Canada does have a big stake and the governor of our central bank should definitely put forward his opinions on these kinds of issues.
This recent shift towards gift cards that retailers don't count until they're redeemed in January...and the (formerly governing) Liberals' tax cuts should support first-quarter consumer spending.
We've seen these cycles of ebb and flow half a dozen times or more since the war began. One can hope that this is a permanent decline, but it's still much too early to reach that conclusion.
If full-scale civil war erupts -- and Iraq appears to be awfully close to that at this point -- even 134,000 troops could be in a highly vulnerable position, especially when you consider how many true combat troops we have there.