first since the training mission began earlier this year — who lost his life after his convoy was attacked by a suicide bomber. Nearly a year ago, when Harper committed Canadian troops to a three-year training mission in Kabul, he predicted it would pose “minimal risks for Canada.”

Last month, Canadian soldiers were involved in a firefight after an attack was launched against the US Embassy in Kabul.

Last year, the Prime Minister reversed course and ordered an extension to the military engagement in Afghanistan. Upon first addressing the matter in the House, he said the new mission would be “a training mission that will occur in classrooms behind the wire in bases.”

Consequently, he said a vote in Parliament wasn’t necessary. The Liberal opposition generally agreed. The NDP was not pleased. The House later debated and defeated a Bloc Quebecois motion that sought to “condemn the government’s decision to unilaterally extend the Canadian mission in Afghanistan until 2014.”

Meet the Haqqanis

By Jody White - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:01 PM - 1 Comment

Jalaluddin Haqqani in a 1998 photo. (Mohammed Riaz/AP Photo)

Afghanistan has long been a place where hope is in short supply. Its neighbours are hostile and meddlesome. Its government and institutions are corrupt and weak. And despite the presence of thousands of NATO troops, security is elusive thanks to Taliban bombs and bullets. Now this unhappy country faces yet another threat, one that predates the Taliban and may be competing with it at the behest of the Pakistani military as the clock winds down towards NATO’s withdrawal.

On the morning of September 13, six men disguised in burqas entered a partially-built high-rise in Kabul which overlooks both the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters. Within minutes, they were raining fire down on both buildings with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. For 20 hours they paralyzed the city and held off hundreds of Afghan troops, police and Western Special Forces while four other attackers with suicide vests prowled the city in search of targets. By the next day, all 10 attackers—along with 11 civilians and five police officers—lay dead. It was the longest and most wide-ranging attack on the Afghan capital since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001. Continue…

Taliban could have been our “best partner” to fight terrorism: Globe reporter

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 2:54 PM - 3 Comments

Globe and Mail reporter Graeme Smith had this to say during a panel discussion convened by This Magazine to discuss a decade of international intervention in Afghanistan:

“Afghanistan had a functioning country in some ways before we came in in 2001. That’s a qualified statement: the Taliban had been relatively successful in establishing a regime and you could argue that if you were looking for a partner to fight terrorism—a partner to take on al-Qaeda and make sure that the country would remain stable with some kind of rule of law—in 2001, your best partner would have been the Taliban.”

Afghanistan was neither functioning nor stable prior to 2001. It was a wasteland that at least three million Afghans had fled, seeking refuge in Pakistan and Iran. Many more were internally displaced. I saw thousands of them in the fall of 2001. They lived and died in shallow pits covered with scraps of cloth and plastic. They hadn’t run from American bombs; they ran from the Taliban.  Continue…

Afghan prisoners routinely tortured: UN report

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 2:16 PM - 0 Comments

A blistering report by the United Nations found Afghan prisons are home to the “systematic torture” of detainees by the Afghan intelligence service and the Afghan National Police. “Use of interrogation methods, including suspension, beatings, electric shock, stress positions and threatened sexual assault,” the report noted, “is unacceptable by any standard of international human rights law.” Of the 324 security-related detainees the UN interviewed, 89 had been handed over to the Afghan intelligence service or the police by international military forces, and in 19 cases, the men were tortured once they were in Afghan custody. Prisoners handed over by Canadian troops, however, appear to have been spared the abuses. An unnamed detainee, who says he was tortured by members of the Afghan National Directorate of Security, was quoted as saying that For those arrested by Canadians, two NDS officials were allocated for further interrogation and those interrogated by them never complained about ill-treatment by NDS officials.”

New York Times

Vancouver Sun

Compelling evidence

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 3 Comments

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has released a report into the treatment of detainees by Afghan authorities.

UNAMA’s detention observation found compelling evidence that 125 detainees (46 percent) of the 273 detainees interviewed who had been in NDS detention experienced interrogation techniques at the hands of NDS officials that constituted torture, and that torture is practiced systematically in a number of NDS detention facilities throughout Afghanistan … More than one third of the 117 conflict-related detainees UNAMA interviewed who had been in ANP detention experienced treatment that amounted to torture or to other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment…

UNAMA’s detention observation included interviews with 89 detainees who reported the involvement of international military forces either alone or together with Afghan forces in their capture and transfer to NDS or ANP custody. UNAMA found compelling evidence that 19 of these 89 detainees were tortured in NDS custody and three in ANP custody.

