Iran has issued a travel warning to Iranians for travel to Canada. I think Iran has thrown all it's toys outa the pram after Canada's fall out with them.

Is Canada boxing above its weight here? Or just hoping that the USA will tag in?

Harper's just doing what the USA told him to do. How else does he get to be statesman of the year.

Boxing above its weight as well as changing the essence of Canada.

Not that I know anything

Its all very well having all this moral outrage and making grand gestures, but diplomacy is seldom about doing the "right thing", its about protecting your nations best interests.


Canada seems to have developed diplomatic delusions of grandure. Its traditional role as a medium power has been to keep the diplomatic chanels open when the big powers were playing thier power games, and work towards compromise and resolution, but now the government is trying a different tack...

The travel advisory is perfectly natural, seeing as Iran is on the brink of war not only with Canada, but about 30 other nations right now. We've just concluded a 12 day military exercise in practising keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, and Iran is scheduled to begin an exercise in practising blocking the Strait of Hormuz to protest sanctions over their nuclear program. If Israel doesn't bomb the daylights out of Iran's nuclear program, or pull out a surprise nuke of their own, the US, UK, Canada, Aus, NZ, and about 25 other countries will end up going to war with Iran either over oil, (should they blockade the strait), or the threat of a nuke. Their regime ruthlessly tortured and murdered a Canadian journalist so we don't need instructions from the US to turn our backs on Iran, or to freeze the assets of anyone in Canada funneling money to them. Of course we can always hope that cooler heads will prevail, that Iran's new leadership proves to be more democratic than the last, but just in case that doesn't come about everyone has their finger on the trigger right now. We should be running a pool on an Israeli pre-emptive strike. If there is a war we can't expect anything to work better than in Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran fought a 10 year war against Iraq and didn't lose.

Nuke them.

Another place for military personnel to visit, meet n greet, and kill and get killed in.

And i thought we were done driving bodies west on the 401

Err, the oil me thinks .
I'd be amazed if they lasted 10 days against Israel + the rest.

I hope this is satire, more so the bit I've clipped. For heavens' sake, I'd gained the impression that you were sane.

You can never really tell, I suppose.

I have a hard time understanding how we as a species seem to think war is an answer to anything.

I suppose it's not until we've had the charred remains of our children handed back to us in a bin liner that we'll really consider what war actually means.

A satirist is someone who thinks bad thoughts about himself, then writes them about other people. I'm not any less sane for having read the news over the past few weeks, and while I feel that Iran and the western world are at a dangerous impasse right now I'm certainly not advocating a war, especially against them. A ship full of oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz every hour, and while we've been piling economic sanctions on the Iranian govt for years, making enemies not only with their politicians, but their middle class who have the only means of changing their government, stopping the oil is the only way they can strike back. While we've been counting on Saudi Arabia to counter-balance Iranian influence among it's neighbours they're unlikely to offer more than limited logistical support if there's a war. I don't have a solution, only hopes and fears.

What would you advise the Israelis to do?

We will never be done doing that.....it's only the ones that you hear about through the media.