BMD isn't the problem ... Bush is

Saw a nice article in the Toronto Star today explaining that Canadian opposition to the ballistic missile defence shield was more about anti Bush feelings than actual anti BMD feelings. You need to have a free registration to read the entire article but the parts I liked were this.

It's not so much that they resist the idea of using missiles to shoot down missiles. Technically, the scheme is simply a more expensive, if less accurate, form of high-altitude anti-aircraft fire.

Rather, it is that they don't trust Bush. The polls show that, too. A solid chunk of Canadians think the current U.S. president is the gravest threat to world peace.

[...]

But a good many Canadians understand that these are not normal times. The trauma of 9/11 has so unhinged the American public that far too many have forgotten who they are and what they once stood for.

What they once stood for was a chippy kind of individualism subsumed into a robust, if occasionally maddeningly corrupt, democracy.

They didn't always pay attention, but when they did their hearts were, more often than not, in the right place.

The Americans of those not-too-distant days would never have stood long for a regime that curtailed civil liberties at home, squandered soldiers' lives in pointless adventures abroad and, as a matter of public policy, engaged in the barbaric torture of prisoners.

They never would have re-elected someone like George W. Bush.

The Americans of these days are different. They support torture, the erosion of their own rights, pointless wars and Bush.

Americans ask: Wouldn't you have done the same if Toronto had been attacked? And perhaps we would have. That, however, would not have made it right.

I think there is some truth to this. We already participate in Norad which is basically the same sort of deal as the BMD shield. So our oppostition is somewhat baffling and it must be driving the US administration nuts (more so than they already are) Fact is we just don't trust them anymore and don't want to go hand in hand to the park with Bush. We don't even want to be seen with Bush and we sure as heck don't want Bush pointing at us and saying ...

"SEE!! Canada likes me"

No indeedy. We don't want that above all things. Is it rational? I doubt it. But these are not rational times.

Full Story Here

IA