Going Canadian, part deux

It seems that when it comes to tsunami relief, "go Canadian" means not going at all (from the Calgary Sun):

The real reason we haven't sent our DARTs [rapid response team]is because we can't. It's the same reason we didn't send fighting troops to Afghanistan until the country had fallen, and that we aren't sending troops to Iraq, either: We just plain can't. We don't have enough of them. Those we do have are ill-equipped. And those who are equipped, we can't get over to there.

All this works to the Liberals' benefit when, politically, they wouldn't want to go to war anyway. And dismissing and disparaging the U.S.-led war on terror earns a lot of brownie points at home.

But helping out the Third World after a disaster -- well, that was supposed to be up our alley, wasn't it? It's the perfect liberal cause -- no real Canadian national interest at stake, no fighting involved, just an opportunity for moral self-righteousness and lots of self-congratulatory press releases. Perfect for the kind of country that dispatched its army to shovel snow in Toronto a few years back.

Except that we're not there.

And we're not even here -- for all the Third Worldism of Paul Martin and his cabinet, they dawdled. Martin didn't leave his vacation in Arabia. Bill Graham, the most anti-American, pro-soft power minister in the cabinet, explain-ed the Liberal hesitation by saying the cabinet was "absorbing" the magnitude of the crisis.

They were stunned, like scared schoolchildren. In the meantime, the big, bad U.S. was on the ground immediately -- as they always are with aid to disaster-stricken countries.

While the UN has planning and co-ordinating meetings -- and criticizing the U.S. for being "stingy" -- the U.S. is actually going about helping people, even regimes outrageously hostile to the U.S.'s own interests, such as Indonesia.

One photograph from Sri Lanka showed a frantic local wearing an Osama bin Laden T-shirt. Many of these people hate America -- but America helps them anyway.

We'll help these people. They'll still hate us. They'll have another disaster somewhere down the road. We'll help them again. That's what it means to "go American."