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Still, the Liberal platform promised to “renew Canada’s commitment to peacekeeping operations.” And if the government sallied forth into Africa to make good on it, I suspect it would be rather popular at first.

Canadians love, love, love the peacekeeping thing. In a poll conducted during last year’s election campaign, Angus Reid found 74 per cent preferred that Canadian troops be “focused on peacekeeping” instead of “combat preparedness” — among Liberal-intended voters, it was 82 per cent. One of the archetypal Canadian op-eds is a paean to our history of peacekeeping and honest brokering around the world that mentions only the 1956 Suez Crisis by way of example. We eat this stuff up.

We haven’t been a major player in peacekeeping for many years. It certainly wasn’t Stephen Harper who abandoned it, much as Liberals enjoy pretending it was. So it is debatable how relevant the popular conception of peacekeeping is to modern-day conflicts. But leave that aside for now. The really bizarre thing about peacekeeping’s popularity is that two of our most recent forays were unmitigated disasters.

In 1994, under the UN’s and Canada’s watch, Hutu Rwandans clubbed, hacked and as a last resort shot to death thousands of Tutsis every day for 100 days. “The worst eyes that haunt me are the eyes of those people who are totally bewildered,” mission commander Roméo Dallaire told PBS’s Frontline in 2004. “They’re looking at me in my blue beret and asking ‘what in the hell happened? How come I’m dying here?’ And they’re absolutely right.