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Originally Posted by peter12
My point was and still is that in order to answer these questions you do not need to examine 91,000 leaked government documents. Who could ever cipher all of that information and come out with a reasonable and balanced view on the war? No one is going to do that. They are going to go through and pick out the most sensational examples from the documents and use that as a screed against the War.
We can make decisions on foreign policy based upon what we already know about war and conflict in general. Are Canada's interests being met in Afghanistan? But more so, what are those interests? What do we, as a constitutional monarchy (or a country who espouses some form of classical republicanism) have to lose or gain by engaging in a foreign expedition in a country whose inhabitants probably don't like or understand us or our motives?
These are all important questions and the release of these documents does nothing to answer them from either a philosophical or practical perspective. What they do is give those with an axe to grind, mostly ignorant people (like mikey and others) against a war that they were biased to oppose in the first place!
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It may do nothing to answer them, but it does raise the profile. How many times a year does the average person think about the war in Afghanistan? Compare that to the cost, impact and deaths involved. Perhaps it deserves to be a higher profile issue, perhaps it deserves fair coverage?
If you are arguing against these leaked documents it seems based on that same logic you should be against journalists being allowed to travel with troops. Basically if seems as if you are arguing against transparency, against information, against truth. It seems as if you don't want any unbiased coverage of it at all.
Does this not also balance out of own biased coverage? When do we hear about the war? Typically only when a Canadian is killed. A soldier signs up and knows he may risk his life in that occupation. Who's speaking for all the dead Afghanis? For all the ones that aren't soldiers, that were minding their own business when they got shot up because their bus driver didn't slow down fast enough or move far enough out of the way? You want their voices silenced?
Sure we can debate the war philosophically without these leaks, but we don't. But leaks like this make it possible. It brings the debate back into the public sphere. It makes it important again. It makes people wonder what is really going on, why we went there, is raises questions.
I guess you don't want the questions raised and a lot of people do.