Allies.....

There's a great post by Bret Stevens in the WSJ online. An excerpt:

On Oct. 2, 2001, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization took the unprecedented step of formally invoking Article 5 of its 1949 Charter, which says that "an armed attack against one or more of them. . . . shall be considered an attack against all of them." Lord Geoffrey Robertson, then NATO's secretary-general, gave a press conference saying he wanted to "reiterate that the United States of America can rely on the full support of its 18 NATO Allies in the campaign against terrorism."
In recent weeks, we've been reminded once again just how cheap those promises were. On Thursday, Stéphane Dion, who leads Canada's Liberal Party, announced that as prime minister he would bring an end to the country's 2,500-strong military commitment to southern Afghanistan. "Neither Canada, NATO nor the Americans anticipated how violent and dangerous Kandahar would become in 2006," he said, adding that the proper role for Canadian forces is "to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people."

Read the whole thing.