The lights in the amphitheater dimmed, and the packed room in the Westin Hotel turned its collective attention to the three big screen TVs on the walls.
There was the Fuhrer in grainy black and white — and that barking, ferocious voice cracking with hatred and belligerence. The images of the Nazi leader were deftly intercut with ISIS beheadings, shots of a smouldering Pearl Harbour, destruction in Syria, Eichmann’s hideous death camps, the huge Swastika being blown up above the Nazi parade square in Nuremberg in 1945 — even a haunting image of Anne Frank.
It was an unsubtle, no-heart-strings-left-untugged curtain-raiser for the some of the political and military elites present, a kind of Two Minutes of Hate for the “good guys”. International security is a huge industry and these were its captains, colonels, generals and political back-scratchers, there to justify their enormous power and budgets — and, of course, to keep everyone safe. There was more gold braid and medals on display than at a Coronation or a royal funeral.
Words boomed from the movie-theatre sound system, playing a supporting role in this visceral video collage of war and remembrance. “Never have so many owed so much to so few” — “whatever the cost may be, we will never surrender.”
The iconic words carried resonances into the heart as well as the head — as all good propaganda does. Thoughts quickly give way to feelings. Just as the video, with its booming soundtrack, came to an end, the screen lit up with a giant picture of Justin Trudeau and the words “Better is always possible.” Better war-making against the evil ones, what?
It was an oddly jarring juxtaposition. Almost all of the other images in the video were of war-making, while Trudeau is expressly offering another way. He wants to create a new role for the military and a return to the more familiar image of Canada — a peacekeeper rather than warrior nation, reflective rather than ideological. A place where Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, with all his absurd war fantasies as the answer to everything in the Middle East, could never get elected.
Trudeau has already announced the end of the Canadian bombing mission in Iraq and Syria. And his new minister of defence, dapper in a well-tailored suit and pearl-gray turban, had been given those marching orders in his mandate letter from the PM. None of the generals were smiling as they awaited the speech from Harjit Singh Sajjan, sublime policeman, decorated soldier and newly-minted politician.
But first, the president of the Halifax International Security Forum (HISF) kept up the drumbeat of fear so carefully begun with the opening video. Peter Van Praagh told a touching story about how his little daughter pulled the covers over her face whenever someone entered her bedroom and shouted “Bad Guys.” To the child, it was a game. But in the grown-up world, the bad guys were real, Van Praagh opined.
Paris was Van Praagh’s megaphone metaphor from start to finish of this event. It has been the same with almost all the news agencies in this country and around the western world in the wake of the terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in Paris. Van Praagh’s rhetoric was generally as carefully contrived as the opening video — “70 years ago, Paris was liberated from Nazi terror; seven days ago it was attacked by new tyrants.” Full marks for parallel structure and historical shorthand. Lasting analysis? A big fat F.
Occasionally though, his hyperbole was embarrassing, as when Van Praagh claimed that Paris is the city that protects the imagination of the world. It is a very great city indeed and a cultural treasure. But to say it protects the imagination of the world? A very tough sell if you happen to be Vietnamese, Algerian, Lebanese, Syrian or non-western, which takes in the majority of the planet.
Post-Colonial or not, bombs are still bombs and France is dropping them in Iraq and Syria. No network in the West is showing any pictures of that devastation — particularly against fleeing civilians. As one general mentioned in a panel discussion here, the attacks in Paris may be the first sign that ISIS is feeling the pressure of the coalition air campaign — i.e. the two things are connected.
So where is the news of the other side? Or is it all Assad’s barrel bombs?
Van Praagh never explained that. There were just the usual bromides that the war against ISIS and its “psychopathic followers” was “winnable”, that this evil group is in league with criminal elements that deal in drug smuggling and human trafficking, and that Muslims must undertake a “serious reappraisal” of their place in the world. More than a little Trumpish to be sure.
Reinforcing Van Praagh’s crayons-and-coloring book analysis of very complex situations with multiple aspects and diverse players were the ubiquitous big-screen TVs that lined the corridors of the hotel. They were all tuned to CNN, which was offering real time coverage of terrorist attacks in Mali, this time with Al Qaida doing the killing.
Walking from salon to salon to look in on this or that plenary or working group, one could be forgiven for thinking that the world was in flames. It was as if fate was the producer of TV presenter Tom Clark’s episode of the West Block that was beamed from the premises.
