So yesterday in Australia, Carney seemed to say that he wasn't ruling out Canada military in the US/Israel war with Iran.
Everyone yesterday thought that was just a mistaken phrasing. Today I'm not so sure.
Here's what he said:
TLDW: Carney issued his first statement about Iran too quickly, and has been walking it back ever since. Doing this on the fly was a mistake and seemed like a rush to curry favour with Trump.
Speaking in Australia, Carney said he would “never categorically rule out” Canadian military involvement in defending allies from Iran, but added it’s distinct from offensive actions being taken by the US/Israel. “We will always stand by and defend our allies when called upon”
— Brian Platt (@brianplatt.bsky.social) March 4, 2026 at 7:35 PM
And Canada was freaking out about these remarks, but it seemed more like Carney was talking hypotheticals and not speaking clearly. Here is Thursday night's At Issue panel:“There’s a distinction between the offensive actions that were taken, and are being taken, by the United States and Israel…We’re not party to those actions. But we will always defend Canadians. We will always stand by and defend our allies when called upon.” www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
— Brian Platt (@brianplatt.bsky.social) March 4, 2026 at 9:28 PM
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TLDW: Carney issued his first statement about Iran too quickly, and has been walking it back ever since. Doing this on the fly was a mistake and seemed like a rush to curry favour with Trump.
At Scrimshaw Unscripted, columnist Evan Scrimshaw was furious at how poorly phrased Carney's statements have been: Carney’s Categorical Comms Cockup Damn Silly Things And Damn Silly Ways
Cole Bennett reports:
Ian Hanomansing also noted this Carignan interview tonight, and talked to retired Lt Col Steve Nolan about what it means:
Nolan notes the importance of nations being truthful and honourable with their soldiers when they are going to war.
Of course, that isn't happening with Trump or Hegseth, is it?
Mark Carney has just refused to “rule out” joining military action against Iran in a press availability in Australia.But hold on -- maybe Canadian soldiers will be going "over there" after all?
In the same spirit, I am refusing to rule out losing my fucking mind.
Carney’s having to weigh a lot of very complicated things as he handles Canada’s reaction to the events in Iran this past week, but at the end of the day he is coming out of this looking diminished and confused, all because he has no effective or coherent strategy on comms. He’s backed the strikes, but then ever so slightly hinted he did it regretfully, and now he’s saying he’s not ruling out intervention after Anita Anand said we had no intention of intervening on Monday.
Now, there are real reasons to think that Carney has more complicated considerations at play here. There is an economic relationship with the Americans at play, bombs are hitting other NATO allies which might necessitate some form of Article 5, and in general it’s worth noting the vast sum of things Carney knows that we don’t is immense. But it’s also unacceptable that I’m stuck pointing all of this out.
Carney could, and should, have said something much firmer that didn’t actually limit his mobility if things severely and substantially changed. “Barring substantial and immense changes in circumstances, we will not be involved militarily, as we haven’t been” does not “rule out” further actions, but it looks like it does, and doesn’t cause political problems....
It’s plainly fucking unacceptable to make these mistakes just because Carney doesn’t care about process.
I don’t think Carney’s preparing to offer Canadian troops to Trump’s nonsense willingly, but that’s not what he said. He said he’s not ruling it out. The fact that so many Carney press conferences need to be cleaned up isn’t acceptable....
Cole Bennett reports:
Canada’s top military commander says allied countries are discussing the possibility of helping Persian Gulf states defend themselves from potential Iranian attacks, a development that could place Canadian forces closer to the rapidly escalating conflict in the Middle East.
Chief of the Defence Staff Jennie Carignan confirmed that discussions are underway among allied militaries (including Europe) about possible defensive support for countries in the Persian Gulf.
Such a move could ultimately involve the Canadian Armed Forces deploying personnel to the region, although Carignan stressed that Canada is not considering participation in the ongoing bombing campaign against Iran being carried out by the United States and Israel.
“We are not talking about participating in Epic Fury, per se,” Carignan said. “This is not a mission that we are considering. However, our Gulf partners may require defence and support, so within that context these would be the types of military options that we could consider.”
The military operation referred to as “Epic Fury” is the ongoing campaign of strikes against Iranian targets conducted by the United States and Israel.
Carignan did not specify what form Canadian Armed Forces involvement might take.
The military may also be called on to help get Canadians out of the volatile region, she said....
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Ian Hanomansing also noted this Carignan interview tonight, and talked to retired Lt Col Steve Nolan about what it means:
Nolan notes the importance of nations being truthful and honourable with their soldiers when they are going to war.
Of course, that isn't happening with Trump or Hegseth, is it?
The War of Epic Fury (SKS Epstein Files Distraction) is getting to be more of a disaster for the United States every day:
JoJo from Jerz writes:
What the fuck is the plan.
