The only thing we can do about Iran is kick out IRGC and other Iranian government agents from Canada. We should do that - and yet we can't seem to manage even this trivial exercise of state power. On the war itself, we are impotent. Pontificating about it is merely embarrassing.
What a giant crock. Iran is a complete and total trainwreck of a country, and confirmation that any religious dictatorship is not a good idea. The US shot down a passenger airliner over there too, years ago....10000 miles from their home. However, let's not pretend that Israel is some completely innocent country being mistreated. The US said it destroyed Iran's ability to make a nuclear weapon 6 months ago ( not to mention Trump's idiocy in leaving the Iran nuclear deal....Iran will get the bomb at some point. MAD doctrine will hopefully take over, or there won't be any Holy sites left on the planet. Whether that's a good thing is open to debate ). This recent attack is nothing but an idiotic failure to learn from history. You cannot bomb your way to peace. The US lost 58000 in Vietnam to accomplish nothing. It lost 2500 in Afghanistan to accomplish nothing. It lost 4500 in Iraq to accomplish nothing. Now, it thinks, along with israel that flinging around a few bombs in Iran will accomplsih a regime change. Pure stupidity. Trump is already pointing fingers, as he always does to avoid responsibility. Israel has no high ground to preach from while it has turned it's dexerved response to October 7 into nothing less than a genocide. What is happening is the consequences of electing criminals to high office. I have great sympathy for what Jews in Canada are suffering. I have little for the people of Israel who keep putting Bibi back in power. The US has never suffered consequences for its idiocy at home.....outside of Osama effectively ending freedom in the country, and making its racism state policy.
As for Canada, we can do absolutely nothing about what is happening over there. Militarily, we have next to nothing to offer. But bombs are going to solve this. Talking is. Until both sides have had enough carnage, this utter stupidity will go on.
The irony is the second last paragraph....it applies to Iran. It applies equally accurately to the current US and Israel.
We have talked without resolution for about 50 years and Iran's assaults on the Western world have continued unabated. The Iranian leadership have ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children including thousands of their own citizens. Time for talk is done.
OK, so how do you accomplish regime change? It didn't happen in Afghanistan. It didn't happen in Iraq. So how many thousand more soldiers are you willing to see die to go in and completely occupy Iran...which is what you'd have to do. How will China and Russia respond if you do? Lobbing a few bombs at them won't accomplish SFA. FWIW, I have the same fears about GOP control of the US.
I understand the sentiment completely. Iran's leadership are a hideous, disgusting bunch of fanatical religious hypocrites. What will it cost in human life on all sides to get rid of them?
Everything you say is the absolute truth. However these evil fanatics have to be stopped. If democracies, as bad as they sometimes are, don’t do whatever needs to be done, then they will come for the rest of us. Then what? Fanatics, wherever you find them are not the alternative. Religious zealots are the worst of the worst.”Nothing is more dangerous than ignorance and intolerance armed with power.” Voltaire
Yeah, the problem is this war won’t stop them, it will just result in the loss of thousands of innocent lives. Regime change doesn’t work, history is proven that time and time again.
I think we're 50/50 from finding out. The US is at the tipping point from democracy to Christian fundamentalist dictatorship. The Trump administration is fanatical, bought and paid for by America's billionaire class, and fully intent on ending the 250-year experiment with "government by the people".
The only things that stop these fanatics is an internal revolution. History has proven over and over that invading and imposing a government doesn't work, because that may not be what the population wants either. You can make life as miserable as possible through sanctions and those kinds of stresses. The Shah was overthrown internally. The Ayatollah must be removed the same way. Like the US Civil War, it will be incredibly bloody. It's a shame the US has forgotten those lessons it learned the hard way.
No. They lost 3000 people that awful day. They lost 6000 of their own soldiers attempting retribution afterwards that accomplished nothing but the loss of American freedom and the downslide to where they are today. How many hundred thousand people did the US kill in Iraq? Afghanistan? Vietnam? A couple of buildings in New York is hardly compensation. Osama won in the end. He laid the seeds for the destruction of everything the US once stood for, through the DHS, and now Trump.
Most of what you said is pretty bang on. I’m not sure I agree with you about Israelis continuing to elect Bibi. The Israeli system of government is such a shit show that whoever ends up in power does it by backroom deals because no one gets a majority and Bibi is very cunning in promising everything to everyone and achieving power by a precarious coalition. I don’t believe he has the support of the majority of Israelis.
