Leadership Quote by Paul Martin

It lands like a blunt shove disguised as practicality: Canada should "get over to Iraq" and do it "as quickly as possible". Paul Martin’s phrasing is telling. Not "support stabilization", not "assist reconstruction", not even "help our allies" - just movement, speed, and inevitability. The line compresses a sprawling moral and strategic debate into logistics, as if the only real question is how fast Ottawa can board the plane.

Context matters. In the early 2000s, Canada sat in an awkward posture: deeply intertwined with the U.S. on defense and intelligence, yet politically wary of the Iraq War’s legitimacy and its fallout. Martin, stepping into leadership after Chrétien, inherited a national mood skeptical of the invasion but nervous about the long-term price of being seen as a free-rider in a U.S.-led security order. The quote reads like a bridge between those pressures - an attempt to reassert Canada as a serious player without explicitly endorsing the original war.

The subtext is transactional: credibility is earned by showing up. "Over to Iraq" also flattens Iraqi reality into a destination, a theatre, a box to check. It’s the language of alliance management, not moral reckoning. That’s why it works rhetorically: it sidesteps the argument Canadians were having (Was Iraq right? Was it legal?) and replaces it with a different anxiety (Will we be punished for not participating?). Speed becomes virtue. Doubt becomes delay.