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I am certainly not a foreign policy wonk, but I have to say, as an ordinary citizen, I am gobsmacked by what Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said Thursday about the crisis in Aleppo, which was, essentially, that it’s tragic and all, but that the Canadian Forces won’t be getting involved.

“Our focus has always been in Iraq,” Sajjan told reporters on a conference call, “and that is our focus now.”

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This came in the wake of Aleppo’s falling two days earlier in Syria, right next door to Iraq, to the Russian- and Iran- and Hezbollah-backed Syrian army.

After years of civil war featuring President Bashar Assad’s starve-and-siege tactics (whereby you surround an area, then squeeze it of humanitarian aid and weaken any resistance), the use of chemical weapons and barrel bombs, and the deliberate targeting of hospitals and clinics and, always, civilians, Aleppo fell on Tuesday.

Throughout, as my Postmedia colleague Terry Glavin wrote furiously, the international community, including Canada, effectively sat on its hands, occasionally bleating inanities at the United Nations and making useless demands that hostilities cease.