The bigger issue is that the Trump administration doesn’t even seem to know why it involved in the US in this war and if they do, they’re not explaining it.
Yes, no one would argue that Iran is a dangerous and murderous regime. But the same argument has been made for numerous failed US incursions into Middle East countries. Iran poses no imminent risk to the US or Canada for that matter.
This sure has deflected attention from the Epstein files though!
Deflection from Epstein was the sole purpose. As for Bibi, "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me". That applies to the US as well. They both did it to themselves, and I frankly no longer care what happens to them. Stupid should hurt.
It would be shameful if Canada merely stayed neutral about a regime that has murdered Canadians and its own citizens but in calling for a ceasefire Canada is actually supporting the butchers within Iran. A ceasefire will give the Iranian leadership an opportunity to regroup, rearm and prolong the war.
Oh please. The argument that if you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists is so cringe. Do you really think the result of this war is going to be a US friendly regime? Go eat your pablum.
Seems to me: the regime in Iran is pure evil. Theocracy and control that’s willing to kill its own people. At the same time I have yet to see any plan to change that. Killing foreign leaders achieves nothing. There is no plan to change Iranian political or social structure. I don’t see a clear Canadian interest in this conflict. It appears this is part of a broader plan for Israel to neutralize its local threats in the Middle East. Somehow the USA has been pulled into that (? The $1B donation to Trump personally through the ‘Board of Peace’). I’m not seeing a reason other countries should get involved. To what end?
Canada should stay as far away from Operation Epstein Fury as much as possible and let the mad US and Israeli regimes burn off the last shreds of their moral authority.
Canadian multiculturalism as policy, the repatriation of the constitution and creation of the charter in 1982 provided fertile ground for Canada’s capture by identity politics. Minority protections designed to temper majority overreach have been corrupted by those who use democratic tools to shield their beliefs from scrutiny. All Canadians are at risk when our institutions are captured by ideologues. The least tolerant wins. That would be religious fanatics, secular fanatics lack faith.
Canada should stay out of a war that is not theirs. We have enough unsolved problems in our own country and should not point fingers or stand on some high moral ground. Jewish people deserve to be defended in Canada. What happens in Israel, though, or in Iran, is not up to us to solve.
Iran's regime is indefensible, but we need only attend to any domestic terrorism, and we should. That war is not our affair, nor interest.
"Power without constraint does not moderate itself or grow kinder over time; it expands until it is stopped. When tyrannical regimes learn that the world will tolerate repression, they deepen it, and when they discover that civilian lives can be extinguished without any accountability"
This is not credible, because the author has completely failed to examine the "strategy" that drives US and Israeli actions against Iran.
In a nutshell, it would appear that there is no coherent strategy.
This is not just "my opinion". I've read and heard assessments made by various foreign policy experts, Iran specialists and students of US and Israeli governance. The consensus about the lack of US and Israeli coherence in this context is strong.
For some good and incisive Canadian analysis that corroborates these points, you may wish to review the following:
Blowing up the country from the air, refusing to send in thousands (if not hundreds-of-thousands) of ground troops, not offering a post-conflict reconstruction strategy.
This is not coherence. It is simply atavistic destructiveness. Even if the regime as shaped under Kameinei and his son is shredded, what will replace it? We've heard nothing (except some utterly unconvincing wishful thinking from that grand agent of chaos, Donald Trump).
Irrespective of how heinous the theocracy in Iran is, what we're seeing play out is irrational and self-harming (to the United States and Israel). It is also doing great damage to many other countries (the GCC states, others in the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asean countries, India.... ).
- - -
In a nutshell, Canada must NOT allow itself to be drawn in on terms that appear to support a very destructive and ill-thought-out US (and Israeli) strategy.
If we do act, I like what Janice Stein suggested in the podcast I referred to above: offer intelligence support to countries in the GCC, including Saudi Arabia. I'm not sure what else we could do, though.
irony, hypocrisy or delusion? invoke international law, human rights for a war started with bombing the political and spiritual leader, his wife, daughter and granddaughter and oopsie 160 school girls. a war started by an indicted war criminal concurrently engaged in ongoing genocide. No true friend of Jewish people anywhere could continue to feed this messianic hubris. True friends will be here when the sycophants and opportunists swing the other way. Dehumanization of the Other is our common enemy.
