After telling Canadians with his most scrubbed, choir-boy sincerity that his latest war would feature aerial bombardment and no boots on the grounds, the country finds out differently.
Canadian soldiers had a firefight with the forces of the Islamic State. They were very much on the ground. With those 69 special forces members a stone’s throw from the front, who in their right mind could have failed to predict this outcome?
Now that everyone knows that Canadian special forces are on the front lines as bomb-directors and snipers, the next act in this bad opera is just as easy to predict.
At some point, a Canadian soldier is going to be captured or killed in action. The prime minister will hold a sorrowful press conference — without taking any questions. The emotional dividend from these inevitable events will be used by his hawkish administration to justify a more “robust” response — i.e. more boots on the ground to protect our forces. And so on … until it’s Afghanistan Redux.
The prime minister’s apologists have already rushed to his defence. Those members of the Canadian Special Operation Regiment are “trainers” on the ground, not really soldiers, we’re told. They only returned fire when fired upon, and immediately went back to their “training” role when the bullets stopped flying. Who could blame them for defending themselves?
Which sounds like a good question — until you remember that they wouldn’t have to be defending themselves if the prime minister had kept his word to Parliament — which he did not.
This, of course, is exactly how the Americans eased their way into the war in Vietnam after the French were whipped. That initial helping hand to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam turned into a military operation that dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than were dropped in the entire Second World War — and the Americans still lost.
It ended on April 29, 1975, with a desperate airlift of U.S. citizens from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, as the Viet Cong overran the city. It was a war that started with trainers and advisers. It ended with the deaths of more than fifty thousand U.S. soldiers — and 3.8 million Vietnamese. So forgive me if the “trainer” explanation rings a little hollow.
I have another problem with the “training” justification. For years, there was supposed to have been a “training” operation going on in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It was hideously expensive. The useless wars there were extended for years by the ruse that Western forces were somehow preparing the Iraqi military, and the Afghan national police and army, to fight their own insurgencies. Canada’s training mission in Kabul cost $522 million.
What value did the West get from all that training? An Iraqi army that melted like butter in the face of an onslaught from Islamic State, and an Afghan military and police ill-prepared to deal with the re-emerging threat from the Taliban. The poppy trade has never been brisker. In other words, when you subtract the few people who made fortunes from those wars — the Dick Cheneys and Haliburtons of the world — the public got stuck paying a crushing bill for two abject failures.
Remember Prime Minister Harper’s immortal plagiarism about Afghanistan? Canada would not “cut and run” — which somehow turned into ‘ten years of war is enough’ the moment this slick opportunist sensed Canadians were turning against the war. With cost estimates of Canada’s Afghanistan mission topping $18 billion in some quarters, I guess he had that much right. And that figure doesn’t count the cost of caring for wounded veterans.
Faced with developments in Iraq, Canada’s three opposition leaders have denounced the prime minister for misleading Parliament, a charge that in more direct parlance comes down to lying. Harper plainly said that there would be no boots on the ground in Iraq. But there are. Period.
Harper’s defenders say that misleading Parliament isn’t the question. The question is really whether or not the Canadian military mission is working. According to some commentators, it is. And because it is, we’re told, the government is justified in what it has done.
That argument is stereophonic absurdity. What constitutes working? Slowing the advance of Islamic State, retaking Fallujah, sending the militants back to the shadows to regroup the way the Taliban has in Afghanistan? Blowing them all to bits?
Do we declare victory on a given day, leave, and then watch a fresh insurgency break out? Iraq itself has been teetering on the brink of civil war since the main body of U.S. forces went home. According to the Kennedy School of Government, the twin debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan cost the United States as much as $6 trillion. Remember when guys like Donald Rumsfeld were saying the Iraq War would be self-financing? As things turned out, the American people paid to the tune of $75,000 per citizen.
Apart from the absurdity of saying a war just a few months old is “working”, there’s the experience of Afghanistan to consider. Before the Americans showed up with their army, the Russians were the occupiers. They tried to force changes on an ancient society which didn’t see the world through western eyes. The result was a bitter war that the Russians lost to an alliance of local forces — including the Mujahideen, which gave the world the CIA’s most famous trainee: Osama Bin Laden.
It is instructive to read through the dispatches from Russian generals trying to tell Moscow it was losing the war. The Politburo ignored the warnings, wanting only good news from the front — the kind of news that reinforces the idea that the war is “working.”
Russia’s disastrous decade in Afghanistan played a key role in the collapse of the USSR. And the Americans didn’t do any better. As reported in the World Affairs Journal, even after the Americans spent $116 billion on “reconstruction”, Afghanistan still doesn’t have a “single sustainable institution or program.” So don’t talk to me about this latest war in Iraq working.
It has been said of Stephen Harper that he bases his foreign policy on moral analysis. Beheaders are bad and it is our duty to bomb them. Trying to understand what drives them is unpatriotic. You get the idea — either you’re with Steve or you’re with the beheaders. This plays well with his political base, including the Born Again Brigade.
But an elephant has barged into the room. Even the most credulous of the Kool Aid drinkers — those who think this prime minister has a morality-driven view of foreign policy — must swallow some huge contradictions.
Take Saudi Arabia, a world leader in beheadings — 87 in 2014 and 10 so far in 2015. The beheadings, by the way, are public, and included the execution of a Myanmar woman on January 17, 2015.
Recently, two Saudi women were arrested for driving a car and voicing opinions online. Their case will be heard in a special court in Riyadh that deals with terrorists.
A Saudi man, Raif Badawi, remains in the news after he was sentenced to ten years in jail and a thousand lashes for the high crime of blogging.
Yet Stephen Harper has just sold Saudi Arabia more than $10 billion worth of armoured vehicles, which will be used by that country’s National Guard to keep things in the Kingdom just the way they are — heads rolling, women walking, bloggers bleeding. What part of Canadian or Christian values is that? I guess it boils down to this: there are beheaders, and then there are rich beheaders. So much for morality.
If Stephen Harper intends to drag Canada into war in the Middle East, he should say so. If his preference is to mislead Parliament while he surreptitiously inches towards that goal, the way he did on the F-35 debacle, then this is not ‘mission creep’ — this is Mission Creepy. Unless, of course, we have we become a sole-source democracy.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
No comments:
Post a Comment