MG Note:  I ran across this article and thought it was worth sharing with our readers.  Mark Steyn is a Canadian and syndicated columnist who currently lives in New Hampshie, USA.  His commentary appears in American, UK, Canadian, and Australian media.

Digger Troops, Nancy-boy Nation (Canada)
Western Standard, Alberta, Canada ^ | October 23, 2006 | Mark Steyn

Canada's soldiers are excellent killers, but Canadian politicians, the media and large swathes of the public prefer to think of them as victims

After one valentine to Australia too many in this space, John Binns had had enough and wrote from Baghdad to tell me why. He began by pointing out that one Australian soldier apiece has died in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq, none of them in combat, whereas 36 Canadians have been killed in Afghanistan, at least half in combat. He then observed that Canada is adding a tank squadron, a rifle company and (probably) six F-18s to its current force of 2,300 over there, and wonders:

"Why do you think the Aussies get more credit than Canada? What was to stop the Aussies from chipping in a battle group when NATO was searching for more troops? It seems John Howard has bought a lot of Yankee goodwill for very little output. I've always said it's what you do not what you say. In the case of fighting the Islamists it appears I am incorrect." Big Bar Gold

Mr. Binns is, indeed, incorrect and it's worth considering why. Let's put the Australians to one side: they've got troops in an awful lot of places, they took the lead in East Timor, they're doing some messy colonial policing in the Pacific, and they've embarked on a significant expansion of their military capability. As for Afghanistan, NATO wasn't "searching" for more troops: it has plenty of troops, but its member nations don't want to deploy them for what is, after all, supposed to be a NATO mission. Most Continental countries are just about willing to do crossing-guard duties in Kabul but steer clear of anything more demanding and impose ever more stringent conditions even for fig-leaf deployments: Norway, for example, is meant to be participating in the Afghan campaign. But, because its troops are "not sufficiently trained to take part in combat," they haven't done any actual fighting. However, they have been in the general vicinity of regions where fighting is ongoing so now the Norwegians have demanded a modification of their rules of non-engagement and insisted that their soldiers be moved to parts of Afghanistan where no fighting whatsoever is taking place.

And Afghanistan is supposed to be the "good war"-- the one all the anti-Iraq crowd claim to support. Norway is an all-too typical NATO "ally": it's willing to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Americans, as long as it doesn't involve any actual fighting and there are two or three provinces between their shoulders and the U.S. ones.

Australia isn't a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for one thing because it's nowhere near the North Atlantic, though given that NATO is now a military alliance of countries that for the most part no longer have militaries it's hard to see why geography should be the one criterion they're pedantic about. Still, for the moment, Canada and the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are the three least postmodern members of America's postmodern transatlantic alliance. So why isn't Canada getting the credit it deserves for the tough, bloody job it's doing in Afghanistan?

One way to look at it is to recast Mr. Binns' distinction between what you say and what you do. Richard Rodgers, the composer of Oklahoma! and South Pacific and The Sound Of Music, used to say that in a successful musical the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look. In other words, there's an internal consistency throughout the whole operation. That's what the Aussies have going for them: John Howard declared on September 11th 2001 (in the best soundbite of the day) that this was no time to be an 80 per cent ally. Since then, he and his cabinet colleagues have been the most rhetorically honest about the war and related matters, and equally straightforward about committing troops to its various fronts. Unlike the Europeans, they don't require months of state department schmoozing and presidential photo-ops in order to crowbar 120 troops out of their barracks willing to serve in a non-combat role.

As for Canada, every American I've ever met who's served with our troops speaks highly of them as superbly trained (if shamefully under-equipped) warriors. But their heroism exists in a vacuum: in the big Canadian musical, our orchestrations don't sound the way our costumes look. We don't promote our armed forces as warriors. Indeed, we don't even promote them as "armed" forces; they're referred to as the Canadian Forces in the media and, on that revolting ten-dollar bill supposedly honouring their service, everybody on view is unarmed, from the peacekeeper peering through her binoculars to the stooped aged veteran. Not to mention, as Joe "My name is Joe" Canadian puts it, that we "believe in peacekeeping"--fingers make peace sign--"not policing"--fingers make pistol shape. You don't have to regard that ancient Molson ad as a virtual parody of parochial self-absorbed September 10th smug self-delusion (right down to the defiantly nationalist actor's subsequent relocation to pursue career opportunities south of the border) to appreciate that tough battle-hardened soldiers who kill the enemy have no place in the national iconography.

Consider, for example, two small groups of Princess Pats who made the news more or less simultaneously. Or rather one of them did. The other group I'd wager most Canadians are still unaware of. In the spring of 2002, four soldiers with the Patricias were killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire--i.e., the Yanks--and the nation went into a week of deeply unbecoming Dianysian grief-mongering. "If Canadian troops cannot be certain that they're not going to be fired on by Americans, we have no business being there," huffed Svend Robinson, every jihadist's favourite gay infidel. Oh, come on. There are few "certainties" in life: sometimes you cruise the jewelry store, slip the ring into your pocket, and get away with it; other times, you don't. Alexa McDonough, meanwhile, declared she felt a "sense of rage" that Canadians were being "taken for granted" by Washington.

Actually, they weren't. In that very week, there was another story (all but unreported, except by the National Post) about a quintet of PPCLI snipers to whom the United States government wished to award Bronze Stars because they were so impressively lethal at, er, killing the enemy. Horrified at what might happen if it got out that our boys still, you know, shot at people, the Canadian government put the proposal on hold until they could figure out a way to fob the Pentagon off with an offer to get the deputy lieutenant-governor of Nunavut to present the medals at a quiet ceremony on an ice floe in Queen Maud Gulf circa 2012.

And that, Mr. Binn, is why Canadian soldiers don't get the credit they deserve. Not because they're nancy boys but because the Canadian state is deeply invested in the idea of Canada as the nancy-boy nation. That's why in April 2002 the politicians, media and large swathes of the public preferred their Princess Pats as victims rather than as killers. Look at the words of almost every prominent "official" Canadian--Chr‚tien, Martin, Axworthy, Ralston Saul--in the first four-and-a-half years after 9/11. The underlying message is: this isn't our fight. Canada, in the peerless formulation of the great Christie Blatchford, mistook the sidelines for the moral high ground, and, in a great civilizational struggle being waged in a media age, it's not enough to have great fighting men when every other force in your society is communicating 24/7 that you're the superwimp pussy-nation.

In a long war, the fellows at home have to rise to the occasion, too, and not just cruise along on the same old culturally relativist Ralstonian boilerplate. Since he took office, Stephen Harper has been attempting to align what we say in Ottawa with what we do in Afghanistan. His public rhetoric is straightforward and grown-up. His speech to the UN was admirably clear-sighted and his toughness at the ludicrous Francophonie summit in Bucharest was all one could have wished for short of his permanently withdrawing Canada from that squalid and disgusting collection of thugs and thug apologists. Whether he can persuade enough Canadians to follow him from Trudeaupia back into the real world remains to be seen, but if he can't and if electors lapse back to some new Liberal pap peddler he will still deserve credit for trying to upgrade our politicians' talk to the level of our warriors' action. Our orchestrations are beginning to sound like our costumes look, and it's about time.