The full report is here. As the Globe notes, one detainee, interviewed in March, claims a separate process for those transferred by Canadian forces. Continue…

Bringing Afghanistan’s democrats out of the shadows

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 12:28 PM - 5 Comments

It is fitting that Terry Glavin begins his book Come from the Shadows: the Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan with a quote from George Orwell — who once said it is not enough to oppose fascism; one must stand against totalitarianism in all its forms.

Orwell, a far-left anti-fascist who took a bullet in the throat while fighting Franco’s brutes during the Spanish Civil War, was angered by the inability of too many of his fellow leftists to counter dictatorial thuggery in those with whom they shared a common enemy. Stalinists got a free pass because, ostensibly, they opposed fascism; they didn’t deserve it.

Glavin, also of the left, is frustrated by the limits of his supposed comrades’ solidarity and internationalism. Afghanistan’s democrats — its students, human rights activists, women, socialists and secularists — should, by rights, be championed and supported by the western left. They are, after all, fighting for the same things liberals in Canada struggled for and earned over the last century. What’s more, they’re fighting for these rights against an explicitly fascistic strain of religious and ethnic extremism embodied in the Taliban. Continue…

The Commons: If you don’t support MacKay, you don’t support the troops

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 5:42 PM - 67 Comments

The Scene. For a full 13 questions this afternoon, the opposition insisted on pressing the government about matters—the economy, trade, the separation of powers in a proper functioning democracy—unrelated to whether or not the Defence Minister should be ashamed or at least embarrassed.

Finally, the Speaker called on the NDP’s Tarik Brahmi, a francophone apparently of Algerian descent, who nonetheless looks to me like a tough English soccer fanatic.

“Mr. Speaker, according to a release by the Canadian Press, the Defence Minister was kept out of key decisions about Canada’s role in the Afghan war,” he said. “This was a top defence priority, yet the Prime Minister was calling all the shots. The Prime Minister could have used some advice. Most agree our efforts should have focused more on peace talks and diplomacy. Is he still making foreign policy and defence decisions on his own, or does he now let his cabinet in the room?”

Peter MacKay stood here not only to enthuse about how cooperatively the Harper government operates, but also to state his objections to talks with the Taliban. Continue…

Good news, bad news: Sept. 22-29

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

No longer for scholars' eyes only, the Dead Sea Scrolls are posted online. (Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

Steps in the right direction

The king of Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to vote, acknowledging they can make “correct opinions.” This in a place where females can’t travel without a male’s permission, and where one woman who drove, despite a ban, was sentenced to 10 lashes. King Abdullah’s decision also permits females to run for Shura Council. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has approved draft regulations allowing women’s shelters to remain independent from government, and receive donations without state intermediation.

Weird science

It was an exciting week in space news: NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, deployed by the space shuttle in 1991, fell from orbit. A troublemaker on Twitter, armed with some Orson Welles quotes, managed to spread rumours worldwide that UARS had fallen near Okotoks, Alta. Fortunately, it appears the satellite crashed harmlessly somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A few days earlier, space geeks were titillated with another report: physicists think they saw neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, which, if confirmed, would disprove Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

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‘I didn’t know all of the specifics’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 9:43 AM - 3 Comments

However much Peter MacKay supports the troops, he apparently wasn’t much involved in one of the Harper government’s most significant moves in regards to the war in Afghanistan.

“The Savage War,” by Canadian Press defence writer and Afghanistan correspondent Murray Brewster, paints a portrait of a PMO keen to preserve its tenuous grip on minority power and desperate to control the message amid dwindling public support for the war.

MacKay, who took over Defence from Gordon O’Connor in August 2007, was blindsided by the Harper government’s decision later that year to set up a blue-ribbon panel to review the mission headed by former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley, Brewster writes. ”It wasn’t discussed with the broader cabinet, no,” the minister says in the interview. “I didn’t know all of the specifics.”

Meanwhile, at the Federal Court

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 5 Comments

A government appeal to limit the scope of an investigation by the Military Police Complaints Commission has been rejected.

A Federal Court has dismissed an application that would, among other things, strike the testimony of diplomat-whistleblower Richard Colvin and block thousands of pages of documents from being used by the Military Police Complaints Commission…

Justice Department lawyers argued the commission had no authority to call witnesses who were not members of the military, such as Colvin, who said he repeatedly warned both Foreign Affairs and the Defence Department about possible prison abuse … The government also claimed that the watchdog, created in the aftermath of the Somalia scandal to monitor the conduct of military police, exceeded its mandate by issuing summonses for documents.