“A declaration that Canadian lives are not expendable…”
Except…
The Montreal Anglo who was beheaded by kidnappers because according to JT “Canada does not pay ransom”. Just before a couple of French Canadian diplomats in similar circumstances were suddenly released.
Or the body count of over 100,000 Canadians by now euthanized by doctors funded by their own government because , treatment and hospice facilities were apparently not available. The program is called MAID. Pronounced the same way as “made” which is a Mafia honorific for members who have killed someone.
As a child growing up in Quebec I certainly experienced the affects of theocracy. I now view the experience as a vaccine against totalitarianism. Ie the Catholic Church abuses I learned to avoid were a “weak virus” form of the repression currently dished out by the Ayatollahs. Of course if you’re Jewish in Quebec -or Canada writ large for that matter - there is little help for you beyond moving to Israel and doing unto others (who want you dead) before they do unto you.
As far as electing criminals to high office goes, like the common cold there is little one can do. Even if you believe you’re honest or altruistic when you lose power you will be criminalized it’s the nature of the game. Elections are generally choices between criminals -present or future - or incompetents. I have yet to decide which is better for any country.
Flight PS752 may or may not have been intentional. All is probably hidden on a report somewhere in an IRGC file. The simplest explanation is a trigger happy operator who doesn't know a commercial flight from a low level assault. With the US operating in Syria and Iraq at the time it is still a viable explanation. With missiles flying back and forth over those borders it would have been prudent however to designate the country as a no fly zone.
There was a similar incident where a Russian flight flying over Syria was shot down and one where an inbound flight to Iran was shot down. The real lesson here is to shut down a countries commercial air space if is activating air to air or ground to air missile systems anywhere in the country.
The only thing we can do about Iran is kick out IRGC and other Iranian government agents from Canada. We should do that - and yet we can't seem to manage even this trivial exercise of state power. On the war itself, we are impotent. Pontificating about it is merely embarrassing.
I think this should be required reading for carney and his liberal party along with all opposition parties.
What a giant crock. Iran is a complete and total trainwreck of a country, and confirmation that any religious dictatorship is not a good idea. The US shot down a passenger airliner over there too, years ago....10000 miles from their home. However, let's not pretend that Israel is some completely innocent country being mistreated. The US said it destroyed Iran's ability to make a nuclear weapon 6 months ago ( not to mention Trump's idiocy in leaving the Iran nuclear deal....Iran will get the bomb at some point. MAD doctrine will hopefully take over, or there won't be any Holy sites left on the planet. Whether that's a good thing is open to debate ). This recent attack is nothing but an idiotic failure to learn from history. You cannot bomb your way to peace. The US lost 58000 in Vietnam to accomplish nothing. It lost 2500 in Afghanistan to accomplish nothing. It lost 4500 in Iraq to accomplish nothing. Now, it thinks, along with israel that flinging around a few bombs in Iran will accomplsih a regime change. Pure stupidity. Trump is already pointing fingers, as he always does to avoid responsibility. Israel has no high ground to preach from while it has turned it's dexerved response to October 7 into nothing less than a genocide. What is happening is the consequences of electing criminals to high office. I have great sympathy for what Jews in Canada are suffering. I have little for the people of Israel who keep putting Bibi back in power. The US has never suffered consequences for its idiocy at home.....outside of Osama effectively ending freedom in the country, and making its racism state policy.
As for Canada, we can do absolutely nothing about what is happening over there. Militarily, we have next to nothing to offer. But bombs are going to solve this. Talking is. Until both sides have had enough carnage, this utter stupidity will go on.
The irony is the second last paragraph....it applies to Iran. It applies equally accurately to the current US and Israel.
We have talked without resolution for about 50 years and Iran's assaults on the Western world have continued unabated. The Iranian leadership have ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children including thousands of their own citizens. Time for talk is done.
OK, so how do you accomplish regime change? It didn't happen in Afghanistan. It didn't happen in Iraq. So how many thousand more soldiers are you willing to see die to go in and completely occupy Iran...which is what you'd have to do. How will China and Russia respond if you do? Lobbing a few bombs at them won't accomplish SFA. FWIW, I have the same fears about GOP control of the US.
I understand the sentiment completely. Iran's leadership are a hideous, disgusting bunch of fanatical religious hypocrites. What will it cost in human life on all sides to get rid of them?
