Juno News - February 19, 2021


Will Canadian troops stay in Iraq？

Topics
NATO mission in Iraq
Mentioned
Donald Trump Shias
Guns and 3D Chess Public health officials need to be transparent and accountable

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

214.7

Word count

1,072

Sentence count

21

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss whether or not Canada should continue to participate in NATO missions in Iraq and the Middle East, and why we even have a need for such a mission in that country. We also discuss the history of NATO's involvement in such missions and why Canada should be involved in them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So we're just wrapping up a meeting of NATO defense ministers and during that meeting it
00:00:10.320 was expected that Canada would face pressure to reverse a projected drawdown of troops which are
00:00:15.260 currently deployed there to support a NATO mission in Iraq. Now that mission was started at the
00:00:20.980 behest of the Iraqi government where they basically asked NATO to come in and provide
00:00:25.080 advising and training and capacity building so that the Iraqi military and the Iraqi government
00:00:29.840 could handle things with regards to extremist groups or militias backed by Iran perhaps or other
00:00:36.420 sort of issues in enforcing sovereignty in Iraqi territory. Now there are two sort of main streams
00:00:41.660 which I think we should talk about in this video and I want to cover them very very briefly. The
00:00:45.620 first one is NATO itself and its role in these types of missions and the second is the history of the
00:00:51.440 Middle East and Iraq and why we even have a need for such a mission in that country. Now NATO as you 0.82
00:00:56.320 know the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was really started to counter Soviet aggression or
00:01:00.780 perceived aggression during the Cold War so it's immediately after the Second World War. Now the
00:01:05.960 organization originally started very small mostly European countries and expanded and is now up to
00:01:09.880 about 30 countries and so the question really remains what is the organization's purpose because
00:01:15.260 there is no Cold War at the very least in the same way that there was previously and there's no
00:01:20.040 more Soviet Union to counter there's no Warsaw Pact there's no you know threat of nuclear war at any
00:01:25.740 moment in the same way that existed during the Cold War so a lot of people have questioned the
00:01:30.140 purpose of NATO. Now Donald Trump has also criticized a number of countries and member countries of NATO
00:01:36.000 for not paying their fair share. Now there's an idea that countries pay two percent of GDP at the very
00:01:41.540 least to support their militaries and therefore be able to participate in NATO and Canada is not one of
00:01:46.840 those countries that has been paying that two percent. There's been a lot of criticism of such
00:01:52.120 and it remains a question on a number of fronts. Do you believe that Canada should be a part of NATO?
00:01:57.340 Where do you stand on Canada's defense spending? And there are a number of things of that nature
00:02:01.860 with regards to whether or not you even think Canada should be in Iraq in the first place as
00:02:05.880 part of such a mission. So that's sort of the first thing to digest but secondly why do we need a
00:02:10.840 mission of this type in Iraq? What's been going on and what's at issue in the Middle East that causes
00:02:16.380 so many so many problems as we constantly read about in the news or throughout history at the very least
00:02:21.020 recent history. So I want to go back to and if you've watched my last video you will recall an
00:02:26.280 agreement that took place during the sort of end of the First World War called the Sykes-Picot
00:02:30.800 Agreement and this basically divided up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire into areas of control. So there
00:02:37.760 would be areas of control under the French, under the British and a little bit under the Russians
00:02:42.040 and this ended up in what we see as the current map where a number of countries were simply created
00:02:48.680 and these countries did not necessarily reflect who lived there, did not necessarily reflect the
00:02:53.880 religious group or ethnic groups or maybe even language groups, it didn't reflect necessarily the
00:02:59.420 Ottoman provinces or regions that were in that area previously and how that was administered and so a lot
00:03:07.020 of the issues internal to some of these countries specifically with regards to ethnic groups, you may have
00:03:12.100 heard of the Kurds or you know Sunnis and Shias, different you know religious or ethnic groups,
00:03:16.000 different streams, these different groups may not necessarily fit you know so so nicely into into a
00:03:23.440 modern nation state because they had never previously been part of the same group and so
00:03:27.720 some of that issue really extends from this agreement where a number of these groups were all lumped
00:03:33.040 together into a new box that was then called Syria or then called Iraq and so that is I think some of
00:03:39.340 the issue at hand and so overall the two main parts what do you think Canada should do with regards to
00:03:44.520 NATO, what is our role in the Atlantic organization, what is our role in defense, you know should we
00:03:50.460 increase defense funding, these are some of the questions you have to ask before you even get
00:03:54.320 into whether or not Canada should be in such a mission in Iraq or in any other country where this
00:03:59.940 may occur and second what is going on in the Middle East and a lot of it has to do with some of these
00:04:05.600 things stretching back all the way to Sykes-Picot and who lives there and who does not live there.
00:04:10.220 Now the Middle East just as a sort of you know wrap-up the Middle East is a very different place
00:04:15.040 than Canada, it's a very different place than the West and I think it's very safe to say that if
00:04:19.420 Canada if we're talking about you know someone from out West has a very different maybe outlook or even
00:04:25.020 maybe a different culture than someone who lives in Toronto or you know in the Maritimes then it's
00:04:29.380 very safe to say that we in Canada have a very different culture and a very different outlook than
00:04:33.100 what goes on in the Middle East and I think that is one of the things we need to start off when we're 0.98
00:04:37.540 looking at those countries at who lives there at the dynamics and how we're going to get involved
00:04:41.720 and how if we are going to get involved what is the best way that we can do that to you know have
00:04:46.160 the most success possible. So you know for True North I'm Sam Ashkenazi. Thank you so much for
00:04:51.140 watching this video. As always there's a lot to discuss but I hope you came away with some very
00:04:55.680 interesting things to think about and thank you so much for watching this video. Have yourselves a great day.