RMC’s Howard Coombs (in Canadian uniform) doesn’t think much of the government’s efforts to battle Trump (US DoD photo)
By Tim Ryan
Royal Military College associate professor Howard Coombs has been getting a lot of press lately for some of his views on how Canadians would react to a U.S. invasion.
Such nightmare scenarios have become fodder for news media reports ever since U.S. President Donald Trump started his bully talk about annexing Canada.
Coombs, director of the Queen's Centre for International and Defence Policy, doesn’t think too highly of his fellow citizens, figuring that they love the good life too much to cobble together some kind of insurgency against American invaders.
He told CBC’s Front Burner in a Feb. 18 podcast he expects Canadian collaborators to run a Vichy-type of government for the Americans.
And Coombs didn’t hold back about what he thought about the Liberal government’s efforts to deal with Trump. “Honestly, we are in a state of disarray right now,” he told the CBC. “Our government is not effectively reacting.” In terms of central resistance on an economic front, it didn’t seem like anything was happening, he added.
Coombs was again being interviewed on a potential U.S. invasion in late March. In a March 30 Canadian Press news service article, Coombs claimed that the U.S. military would try to limit the amount of destruction and death aimed at Canada to prevent creating a disaffected population. Coombs, who served with American troops and was a Canadian advisor in Afghanistan, claimed such a strategy was successful in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Really?
The U.S. military’s indiscriminate use of firepower in both countries significantly contributed to the rise of an effective insurgency against the Americans. Increasing civilian deaths in Afghanistan as a result of U.S. and NATO firepower helped strengthen the Taliban.
Approximately 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed during the U.S. occupation, with a significant number caused by trigger-happy American troops.