Everything you say is the absolute truth. However these evil fanatics have to be stopped. If democracies, as bad as they sometimes are, don’t do whatever needs to be done, then they will come for the rest of us. Then what? Fanatics, wherever you find them are not the alternative. Religious zealots are the worst of the worst.”Nothing is more dangerous than ignorance and intolerance armed with power.” Voltaire
Yeah, the problem is this war won’t stop them, it will just result in the loss of thousands of innocent lives. Regime change doesn’t work, history is proven that time and time again.
I think we're 50/50 from finding out. The US is at the tipping point from democracy to Christian fundamentalist dictatorship. The Trump administration is fanatical, bought and paid for by America's billionaire class, and fully intent on ending the 250-year experiment with "government by the people".
The only things that stop these fanatics is an internal revolution. History has proven over and over that invading and imposing a government doesn't work, because that may not be what the population wants either. You can make life as miserable as possible through sanctions and those kinds of stresses. The Shah was overthrown internally. The Ayatollah must be removed the same way. Like the US Civil War, it will be incredibly bloody. It's a shame the US has forgotten those lessons it learned the hard way.
Agreed. Like the old saying- if we don't learn History's lessons then the mistakes get repeated.
“ The US has never suffered consequences for its idiocy at home…” Does 911 qualify?
No. They lost 3000 people that awful day. They lost 6000 of their own soldiers attempting retribution afterwards that accomplished nothing but the loss of American freedom and the downslide to where they are today. How many hundred thousand people did the US kill in Iraq? Afghanistan? Vietnam? A couple of buildings in New York is hardly compensation. Osama won in the end. He laid the seeds for the destruction of everything the US once stood for, through the DHS, and now Trump.
Most of what you said is pretty bang on. I’m not sure I agree with you about Israelis continuing to elect Bibi. The Israeli system of government is such a shit show that whoever ends up in power does it by backroom deals because no one gets a majority and Bibi is very cunning in promising everything to everyone and achieving power by a precarious coalition. I don’t believe he has the support of the majority of Israelis.
The bigger issue is that the Trump administration doesn’t even seem to know why it involved in the US in this war and if they do, they’re not explaining it.
Yes, no one would argue that Iran is a dangerous and murderous regime. But the same argument has been made for numerous failed US incursions into Middle East countries. Iran poses no imminent risk to the US or Canada for that matter.
This sure has deflected attention from the Epstein files though!
Deflection from Epstein was the sole purpose. As for Bibi, "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me". That applies to the US as well. They both did it to themselves, and I frankly no longer care what happens to them. Stupid should hurt.
It would be shameful if Canada merely stayed neutral about a regime that has murdered Canadians and its own citizens but in calling for a ceasefire Canada is actually supporting the butchers within Iran. A ceasefire will give the Iranian leadership an opportunity to regroup, rearm and prolong the war.
Canada expelled Iran's diplomatic representatives more than a decade ago. We are NOT neutral on this issue.
Calling for a ceasefire, moreover, is NOT an expression of support for the Iranian regime.
Get a grip.
Oh please. The argument that if you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists is so cringe. Do you really think the result of this war is going to be a US friendly regime? Go eat your pablum.
explain again, why the Iranian regime is a worse violator of human rights the Saudi? Egypt? Algeria?
Seems to me: the regime in Iran is pure evil. Theocracy and control that’s willing to kill its own people. At the same time I have yet to see any plan to change that. Killing foreign leaders achieves nothing. There is no plan to change Iranian political or social structure. I don’t see a clear Canadian interest in this conflict. It appears this is part of a broader plan for Israel to neutralize its local threats in the Middle East. Somehow the USA has been pulled into that (? The $1B donation to Trump personally through the ‘Board of Peace’). I’m not seeing a reason other countries should get involved. To what end?
"We must do something! This is something!"
On that logic, “we must do something” in a whole shit ton of murderous regimes across the world.
A downvote for very muddled thinking.
Canada should stay as far away from Operation Epstein Fury as much as possible and let the mad US and Israeli regimes burn off the last shreds of their moral authority.
Canadian multiculturalism as policy, the repatriation of the constitution and creation of the charter in 1982 provided fertile ground for Canada’s capture by identity politics. Minority protections designed to temper majority overreach have been corrupted by those who use democratic tools to shield their beliefs from scrutiny. All Canadians are at risk when our institutions are captured by ideologues. The least tolerant wins. That would be religious fanatics, secular fanatics lack faith.
