My two guest columns are running on Daily Canuck this week. The first one: Jack Layton's Dilemma is already posted. The second one: Jack Layton's Choices for 2007 will run in a couple of days.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Friday, December 22, 2006
The Maher Arar Lesson
The telling thing about the members of the administration of George W. Bush is that no matter how much you fawn and bend the knee and profess complete adherence to their weltanschauung, they will not concede the smallest thing to you if it does not suit them completely.
Poor Peter Mackay was seen in diplomatico flagrante with Condoleezza Rice in Washington exchanging sweet nothings about how close the Canada-U.S. relationship has become now that the Liberals have been banished from office. But could he get the Americans to take Maher Arar off their terrorist watch list? No. Following a painstaking Canadian investigation of the case that revealed how the innocent Syrian-born Canadian was grossly mistreated by Canada, the U.S. and Syria, will the Bush administration concede the point? Not a chance.
There is a theory, often advanced by neo-conservatives in Canada that much is to be gained by maintaining an intimate relationship with Washington. But when push comes to shove, the Americans don’t yield an inch---on Canadian sovereignty in Arctic Waters, on softwood lumber (where Canada did the yielding) or on any other file. Misty-eyed evenings where prime ministers and presidents sing When Irish Eyes are Smiling get us nowhere.
In dealings with Washington, realism and a clear-eyed view of the Canadian interest ought to be our watchword.
Call it the Maher Arar lesson.
Poor Peter Mackay was seen in diplomatico flagrante with Condoleezza Rice in Washington exchanging sweet nothings about how close the Canada-U.S. relationship has become now that the Liberals have been banished from office. But could he get the Americans to take Maher Arar off their terrorist watch list? No. Following a painstaking Canadian investigation of the case that revealed how the innocent Syrian-born Canadian was grossly mistreated by Canada, the U.S. and Syria, will the Bush administration concede the point? Not a chance.
There is a theory, often advanced by neo-conservatives in Canada that much is to be gained by maintaining an intimate relationship with Washington. But when push comes to shove, the Americans don’t yield an inch---on Canadian sovereignty in Arctic Waters, on softwood lumber (where Canada did the yielding) or on any other file. Misty-eyed evenings where prime ministers and presidents sing When Irish Eyes are Smiling get us nowhere.
In dealings with Washington, realism and a clear-eyed view of the Canadian interest ought to be our watchword.
Call it the Maher Arar lesson.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Jack Layton: At the Crossroads
(A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in today's Globe and Mail.)
Jack Layton now faces the most important decision of his political life: how to keep the NDP alive and progressive in the coming struggle for power between Stephen Harper and Stephane Dion.
Based on the choice made by NDP election strategists over the decades, including the approach taken by the party in the 2006 election, the NDP is likely to insist that the Liberals and Conservatives are equally reactionary and that the only genuine alternative is the NDP. This “tweedledum-tweedledee” approach was already offensive and patently false to many progressives by the time of the 1988 free trade election when Brian Mulroney campaigned for the deal he had negotiated with Ronald Reagan against Liberal John Turner who promised to tear up the free trade deal if elected.
In the 2006 election, the NDP pushed this approach to a further extreme. Jack Layton and his party directed their fire almost exclusively at Paul Martin’s Liberals as corrupt and unfit for office, while saying next to nothing about Stephen Harper and the threat posed to Canadians from his neo-conservative platform and ideology. It was as though the NDP had innocently slept through the past couple of decades of experiences throughout the West with neo-con governments.
Now Jack Layton and his advisors have to decide how to cope with Stephane Dion, whom Layton himself described as a man of principle only a few months ago in the confident belief that the corrupt Liberals would never pick such a leader. If it is not clear to NDP strategists that there’s a world of difference between the politics of Stephen Harper and Stephane Dion, this has certainly occurred to legions of progressive Canadians whose strongest wish is to replace the Harperites with a progressive government.
What is the NDP to do?
