Now Carney has found himself having to say again himself, repeatedly, Hell No We Won’t Go – and Canadians have been saying that repeatedly to him, too:

Reactions from Canadians:

Yep. Are we going to help the Americans with their illegal war? Nope. Are we gonna help our allies some of whom are currently in the Middle East? Yep.

It’s going to be a very delicate balancing act. I don’t envy Carney in this moment. I hope he listens to his advisors.

— DD FlubDub 🇨🇦 (@perfectparanoia.bsky.social) March 6, 2026 at 9:36 PM

In the Toronto Star, columnist Justin Ling writes Donald Trump is waging war on a stack of lies. Mark Carney’s response shows he still has much to learn (gift link).
Ling provides a detailed summary of how Chretien kept us out of Iraq, and how Trump’s Iran war justifications aren’t making sense. He concludes:

…All this seems to indicate Carney doesn’t have the new world order figured out quite to the extent he’d have us believe, so it’s lucky that whether Canada supports or condemns the war doesn’t much matter, at least for now. Still, as the world becomes more dangerous and Trump more belligerent, the prime minister might want to take some lessons from Chrétien.

Carney needs strong, credible, skeptical advisers at his side. More important, he needs to learn that you can never trust a liar.

Next, news about the war itself.

The Institute for the Study of War posts detailed assessments of daily events on both sides. Their March 6 report says:

1. Russia is reportedly sharing intelligence with Iran to support Iranian attacks against US forces in the Middle East…. China may be preparing to provide Iran with financial assistance and missile components.
2. The US-Israeli combined force has continued strikes targeting Iranian ballistic missile infrastructure in order to degrade Iranian missile capabilities and ultimately destroy the Iranian ballistic missile program…. ..
3. The combined force is continuing to target Iran’s defense industrial base, especially facilities that support drone development….
4. Iran has continued to retaliate against Israel, US bases in the Middle East, Gulf states, and other regional countries for the joint force strike campaign. Iran has launched at least six waves of ballistic missile attacks in the previous six days. The lower number of missile attacks further demonstrates the joint forces’ success in degrading Iran’s number of missile launchers.

So its getting broader and deeper and more destabilizing by the day.

 
In The West Point History Professor, Terrence Goggin writes FLASH: A TRUMP HIGH RISK GAMBIT: The 82nd Airborne Is About To Seize An Iranian Chokepoint, Kharg Island And Adjacent Oil Infrastructure (moving 2.7 million barrels per day), Within A Matter of Days AN EMERGENCY SPECIAL REPORT

…In addition to bombing Tehran President Trump appears to be executing a high-risk strategic gambit: deploying the 82nd Airborne Division’s Ready Brigade — currently on 18-hour alert — to seize Kharg Island and its adjacent mainland oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. The objective is not to capture Iran’s oil but to permanently interdict Iranian oil exports, depriving the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of the revenue required to sustain its one million-plus armed forces….
Trump’s demand for “unconditional surrender” has shifted the conflict from a targeted campaign against Iran’s nuclear program to a potential regime-breaking operation. When pressed on the definition, Trump stated it could mean the complete destruction of the regime’s military capabilities — not a formal instrument of surrender — specifically: the destruction of Iran’s navy, elimination of its ballistic missile threat, ensuring it cannot obtain a nuclear weapon, and the weakening of its regional proxies.
This represents a categorical expansion of war aims mid-conflict. The Kharg seizure, if executed, is the enforcement mechanism for these demands — the physical equivalent of holding a gun to the IRGC’s payroll….
the IRGC’s counter-strategy will not be a single decisive blow by missiles against Kharg but a sustained low-cost saturation campaign of cheap drones and missiles designed to exhaust American interceptors within weeks. The IRGC leadership — even degraded — understands this arithmetic. The race is between Iranian regime cohesion breaking and American interceptor stockpiles running dry….

Hmmm….

Some other comments:

In The Atlantic, Phillips O’Brien writes U.S. Capabilities Are Showing Signs of Rot

On multiple occasions after President Trump launched a massive air campaign against Iran this past weekend, retaliatory attacks by simply constructed Iranian drones have penetrated American defenses with serious results. ….When a complex system starts to decay, the first signs are usually subtle….
When Trump announced that the bombing of Iran had started, European states conspicuously refrained from endorsing the operations. The leaders of the three largest European democracies—Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—jointly declared that they were not participating in the strikes.
Since then, Britain has reluctantly agreed to let the U.S. use a base on Cyprus for operations, but this limited help has clearly disappointed the Trump administration. This week, the president belittled the so-called special relationship with Britain for being “obviously not what it was.” Hegseth complained that America’s traditional allies “wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.” But he and Trump should hardly be surprised at the lack of enthusiasm. The president has repeatedly cozied up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the greatest security threat to democratic Europe, and has sought to take Greenland from Denmark, another longtime ally. Americans and Europeans might still refer to each other as “allies,” but the signs of rot are obvious….
Trump’s rejection of planning, expertise, and diplomacy is beginning to have real-world consequences….

In The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan writes The War He’s Always Wanted A moment of triumph for Benjamin Netanyahu; and of democratic collapse in the US.

…So whose war is this again?
Trump told us that the 2025 strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities had been “for Israel”; he told Tucker Carlson last month that “he understood the risks of an attack, but that he had no choice but to join a strike that Israel would launch.” Think about that last comment for a moment. “No choice”? Since when does the president of a superpower have “no choice” but to acquiesce to the decisions of a foreign country on a matter as grave as a declaration of war?
…let me just note two big domestic constituencies who helped explain Israel’s dominance of Washington, without which this war is impossible: evangelical fanatics and Jewish Americans. It’s one of the strangest American alliances imaginable, but it explains a huge amount of why we are where we are. Up against these formidable bipartisan forces, the rest of us never had a chance.
…I’m not optimistic. A dying empire in staggering amounts of debt has just taken on another open-ended war that will likely bring chaos in its wake. The war we are conducting appears to be a brutal one — with hospitals and schools already hit. The question of our weapon supplies for the wider world after Gaza and Ukraine is an open and worrying one.
So this in many ways is where we have been headed for many decades now: a collapsed democracy, a deranged king, a bankrupt treasury, a war we cannot win for a country not our own, and a public accustomed to the learned helplessness that comes from knowing that however you vote, you will always get the same result:
A regime-change war in the Middle East, whether you want it or not.

I have seen a lot of posts in social media saying that American bases have been destroyed by Iranian drones, with hundreds of American casualties as a result. I don’t know whether any of these posts are even true. But I guess they could be – here are some related comments:

And I suspect we’ll hear more about this in the coming days: