Well, I don't know what's in the minds of the people who create these reports, and this report in particular. All I can say is I think there has to be political motive behind it. I mean, this was, I thought, a really interesting study in manipulating statistics and trying to prove with those statistics whatever it was that you wanted to see come out of the study.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's almost as if they were measuring how high the ocean is at any given point. There's a 30-metre wave here and there's a trough over there, so let's take the average and see where we're going with this. I don't know what it shows.
I had a philosophy professor way back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth who used to say, “The square root of Hong Kong is red”. Now, that's a sentence that has all of the elements that make up a sentence, but it's absolutely meaningless.
The study we saw come out last week is exactly of that kind: if casualties continue in this way, if the war goes in this direction, if this happens, if that happens, if the other happens.... Casualties are a very sensitive subject to speak of. I think in this country we are so blessed that we have not seen heavy casualties in action for 50 years. But I would remind this committee that more than 500 Canadians died in active service in two and a half years in the Korean War, and that was for a country the population of which was much less than it is today.
I think you have to put casualties in perspective. You're going to take casualties in a war. Sometimes there will be more and sometimes there will be less. To try to draw out that string and say there will be x number at the end of five years or at the end of ten years is strictly and purely a political exercise--nothing more, nothing less.