"Here Is Hell": Canada's Engagement in Somalia.

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

Canadians believe in peacekeeping as an article of faith. Is there one politician or commentator who has not referred to the nation’s “traditional” support for peacekeeping, usually to make the point that we are different than “warlike” Americans? The difficulty is that peacekeeping is sometimes messy, and the operations in Somalia in the early 1990s, some but not all under the United Nations, illustrate the point perfectly. Grant Dawson’s fine book is a study of policy-making, and he demonstrates how public and political expectations combined to put Canadian troops into a situation for which they were not well prepared. The resulting murder of a Somali youth and its political-military fallout in Canada, including the Somalia Commission of Inquiry, nearly wrecked the Canadian Forces and did lead to the dissolution of the Canadian Airborne Regiment.

Dawson’s account is built on masssive research and an extraordinary range of interviews in Canada and abroad. He does not want to see Canada stop its peacekeeping efforts (the demands of the Afghan War has constrained them), but he clearly believes that more care needs to be exercised.