Canada should stay out of a war that is not theirs. We have enough unsolved problems in our own country and should not point fingers or stand on some high moral ground. Jewish people deserve to be defended in Canada. What happens in Israel, though, or in Iran, is not up to us to solve.
Iran's regime is indefensible, but we need only attend to any domestic terrorism, and we should. That war is not our affair, nor interest.
"Power without constraint does not moderate itself or grow kinder over time; it expands until it is stopped. When tyrannical regimes learn that the world will tolerate repression, they deepen it, and when they discover that civilian lives can be extinguished without any accountability"
Bibi/Likud?
This is not credible, because the author has completely failed to examine the "strategy" that drives US and Israeli actions against Iran.
In a nutshell, it would appear that there is no coherent strategy.
This is not just "my opinion". I've read and heard assessments made by various foreign policy experts, Iran specialists and students of US and Israeli governance. The consensus about the lack of US and Israeli coherence in this context is strong.
For some good and incisive Canadian analysis that corroborates these points, you may wish to review the following:
C.f.: Why You Cannot Bomb Your Way to Regime Change | World on Edge, The Paikin Podcast, 12 March 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNCWK6vAjkA
- - -
Blowing up the country from the air, refusing to send in thousands (if not hundreds-of-thousands) of ground troops, not offering a post-conflict reconstruction strategy.
This is not coherence. It is simply atavistic destructiveness. Even if the regime as shaped under Kameinei and his son is shredded, what will replace it? We've heard nothing (except some utterly unconvincing wishful thinking from that grand agent of chaos, Donald Trump).
Irrespective of how heinous the theocracy in Iran is, what we're seeing play out is irrational and self-harming (to the United States and Israel). It is also doing great damage to many other countries (the GCC states, others in the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asean countries, India.... ).
- - -
In a nutshell, Canada must NOT allow itself to be drawn in on terms that appear to support a very destructive and ill-thought-out US (and Israeli) strategy.
If we do act, I like what Janice Stein suggested in the podcast I referred to above: offer intelligence support to countries in the GCC, including Saudi Arabia. I'm not sure what else we could do, though.
irony, hypocrisy or delusion? invoke international law, human rights for a war started with bombing the political and spiritual leader, his wife, daughter and granddaughter and oopsie 160 school girls. a war started by an indicted war criminal concurrently engaged in ongoing genocide. No true friend of Jewish people anywhere could continue to feed this messianic hubris. True friends will be here when the sycophants and opportunists swing the other way. Dehumanization of the Other is our common enemy.
“A declaration that Canadian lives are not expendable…”
Except…
The Montreal Anglo who was beheaded by kidnappers because according to JT “Canada does not pay ransom”. Just before a couple of French Canadian diplomats in similar circumstances were suddenly released.
Or the body count of over 100,000 Canadians by now euthanized by doctors funded by their own government because , treatment and hospice facilities were apparently not available. The program is called MAID. Pronounced the same way as “made” which is a Mafia honorific for members who have killed someone.
As a child growing up in Quebec I certainly experienced the affects of theocracy. I now view the experience as a vaccine against totalitarianism. Ie the Catholic Church abuses I learned to avoid were a “weak virus” form of the repression currently dished out by the Ayatollahs. Of course if you’re Jewish in Quebec -or Canada writ large for that matter - there is little help for you beyond moving to Israel and doing unto others (who want you dead) before they do unto you.
As far as electing criminals to high office goes, like the common cold there is little one can do. Even if you believe you’re honest or altruistic when you lose power you will be criminalized it’s the nature of the game. Elections are generally choices between criminals -present or future - or incompetents. I have yet to decide which is better for any country.
Trudeau's, Mark Carney's Canada, a pliable long-time harlot for any and all assorted terrorists. The real meaning of leftist multiculturalism.
Flight PS752 may or may not have been intentional. All is probably hidden on a report somewhere in an IRGC file. The simplest explanation is a trigger happy operator who doesn't know a commercial flight from a low level assault. With the US operating in Syria and Iraq at the time it is still a viable explanation. With missiles flying back and forth over those borders it would have been prudent however to designate the country as a no fly zone.
There was a similar incident where a Russian flight flying over Syria was shot down and one where an inbound flight to Iran was shot down. The real lesson here is to shut down a countries commercial air space if is activating air to air or ground to air missile systems anywhere in the country.
That would have saved 3 plane loads of people.