Because right now the United States appears to have wandered into a war with Iran with the same breathtaking strategic discipline you see when someone decides they can flambé bananas after three bourbons and a five-minute YouTube tutorial — alarms shrieking, metal pans clanging, smoke crawling up the walls while one concussed dumb fuck keeps waving a dish towel like it’s a fire extinguisher and insisting everything is under control even though the entire kitchen smells like burned sugar, hot oil, and the specific brand of catastrophe that only happens when someone who has never once been told no decides that confidence is the same thing as competence and flambéing is basically just cooking except on fire and how hard can fire be.
Less than a week ago, the melon-hued madman decided that one of the most volatile regions on Earth needed another round of American missiles streaking across the sky like flaming punctuation marks in a sentence nobody bothered to finish writing.
Donald Trump and his talentless troupe of taint-licking toadies — that feral daycare of discount Napoleons and diploma-mill ghouls, that gaggle of the unfuckable who somehow possess nuclear access codes — decided it would be a terrific idea to launch missiles at a country of more than ninety million people, because apparently nothing fills a yawning void of inadequacy quite like ordnance, mass casualties, and hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money....
I think the US military is acting already like Hegseth's "No Rules of Engagement" doctrine means they can commit war crimes.
Now they have torpedoed an Iranian frigate that they knew was unarmed, and abandoned the survivors to drown:
If Canada does go over there, regardless of the reason, it will be a quagmire.
But Britain and France are already sending military to the region, to protect their own citizens in the region rather than to join the US in fighting with Iran. The Netherlands may also do this.An Iranian ship at a joint Indian naval exercise, where all vessels were required to be unarmed, paraded its sailors along other participants, including the US. The US then withdrew at the last minute, torpedoed the Iranian vessel, and refused to rescue survivors. 87 sailors killed, 60 missing.
— Anonymous (@youranoncentral.bsky.social) March 5, 2026 at 4:30 PM
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FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?
— Neil Lewis (@neil-lewis.bsky.social) March 5, 2026 at 1:15 AM
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If Canada does go over there, regardless of the reason, it will be a quagmire.
i just cannot understand the mindset of some hawkish liberals who think there's any plausible good outcome here the two timelines before us are IRGC consolidation or Super Syria, in what world could this possibly lead to decent governance for the people of Iran
— Cameron 🇺🇸🗽🦅 (@cameroncorduroy.bsky.social) March 3, 2026 at 10:06 AM
9 comments:
When the Americans and Israelis are waging an unlawful war of aggression, I don't see how it's difficult to say we want no part of it. The extent of our military operations should be limited to evacuating Canadians.
Also, be wary of how the media reports Iranian strikes on Turkey. The US operates three joint bases in Turkey -- Incirlik Air Base, Izmir Air Station near Istanbul, and Kürecik Radar Station. Iranian strikes on any of these are self-defense against US attack. Turkey could have denied the Americans the use of those bases, just like the UK and Spain did. It can hardly complain if it chose to be complicit in a massive war crime, and Canada should have no obligation to defend Turkey or the US should they be attacked as a result.
You know, every time the United States decides to beat up some brown people, I think it says something that we always have the same discussion with the same imaginable options: Either we join the United States in bombing the brown people, or we stay out of it.
The possibility of being on the brown people's side never seems to even be raised. It's just not imaginable, it's not within our universe of things that could even hypothetically happen. It is a place our brains are not supposed to go.
But for instance, in the case of Venezuela, that is the side we should have been on. Sure, we don't have the power to make much of a difference, sending our navy wouldn't be realistic. But that is the side we should have been on. And arguably in the case of Iran . . . again, we can't really send Canadian troops to the Iranian border to defend Iran against the United States. But fundamentally, in this war we have three repugnant regimes fighting, but two of them (the US and Israel) are committing the "supreme international crime" of unprovoked aggressive war, while the third is defending itself from that attack. If we're going to be on anyone's side, it should be Iran's side. And maybe if people discussed that possibility they would conclude that it's just not pragmatic to actually commit to that.
I just find it interesting that we can't even imagine it as an option.
Good point!
Meanwhile, on the tactics and strategy of it. Trump seems to have assumed that "war" was like a tap that the US could turn on and turn off at will. Going into the stupid reasons why, the basic thing is that American policymakers imagine the leadership of all other countries as sort of Skinnerian lab rats, or high school bullying victims. So all they want is to feel pleasure and not feel pain, in the moment. Nobody else ever has any plans or long term objectives. This is ridiculous; in the case of the Trumpies, maybe it's projection, but US policymakers have thought kind of like that forever. There's some racism and American exceptionalism and stuff going on. Anyway, given this stupid model of the opposition, the implication would be that if you start hurting them, their main motivation will be to not hurt any more, and so if you decide you feel like stopping, they will be grateful for not hurting any more and that will be that. And probably you can extract some concessions in return for not hurting them any more.
And Iran has in the past tended to be quite cautious and conservative in its responses to US aggression . . . they don't make policy concessions, but they have avoided hitting back too hard, for fear of escalation. So that could lull a stupid person into a false sense of security.
