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Was Canada Lured Into Afghanistan by the Thrill of War?

Huffpost Canada presents the first of five excerpts from Noah Richler's new book,. In this opening part, he wonders if Canada's role in Afghanistan wasn't driven as much by journalistic vanity as military necessity.
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Huffpost Canada is thrilled to present the first of five excerpts from Noah Richler's new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About War. Noah has personally chosen the excerpts for our readers and written a short introduction to each.

A BOOK DEMANDS several decisions before it is started, and the most important of these has to do with arguing the case for moral permission. With my first book, This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, that permission had to do with weaving authors and their views into a story of the country very much constructed by me. With What We Talk About When We Talk About War, a book about how society talks itself into, through and out of a conflict that uses Canada's participation in the war in Afghanistan as its example, the question, "Do I have a right to write this?" was more grave.

Although the book is not a judgment about the conflict, I was well aware that I would be writing about the language of heroism that Canada used to support its war effort and a train of events that has seen 158 Canadian soldiers and four civilians die, with no practical knowledge of the military or my having been to Afghanistan. It hardly mattered that this fact was likely to be pounced upon by my arguments' detractors; the fella I needed to convince was me.

The case I made before my court of one was that I was writing the book for the vast majority of Canadians, like myself, who depend on what they learn from others for the views they take on. More importantly, the politicians and military who send a country's young men and women into conflicts -- and then the coterie of journalists and academics who cheer them on -- almost categorically do so without ever having made the visit themselves. There's no need. The cause is de facto "just" and anyone who dares question the "warrior nation" is clearly not patriotic. Bluster counts for a lot, and in Canada there was plenty.

* * *

To the media and academics that held the keys to the new realm, Canada the war-fighting nation was simply more exciting. Come 2001, the news from Afghanistan loomed, as it did for soldiers, as a great adventure. A lot of force was applied to the impetus of change, if only for the banal reason that the altered course that the country took after 9/11 was new. It offered not just a change of political direction but an invigorating array of new takes on overly familiar Canadian leitmotifs, ones previously tried and tested though reported to exhaustion.

The old Canadian themes -- the Canada of Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canada as the place of rescue -- had become tedious; the new ones providing purchase to an eager, irrepressible but also acrimonious bunch of academics and journalists offered a way out of their limbo by the fight. War makes reporters feel useful, that their job and their broadcasts might actually be helping. War is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that makes careers and reputations. It offers the academic and the stay-at-home columnist the opportunity to opine on matters of grave importance. War provides invigorating opportunity for older, established journalists who would otherwise risk growing stale in a repetitive cycle of news -- psychotic killers, cheating celebrities and lying politicians, they all come around -- and the possibility of a breakthrough for neophytes and others wanting to stake a reputation.

Being able, instead, to reflect on the horrors of war with the authority of a front-line posting is why a plethora of journalists endure years of reporting from City Hall or the courts, or writing from some rural backwater until the chance arrival of that special break. Rare, if he or she exists at all, is the foreign correspondent who does not want to report from a war zone and to have experienced, in first person, the character-defining times.

War bestows upon the front-line journalist the chance to wear its badges, suffer its extremes of feeling and be able to tell the stories and write the book afterwards. Dangerous as it occasionally is, it offers the opportunity to have had the fun. It is work that influential columnist Christie Blatchford, writing for the National Post in 2006, declared to be infinitely preferable to the beat in Ottawa, "where politicians blow smoke up one another's bums for a tedious time."

In Ottawa, wrote Blatchford, "you can always just grab a cab to go wherever you like, whenever you like, and the greatest potential risk you take is that of a latte burn." What, in the capital or in Toronto, where Blatchford lived, was there to compare with the singular thrill of war reporting that would surely leave her, in Afghanistan as it had done in Bosnia, "grateful and trembling to be alive, but desperate to live too, to suck out every last bit of juice, feel every possible feeling."

Like a night on the town, only this one a community wrenched by war, Blatchford remembers Bosnia in her book, Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army (2007), for feeling "gloriously alive" and wanting "to dance all night in the appalling, glittery disco in the basement of the hotel, drink my face off, smoke like a chimney, lie beside a man and feel arms around me."

Short of a tragic outcome, war reporting is as much of a thrill to the correspondent as it is to soldiers such as Sgt. Ed Wadleigh, knowing "that we were there -- and those who weren't will either forever wish they had been, or at least will never understand what exactly there means."

It is this thrill of the new beat that, in concert with decision-making in Ottawa, has been the foremost catalyst of Canada's shift away from the country that it had been before the events of September 2001. Politicians were the primary decision-makers, certainly, and well-placed military lobbyists in academia and think-tanks played a major role, but the personal excitements of journalists were also a major factor.

We are co-opted by institutions-- and by ourselves.

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