Mr. Chair, I think you and I are probably reliving our youth a bit, going back to the Vietnam War.
When Canada accepted people who skipped out from doing service in Vietnam, I think we did a major service to our neighbours to the south, and in the long term that has been recognized.
There are a couple of differentials between this and Afghanistan. Afghanistan is under NATO; it's a multilateral force. Iraq was the coalition of the willing. We, the Liberal Party, the Liberal government, resisted going into Iraq even though we had a fair amount of pressure.
The thing that really bothers me to no end is that we have heard of war crimes going on in Iraq. There's no denying that they've been there. This has been disturbing to many people, and what has even been more disturbing are the very heavy civilian casualties. I don't know if we'll ever know the figures.
The war in Iraq is a misadventure that I hope the Americans manage to avoid in the future. You would have thought that they would have learned that lesson from Vietnam.
There was the draft during the Vietnam War, but people who wanted to avoid it, and those serving in Vietnam, found various occasions to do so. The current President of the United States did not serve in Vietnam, and the President before him, Bill Clinton, did not serve in Vietnam.
I agree with Bill when he says this is mostly poverty driven, because many people who enlist in the services on an auxiliary basis look at it as another job, and then all of a sudden they're plucked out from believing that they were going to protect their country and are sent over to Iraq.
I learned my lesson from Vietnam, and how we did the right thing then, how we were right to refuse to go to the war in Iraq, and how if we're going to be engaged in this kind of activity of peace-building, peacemaking, we have to do it as part of our recognized multilateral force. So I will be supporting this motion, and I pay tribute to the contributions of the many Vietnam draft dodgers who came here.