REVIEW: Can Intervention Work?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Stewart and Knaus grapple with the seminal question of modern international affairs: can intervention work? By this they mean: can the West, using military force, end wars, halt genocide, topple dictators, replace them with friendly governments, and build nations, without making things worse? Their answer is yes—but not as often as many of us think, and only with limited goals, and more humility and local knowledge than has typically been the case in recent decades.

Stewart, a young British member of Parliament who gained fame for a book about his 2002 walk across central Afghanistan, says foreigners intervening in a failing or war-ravaged country too often succumb to mission creep. Their mandate swells, drawing in ever more resources and troops to little beneficial effect. “There isn’t an insurgency,” a military friend told Stewart after a 2005 reconnaissance trip to Helmand province in Afghanistan, where Britain was about to deploy thousands more soldiers, “but you can have one if you want one.”

Stewart has argued for years against sending more soldiers to Afghanistan. What is needed instead, he says, is a “light long-term footprint.” Commit, but don’t try to do too much. Foreign soldiers, diplomats and aid workers, deploying for in-country tours that are so short British imperialists of a century ago would scoff in disbelief, don’t develop the expertise to implement grand plans designed in faraway capitals. “We—the foreign government organizations and their partners—know much less and can do much less than we pretend,” says Stewart.

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David Cameron comes to Ottawa

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 10:56 PM - 8 Comments

The invitation had been “dangling” for months but, British sources say, plans for British Prime Minister David Cameron’s first bilateral visit to Canada — and the first by a British prime minister since Tony Blair in 2001 — only got under way two weeks ago.

It was then something of a scramble to prepare statements and speeches. Quoting Churchill is always a reliable crowd pleaser on these occasions, and both sides were soon eyeing the great wartime leader’s “Some chicken! Some neck!” speech delivered in the House of Commons in December 1941. Continue…

Funding Planned Parenthood, but not abortion

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 1:14 PM - 18 Comments

A few months ago, Conservative MP Brad Trost was boasting that the government had “defunded” Planned Parenthood. But after more than a year of public waffling, the CBC reports that the government is about to approve funding for the group.

International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda has decided to approve a proposal by the International Planned Parenthood Federation to provide sex education and contraception in five developing countries…

The proposal gets around the thorny issue of abortion by asking for money for sex education and contraception services, and does not include abortion services. The funding is worth $6 million over three years for Planned Parenthood to work in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Mali, Sudan and Tanzania, where abortions are illegal except in cases where the mother’s life is at risk.

How’s “reconciliation” with the Taliban working out?

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 2:03 PM - 10 Comments

Burhanuddin Rabbani, former Afghan president and chair of the body tasked with making peace with the Taliban, has been assassinated.  Continue…

Adventures in Afghanistan’s ‘Nothing Land’

By Emma Teitel - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 1 Comment

Ahmad Masood/Reuters

The BBC’s famous mockumentary The Office has inspired numerous copycats since its inception in 2001. America’s NBC adaptation, which is about to start its eighth season, popularized actor Steve Carell’s socially inept character, Michael Scott, a paper company manager with a penchant for political incorrectness, sexual indiscretions and a fascination with Meryl Streep. More recent contemporaries are no different: most versions of comedian Ricky Gervais’s original Office production, from France’s Le Bureau to Quebec’s La Job, come complete with almost interchangeable office antics. Every version, that is, except one: an Afghan TV station, Tolo, aired its own Office-style series this summer called The Ministry, replacing office politics with real ones.

The eight-episode series (season two is set to air in October) takes place in a fictional country mirroring Afghanistan, called “Hechland” (translation from Dari: “Nothing Land”), and follows the shenanigans of Hechland’s Ministry of Garbage and its narcissistic minister, Dawlat—played by Abdul Qadir Farookh of the The Kite Runner. Farookh is one of the only actors with professional experience on the production—a Kabul apartment flat converted to a studio by the show’s producers. “Everyone on set is in training,” says 31-year-old Abazar Khayami, one of the show’s senior producers. “But we took our disadvantage and made it into an advantage.”