Paris had made international security hot television at exactly the right moment. At one point Clark pointed out that two-thirds of the coalition fighter jets returned to base without dropping their bombs because of a fear of collateral damage – i.e. killing civilians. In the interests of turning the screws on ISIS, Clark asked if it might not be time to change the rules of engagement. Paris fever talking?
A hush fell over the room when Harjit Singh Sajjan took to the podium. Canada’s new Defense Minister was wearing a Golden Lobster lapel pin, an honour bestowed on him by the Halifax Canadian Club. The HCC is a permanent body created by the Harper government to support the work of the HISF, a non-profit based in Washington D.C. Through DND and ACOA, Ottawa kicks in about $2.5 million a year to fund the public/private venture that promotes the security industry. Do you hear the oinking in the air?
Reading from his prepared script, the minister did not lead with Paris once the formalities were out of the way. Instead, he listed a series of terrorist attacks in Egypt, Beirut, Mali — and Paris. It was an important distinction, refusing as it did to agree that what happens in Western Europe or North America changes everything, but what happens in the Arab and Muslim world doesn’t matter.
Sajjan’s words did not feed the war hawks in the room or rise to the Hitler bait. Instead, he pointed out that war alone can’t build the conditions for peace. In both his speech and a panel discussion that followed, the new minister asked the kind of thoughtful questions that haven’t been raised in Canada on foreign policy and security issues for ten years.
How did we get to the place we’re in now? What about youth who are alienated by a lack of opportunity, and therefore become the richest recruitment targets for ISIS? And finally, this. The West has to understand the situations it wants to intervene in before there can be any success in military operations or training. And “understanding” would allow the coalition to predict future threats, rather than simply react to them with force. Policy would be a strategy, not a spasm.
Peter MacKay, who sat poker-faced throughout Sajjan’s address, later asked the panel whether NATO should invoke Article 5 in order to get “all hands on deck” in the fight against ISIS. It was an arrogantly dismissive rejection of everything he had just heard from the man who now holds the position he once occupied.
Tellingly, Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff, General Jon Vance, didn’t think invoking Article 5 was a good idea. In fact, Article 5 would not even oblige Canada to take military action. Vance later went further, observing that “you can’t carpet bomb your way to victory.”
Meanwhile, two days before the Forum, Citizen Godfrey over at the National Post published Peter MacKay’s war-mongering view that if asked by France to help wage war against ISIS, Canada must answer the call. No one should be surprised. MacKay is what he is, in or out of politics; a Republican clone who thinks war is the answer. Too many friends in Washington, not enough in Canada. As for Paul Godfrey, he continues to abuse his power to press people vote Conservative.
The same press that endorsed the autocratic corruption of the Harper government in the recent election, is also publishing polls arguing that most Canadians are against taking in Syrian refugees. Not everyone is buying.
One of the stellar moments at the 7th Halifax International Security Forum came when Janice Gross Stein, a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs, scoffed at the notion that Justin Trudeau was playing with fire by taking in 25,000 Syrian refugees who had been pre-screened by the UN. They will also face scrutiny from Canada’s security agencies. She told the Forum that 25,000 was a “small number” and that Canada should not “securitize the refugee issue.”
There were many informative but also many questionable aspects to this Forum. The message from most of the military representatives seemed to be to wage war, train the locals, and be prepared for a long engagement — a kind of replay of what George W. Bush was always asking for during his tenure. Patience, more money, and more troops. More often than not, his rationale was based on what the generals in the field were telling him.
But these days the military has a credibility problem. The Pentagon has just decided to expand its inquiry into the allegation that senior officials tampered with the intelligence reports of the United States Central Command, or Centcom. The purpose of the tampering was to “revise” certain reports to hide the American military’s failures in training Iraqi troops who fled in the face of ISIS rather than fighting. What was wanted was optimism not accuracy. There is also concern that the same people skewed intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan.
But the most striking thing about this three-day event was the intellectual distance between many of its conclusions and recent Canadian history. According to a poll produced for HISF, most Canadians approve of the coalition air strikes, there is no evidence that Canada’s image in the world has suffered in recent years, and that most Canadians think war is necessary to achieve justice. The poll was conducted between September 25 and October 9th, 2015 in 24 countries.
Another somewhat bigger poll, the one conducted on October 19th, told a very different story.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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