The NDP could try to make Stephen Harper look better than he really is on the environment and possibly one or two other issues. Given Dion’s strong showing in public opinion polls, Harper has as much interest in this as Layton. The Conservative and NDP leaders have already managed to find enough common ground on the environment to keep the government’s clean-air bill alive in a Commons committee. They could take this a step further with a concession by Harper on greenhouse gas targets that the NDP could welcome as a first step. This would be a way for Harper to moderate his image in Ontario and Quebec and it would allow Layton to argue that the NDP caucus is getting things done for working families and seniors.
The purpose of such a Harper-Layton duo (never to be acknowledged as such, of course) is that it could help both the Conservatives and the NDP stave off a rush of Canadians to support Stephane Dion.
I hope, for the sake of the country and for the sake of the NDP, that this is not the course adopted by Jack Layton.
The alternative course for him to take is to join those political forces that want Harper out of office as soon as possible. Layton ought to take a leading role---the leading role---in exposing Harper and the Conservatives for what they are. The one issue on which the NDP has genuinely done this is Afghanistan, where Layton has had the courage to call for a withdrawal of Canadian troops.
The NDP can do this as well on the environment. Everyone who has analyzed the issue knows that Harper will never do anything to slow the full-scale development of the oil sands projects in Alberta. And without slowing oil sands projects, Canada can only continue to increase its greenhouse gas emissions. Jack Layton should say this without equivocation.
On childcare and on insisting that the affluent pay their fair share of taxes, social democrats share no common ground with Conservatives. It ought to be clear to any New Democrat that if Harper were to win a majority of seats in the next election, he would attack Canada’s social state with a vengeance and seek to make a deal with Quebec sovereignists by savaging the power of the federal government.
Layton should make himself the leader of the movement to oust Harper from power. And in doing this, he can also look out for the long-term interests of the NDP. He should call on Stephane Dion to agree that the first step of a new Liberal government (likely a minority government) will be to introduce a scheme of proportional representation that can permanently end the dilemma progressives now have in deciding how to vote. With proportional representation, progressives can vote NDP without having to resort to the fiction that Liberals and Conservatives are peas in a pod.
If Stephane Dion is as progressive and guileless as he would have us believe, Layton should say, let him commit at once to proportional representation.
The next election is going to be a tough one for the NDP, no matter which strategic approach it takes. The party can come out of it with its political position as the leading edge of progressive politics intact, and with a strong caucus. But only if the NDP is unequivocal in making Stephen Harper the target. If Jack Layton goes back to “tweedledum-tweedledee”, not only is his party going to be punished at the polls by progressives who want Harper out, he will be endangering the long-term survival of the NDP.
Jack Layton now faces the most important decision of his political life: how to keep the NDP alive and progressive in the coming struggle for power between Stephen Harper and Stephane Dion.
Based on the choice made by NDP election strategists over the decades, including the approach taken by the party in the 2006 election, the NDP is likely to insist that the Liberals and Conservatives are equally reactionary and that the only genuine alternative is the NDP. This “tweedledum-tweedledee” approach was already offensive and patently false to many progressives by the time of the 1988 free trade election when Brian Mulroney campaigned for the deal he had negotiated with Ronald Reagan against Liberal John Turner who promised to tear up the free trade deal if elected.
In the 2006 election, the NDP pushed this approach to a further extreme. Jack Layton and his party directed their fire almost exclusively at Paul Martin’s Liberals as corrupt and unfit for office, while saying next to nothing about Stephen Harper and the threat posed to Canadians from his neo-conservative platform and ideology. It was as though the NDP had innocently slept through the past couple of decades of experiences throughout the West with neo-con governments.
Now Jack Layton and his advisors have to decide how to cope with Stephane Dion, whom Layton himself described as a man of principle only a few months ago in the confident belief that the corrupt Liberals would never pick such a leader. If it is not clear to NDP strategists that there’s a world of difference between the politics of Stephen Harper and Stephane Dion, this has certainly occurred to legions of progressive Canadians whose strongest wish is to replace the Harperites with a progressive government.
What is the NDP to do?
The NDP could try to make Stephen Harper look better than he really is on the environment and possibly one or two other issues. Given Dion’s strong showing in public opinion polls, Harper has as much interest in this as Layton. The Conservative and NDP leaders have already managed to find enough common ground on the environment to keep the government’s clean-air bill alive in a Commons committee. They could take this a step further with a concession by Harper on greenhouse gas targets that the NDP could welcome as a first step. This would be a way for Harper to moderate his image in Ontario and Quebec and it would allow Layton to argue that the NDP caucus is getting things done for working families and seniors.
