QotD: "Le p'tit gar"

Reading this book you detect an undercurrent of hostility toward "Bay Street" and "Wall Street," but no great sense of what Chrétien's for — other than "tolerance" and the other hollow cobwebbed buzzwords that boil down to little more than a passionate belief in not believing passionately in anything. The Iraq chapter is headlined "No To War," as if M. Chrétien is an elderly student on the march with Naomi Klein and Maude Barlow. In fact, under the cover of various "liaison" programs, Canada had more men in Iraq than many full-throated paid-up members of the "coalition of the willing." It was happy to be a unilateral coalition of the unwilling as long as it didn't have to march in the victory parade. But the author strains credibility when he claims to have told Bush, six months before the invasion, "I've been reading all my briefings about the weapons of mass destruction, and I'm not convinced. I think the evidence is very shaky." My Beltway pals scoffed when I relayed this snippet to them, and I'm inclined to agree. Even Chrétien's chum Chirac, who opposed the war, never disputed the fact that Saddam had WMDs, if only because he had a big bunch of the relevant receipts.

Mark Steyn, "He's still da boss", Macleans, 2007-10-23