I talked about this at Progressive Bloggers and at BlogsCanada E-Group in the politics thread, but I thought you guys might be interested in it here.

In today’s (July 8) edition of the Toronto Star, Rosie Dimanno wrote a column titled, “The British Are An Inspiration”. No complaints from me on that, but unfortunately, Rosie decided to use this column to also take cheap-shots at the Spanish and to repeat the old neo-con/George Bush line that the war on terror and the war in Iraq are somehow connected.
Let’s take a look first at the Spanish line… she writes in her column about this here:

England is not Spain.  It won’t cut and run, cowering in the face of atrocities and threats realized.  Prime Minister Tony Blair will not recall 9,000 British troops from Iraq, nor will he relinquish Britain’s commitment to take over the lead NATO role in Afghanistan next May.

Pogge, One of our Progressive Blogger affiliates, quite rightly objects to this:

Lets review.  A majority of the Spanish population were opposed to their country’s involvement in the war in Iraq before the Madrid bombings. Current Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero had made it clear that if he won, he intended to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. He said that before the Madrid bombings. And outgoing Prime Minister Aznar managed to screw up his own chances for re-election by playing politics with the bombings. He incurred the wrath of the Spanish electorate by lying to them, by insisting that the crimes were committed by Basque terrorists and even pressuring the media to stick to the party line and not report otherwise.  What happened yesterday in London was a tragedy and a horrible crime. Using it to smear previous victims of terror because their politics don’t happen to agree with your own doesn’t make it any better.

Later, in comments at the Progressive Blogger site, he expands on the Rosie argument about Britain not recalling 9000 troops.. when in fact, they are already planning to do exactly that:

..according to the Financial Times, the British Ministry of Defence had already drafted plans for a significant withdrawal of troops. Does that mean they were already cutting and running? DiManno can’t have it both ways.

Here is another part of Rosie’s column I shook my head at:

If anything, I suspect, the popular opposition to military engagement in Iraq will lose some of its traction.

Dimanno seems to be presuming that a terrorist bombing in London will somehow make people believe the Iraq war and the War on Terror are somehow now connected and that everyone in Britain will now leap to supporting the Iraq war effort.

This is nonsense – Bush and Blair never went to Iraq to fight terror or because Saddam was supporting Al Queada – they went on the basis of the now discredited charge that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The line about “freeing the Iraqi’s” got inserted by the US after it was becoming apparent no such weapons existed. As for the terrorists, these people who never were in Iraq in the first place are only showing up there now precisely because the Americans and British are there.

Bush and his Administration have been subtly and openly trying for 2-3 years now to ingrain in the American people that the War on Terror and fighting in Iraq was one and the same – but that is finally, I sense, beginning to be discredited by the American population.

The people in Britain are smart enough to know this, despite Dimanno’s hopes they’ll have collective amnesia. Dimanno is the one person at the Toronto Star (a generally liberal paper with the largest subscription in Canada) who was always spouting off the neo-cons’ version of the events leading up to and after the Iraq war, and she has shown that she continues to do so now in columns more worthy of being in the right-wing rantings of the Toronto Sun or the National Post, rather then the Star. I wont go so far as to call her a “hack”, as Pogge does, but I believe she’s let her personal views get in the way of the facts.

To be sure, the English ARE an inspiration..I have no problem with Rosie lauding their reaction and their resolve to the crisis,  but Dimanno needs to be called out on the parts of her article which simply arent reality-based and are trying to re-write history.

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