There is no official television rating system in Afghanistan, but Khayami says it’s obvious The Ministry is one of the most popular shows in the country, as its actors are frequently recognized on the streets and invited into politicians’ homes for dinner. The series’ plots range from government corruption and nepotism to gender inequality and suicide bombings. In one episode, Dawlat the minister (a former New York cab driver who earned his job through pure nepotism) pays off the wrong warlord, setting off a string of suicide bombings he was supposed to prevent. “Nothing is taboo,” says Khayami, noting that things would probably be very different if the show made fun of the Afghan government in a direct, rather than veiled way. “When they are alone in their homes,” he says of real-life government officials, “I like to think they watch the show and laugh. But if we had gone that extra inch and called it Afghanistan [instead of Hechland] and poked direct fun at the administration, then it might be a different story. We’ll never know.”

Continue…

Good news, bad news: Sept. 8-15

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Libyans celebrate Moammar Gadhafi's ouster in Martyrs' Square (Anis Mili/Reuters)

Together now

On the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 last weekend, Americans grieved and nerves were frayed over warnings of potential repeat attacks, but the occasion passed peacefully. And with ceremonies, remembrances and rousing displays of patriotism at packed football and baseball stadiums, it perhaps even drew Americans closer at a time when the nation is badly divided politically and its economic future looks bleak. The event offered a reminder that there’s hope even in the darkest periods.

A step forward

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird announced this week that Canada will reopen its embassy in Libya. Diplomatic officials are already on the ground in Tripoli. Baird also said Ottawa will release $2.2 billion in Libyan assets that had been frozen during the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi. While isolated fighting continues with remaining Gadhafi loyalists, the hunt continues to capture the former strongman. Last week Interpol issued arrest warrants for Gadhafi, one of his sons and his intelligence chief for alleged crimes against humanity.

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Too many bureaucrats, not enough troops

By Paul Wells - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 28 Comments

Cpl Bruno Turcotte/DND

Why was a Canadian military with 65,000 men and women on active duty and 25,000 reservists sorely tested by the task of keeping 1,500 soldiers in the field in Afghanistan? Why are Arctic sovereignty patrols a strain on the same military? The way Andrew Leslie sees it, it’s because the Canadian Forces’ tail has grown bigger than its teeth.

“We have the same number, or slightly more people, in Ottawa that we have in the Royal Canadian Navy—20,000,” Leslie was saying the other day. By “Ottawa,” he meant the personnel working in command and support functions at National Defence headquarters, not far from Parliament Hill.

So that’s about as many people riding desks as the Canadian Forces has riding boats. “And we have a lot of coastline,” said Leslie, who until the first week of September was a lieutenant-general in the Canadian Forces. “And we have really busy ships’ crews.”

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CSIS and the NDS

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 4:38 PM - 7 Comments

The Security Intelligence Review Committee has released its review of how CSIS handled Afghan detainees and its relationship with Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security.

The Service’s relationship with the NDS consisted of [REDCATED] exchanges of information, [REDACTED].

Notwithstanding this productive working relationship, CSIS’s assessment of the NDS was both cautious and measured. [REDACTED] CSIS continued to stress that most allegations of human rights abuses were unconfirmed, [REDACTED].

In the course of this review, SIRC found no indication that in the period during which they conducted detainee interviews, CSIS officers posted to Afghanistan ever had firsthand knowledge of abuse, mistreatment or torture of detainees by Afghan authorities.

Afghan insurgents launch series of attacks in Kabul

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:58 AM - 0 Comments

Insurgents launched a series of attacks in the Afghan capital of Kabul on Tuesday, striking the U.S. Embassy and nearby NATO headquarters with rocket-propelled grenades and firing volleys of bullets from automatic weapons. At least 10 explosions rocked Kabul as an undetermined number of insurgents attacked from a multi-storey building that is under construction. Afghan security fought back from below, firing shots up at the building. Elsewhere, two bombs reportedly went off near the Afghan Parliament, although it’s unclear whether the building was targeted. In a text message, a Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attacks. The incident comes amidst continuing security fears in Kabul and other regions of Afghanistan. Earlier this summer, nine suicide bombers attacks Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, which is popular among foreigners.

The New York Times

And speaking of foreign workers

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 12, 2011 at 2:00 PM - 8 Comments

Two-thirds of those Afghan interpreters who applied for refugee status in Canada have apparently been turned down.

The special-measures program was announced with much fanfare by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney in the fall of 2009 and brought Canada in line with other NATO countries which had already launched similar initiatives. It ends Monday.

