We're in it with Bush

"In "The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar", Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang use precious insider knowledge to reveal just how much Canada's involvement in Afghanistan is about Iraq. We didn't go there out of concern for a poor, beleaguered people, not even to prevent terrorism, but because of an obsession with America. "Washington's reactions tended to be the exclusive consideration in almost all of the discussions about Afghanistan. ... The political problem, of course, was how to support Washington in its war on terror without supporting the war in Iraq. The answer to the problem was the so-called 'Afghanistan solution.'"

Without appearing to support the war in Iraq would have been more precise, because, in fact, our commitment to Afghanistan was very helpful to the Iraq war. In 2003, "Rumsfeld was aggressively looking for countries to commit troops to Afghanistan to free up U.S. forces for the coming invasion of Iraq." When we later volunteered for some "heavy lifting" in Kandahar it was, once again, because "the Bush administration wanted to concentrate its military resources in Iraq and Rumsfeld clearly wanted NATO allies to relieve American troops in the south."

As far as the Bush administration is concerned, Afghanistan and Iraq are one war, and we're in Afghanistan, under American command, to help them fight it..."