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It is one thing for corporations to offer their support to victims of horrible events. McCain, by using a public corporation, has stepped over the boundaries of good corporate governance, even if he did state in his tweets that he was delivering “personal reflections.” Also, Paramount Foods is a totally private corporation with no public shareholders.

Another question: McCain is the cousin of the wife of Finance Minister Bill Morneau. Does Morneau endorse McCain’s tweets? Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came close to agreeing with McCain. “I think if there were no tensions, if there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families,” he apparently told Global News.

That comes close to blaming Trump, although it’s more of a statement of the obvious. Without A there would be no B and no C. But that doesn’t mean that A is a cause of C.

McCain’s use of the words “collateral damage” is flawed. In military circles, collateral damage occurs when the immediate result of a justifiable military attack is the death of innocents. The U.S. killing of Maj. General Qassem Soleimani was a clean — and by most honest accounts — justifiable execution in which a global merchant of terror was taken out by U.S. operatives. It took place in Iraq, not Iran. No innocents were killed.

The same can be said of Iran’s response, which by all accounts was carefully measured not to inflict any casualties on the U.S. military personnel, let alone risk collateral damage to any innocents in Iraq.