But this time, it's too late. The US and Israel led with "We've already escalated. Our objective is regime change and/or the destruction of Iran as a country, and we've killed your leader and top religious leader rolled into one." So there's no point in a conservative response, and anyway the old guy who favoured conservative responses is dead. So there is no "turning off the tap" any more; this is now a war that Iran is fighting as a war, and the US is no longer in control of when it ends.
And that is a big problem for the Americans and Israel, because their ability to deal disproportionate damage is based on having interceptor missiles to stop Iranian missiles and drones. And, Iran has a LOT more missiles and drones than the US has interceptors. And the drones and even missiles are much cheaper and faster to produce than the interceptors; the US produces interceptor missiles of its various types VERY slowly. Estimates I have seen suggest the US only has a few days more of interceptors.
The US hoped to destroy Iranian missiles on the ground before it got to that. But while I'm sure they've done some of that stuff, Iran has been planning on this basis for ages. Their missiles and drones are very decentralized and mostly hidden; they don't need special missile bases, they can launch this stuff from a truck.
So what happens when the US runs out of interceptor missiles? Well, the US military bases in various Gulf states get creamed pretty bad. And, it might be wise for the US fleet to get the heck out of range. Then, when Israel runs out of interceptor missiles, a lot of Israeli targets get creamed. In the case of Israel, we might also see quite a lot of tit for tat hitting of civilian targets in places like Tel Aviv, because the Iranians are probably really mad about the attacks on schools and hospitals (no, it's not just one of either) and so on.
Second half tactics and strategy:
The US has always deliberately bombed civilians. The US air force believes in the idea that if you kill enough civilians and generally make their lives miserable enough, they will rise up against their government for the sin of resisting you. This I guess is based on that same theory of what other people are like that I mention in my earlier comment. They, and some other Western countries, have kept to that doctrine despite the fact that in the history of aviation it has never worked. US bombing patterns in all their wars are actually much more brutal in terms of civilian deaths than Russian bombing patterns in Ukraine, precisely because the US has a doctrine that terror bombing is a useful strategic thing while as far as I can tell Russia does not. Russia does attack civilian targets, but they are generally infrastructural or economic and they are usually attacked at night when fewer people are there. Russia's ruthless enough that I'm sure they would do it if they thought it was useful, they just don't think it is.
So this is a horrible, unethical doctrine. But it is also a stupid doctrine that ignores reality. It's a mistake you can get away with, or appear to, if you have unlimited firepower and can hit everything you want to hit militarily and then do that as well. But tactically, every bomb you drop on a civilian, non-infrastructural target, is like dropping a bomb in the desert--you COULD have dropped that bomb in a way that degrades the opponent's military or economy, but you wasted it instead. There are 90 million people in Iran, US/Israel are not going to kill their way to victory.
And strategically, deliberately using your firepower to kill civilians does not just fail to make them rebel against the government. It makes them really mad at YOU. This tends to make them rally round the government. And indeed, while I don't expect the CBC has been showing much of this, Iran has seen huge crowds mourning Khamenei and generally being all patriotic . . . probably some of the same people who were in the streets demanding reform just a couple weeks ago, and a policy of bombing hospitals has them loyal to the government again. It's moronic. As a result, despite all the deaths the government is as stable as it's been in years. Idiocy.
Iran on the other hand seems to be making its early targets things like American radars, which target for the interceptor missiles. Although Iran has, again, very decentralized fire control to avoid decapitation, so their tactics will be fairly fuzzy. Still, the individual commanders certainly seem to have priority lists, and the top priority appears to be getting rid of enemy capacity to shoot down their missiles. And they are having some success. In a few days we will no doubt find out what their next priority is. Seems like Bahrain and Kuwait may already have run out; in Bahrain the main oil refinery and the big US naval base are being hit.
And the Americans, again, have no real way to avoid finding out . . . they no longer have the power to just call this off. But one possibility is starting to loom: Beyond "not achieving regime change", beyond "quagmire", it is distinctly possible the Americans might just . . . lose. Now that's an outcome that would reverberate around the world.
Meanwhile, Alberta and Russia should be happy--price of crude is way up.
Excellent analysis PLG
My son was saying last night that Reddit thinks the social media platforms are strangling posts showing the damage in Iran and elsewhere. It wouldn't surprise me
This is the least reported war that the USA has undertaken ever!
Usually the press are tailgating the missiles!
Something does not add up..
TB
And I don't 'buy' this:
"Evan Scrimshaw was furious at how poorly phrased Carney's statements have been:"
That framing is giving Carney a pass. He sounds confused because he is. He is a central banker at heart. It turns out that the equivocating required for those jobs, is poor preparation for the role of PM. He spent the post UK-bank years building a reputation for wisdom regarding climate and UBI issues, but that was just cos-play to fool us all. Under the incredible duress of a tRump-WW3 imbroglio, the real Carney is being revealed ... and we don't like him at all.
Today's Globe and Mail cartoon is spot on.
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