Applicants had to demonstrate they faced extraordinary risk as a result of their work with Canada. Few didn’t. Working as an interpreter for NATO forces in southern Afghanistan was akin to having a Taliban bull’s-eye on the back of a shalwar khameez. Stories of night letters, threatening phone calls, abductions and even hangings were part of the job. As interpreters also travelled with soldiers and diplomats, at least six were among those killed during the IED strikes that claimed 161 Canadian lives.

The decline of al-Qaeda

By Michael Petrou - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 2 Comments

Erik de Castro/Reuters

Osama bin Laden enjoyed talking about his death. And like other hyper-religious Islamists, he claimed to long for it. “So let me be a martyr, dwelling in a high mountain pass among a band of knights who, united in devotion to God, descend to face armies,” he wrote in a poem he recited in a 2003 audiotape.

Bin Laden could embrace dying because he believed the war he had declared on Jews and “crusaders” was bigger than him and any other individual. It would sweep the Muslim ummah, or nation. “I am just a poor slave of God,” he said in December 2001, shortly after slipping away from the American bombardment of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. “If I live or die, the war will continue.” With God’s grace, he said, the “awakening” had begun.

Now bin Laden is dead, assassinated by U.S. commandos in a May raid on his secret compound deep inside Pakistan. And indeed, the war between al-Qaeda and its many enemies continues. But al-Qaeda’s destructive nihilism is becoming a lonelier and lonelier pursuit. A decade after its most spectacular and murderous success, al-Qaeda is a shrunken shell of what it once was, rejected by increasing numbers of Muslims and even its onetime spiritual allies.

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Poverty, terrorism and 9/11

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 38 Comments

During his interview with the CBC, Stephen Harper was asked about comments Jean Chretien made nine years ago on the first anniversary of Sept. 11.

Nobody who was killed on 9/11 deserved it remotely. It was a terrible thing, has nothing to do with wealth versus poverty. It has to do with, in this case, a particular hateful ideology that has attacked people around the world, not just affluent societies like our own, but some pretty poor places. You know, I think the people killed in Indonesia, in India. The fact that Afghanistan became a failed state, where you know, people just essentially lived in not just poverty, but brutality, to the point where a kind of Islamic fascist regime literally invited terrorists, international terrorists to set up camp in their country. I think that that kind of situation obviously bred a threat, and that’s why we are so worried when we look around the world now at other places where the same thing could happen. You know, I think you know some of them: Somalia, Yemen, that are there or at that kind of stage. That’s the kind of thing I think we really have to worry about, where you have not just poverty, but poverty and literally lawlessness becomes the nature of the state. And I do think it’s in our broader interests and the right thing to do to try and help people and help countries so that they don’t get into that situation. That’s why, you know, we obviously are helping with the famine in East Africa. It’s why we’re so involved in Haiti. Not to have that kind of a state in our own backyard. So those, I think those kinds of situations are very dangerous.

Mr. Chretien’s comments, as reported by the Globe, were as follows. Continue…

Worried about terrorism? Not us.

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 12 Comments

Steve Payne/The New York Times/Redux

Even though memories of 9/11 remain vivid for Canadians, the threat of terrorism is hardly at the top of our minds. An Innovative Research poll done for Maclean’s shows that 27.1 per cent of Canadians consider 9/11 to have been the most important international development of the last decade, ranking it just slightly higher than the credit crisis of 2008 (26.2 per cent) and well above other developments like climate change and the rise of the middle class in China and India. Which isn’t to say 9/11 has had a lasting impact on our national psyche. Asked to name the one issue that concerns them most, just 3.4 per cent of respondents identified the threat of terrorism. Indeed, Canadians are much more likely to be worried about the state of our health care system (19 per cent) and the potential for another recession (18.2 per cent) than they are of a repeat of 9/11.

That may be partly explained by the seemingly widespread perception among Canadians that terrorist attacks aren’t likely to affect them personally. If terrorist threats are to happen at all, Canadians believe they’ll target people other than themselves. Nearly eight in 10 Canadians say they’re either not very concerned or not concerned at all that someone they know could fall victim to a terrorist attack. A comparably meagre 3.9 per cent say they are very concerned about the possibility. The online poll had 1,066 respondents and a margin of error equivalent to plus or minus three per cent.

But Canadians have come to some firm conclusions about the fallout from 9/11. As a nation, we’ve grown particularly skeptical about the benefits of the two wars that followed the attacks. Canadians are twice as likely to say the war in Afghanistan made the world a more dangerous place as they are to say it made the world safer. The divide is even more stark when it comes to Iraq: Canadians are more than four times more likely to say the war in Iraq made the world more dangerous rather than safer.

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