The purpose of such a Harper-Layton duo (never to be acknowledged as such, of course) is that it could help both the Conservatives and the NDP stave off a rush of Canadians to support Stephane Dion.
I hope, for the sake of the country and for the sake of the NDP, that this is not the course adopted by Jack Layton.
The alternative course for him to take is to join those political forces that want Harper out of office as soon as possible. Layton ought to take a leading role---the leading role---in exposing Harper and the Conservatives for what they are. The one issue on which the NDP has genuinely done this is Afghanistan, where Layton has had the courage to call for a withdrawal of Canadian troops.
The NDP can do this as well on the environment. Everyone who has analyzed the issue knows that Harper will never do anything to slow the full-scale development of the oil sands projects in Alberta. And without slowing oil sands projects, Canada can only continue to increase its greenhouse gas emissions. Jack Layton should say this without equivocation.
On childcare and on insisting that the affluent pay their fair share of taxes, social democrats share no common ground with Conservatives. It ought to be clear to any New Democrat that if Harper were to win a majority of seats in the next election, he would attack Canada’s social state with a vengeance and seek to make a deal with Quebec sovereignists by savaging the power of the federal government.
Layton should make himself the leader of the movement to oust Harper from power. And in doing this, he can also look out for the long-term interests of the NDP. He should call on Stephane Dion to agree that the first step of a new Liberal government (likely a minority government) will be to introduce a scheme of proportional representation that can permanently end the dilemma progressives now have in deciding how to vote. With proportional representation, progressives can vote NDP without having to resort to the fiction that Liberals and Conservatives are peas in a pod.
If Stephane Dion is as progressive and guileless as he would have us believe, Layton should say, let him commit at once to proportional representation.
The next election is going to be a tough one for the NDP, no matter which strategic approach it takes. The party can come out of it with its political position as the leading edge of progressive politics intact, and with a strong caucus. But only if the NDP is unequivocal in making Stephen Harper the target. If Jack Layton goes back to “tweedledum-tweedledee”, not only is his party going to be punished at the polls by progressives who want Harper out, he will be endangering the long-term survival of the NDP.
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Racism: Europe's Disease
Menton, France: Racism remains Europe’s disease. It takes a range of forms from outright exclusionism to the milder practice of labelling everyone according to ethnicity or religion, and making broadly pejorative comments about people based on the above.
In France, the great current national debate is about “belonging and not belonging”. Who is French and who is not? France has had a divided soul on this question dating all the way back to the French Revolution. Much earlier than most other countries, France separated citizenship from ethnicity. In theory at least a citizen of France was French regardless of ethnicity. From this starting point---by the beginning of the 20th century---the concept of a secular educational system developed in which the teaching of religion and the display of religious symbols was banned.
But France has been very leaky around the edges since time immemorial on the creation of a society in which ethnicity and religion are not factors in determining social ranking. Although France was a country that opened its doors to immigrants for many decades---without immigration since 1945, the population of the country would be millions fewer than the current population of 62 million---the prejudice against immigrants has been a powerful, politically salient, issue over the past couple of decades.
The central target of anti-immigrant sentiment is the six million strong community of Muslims, who are mostly of North African origin. Several years ago, the French National Assembly passed legislation banning the wearing of religion symbols by students in public schools. While Muslims were not singled out in the legislation, the visceral political goal of the exercise was to ban the wearing of the voile (head scarf) by Muslim school girls. While secular republicanism was being proclaimed, a line was being drawn between the majority and the Muslim minority.
It is not difficult to encounter the sentiments that keep race, religion and immigration live issues in France. Over the past month in the corner of France where I reside---Menton and the rest of the Cote d’Azur---immigrant bashing has come up in many conversations, no matter what has been the ostensible topic of conversation.
Some immigrants fit in much better than others is the sentiment of one group of older French and Italian and speakers I encountered. This group settles on the idea that Chinese immigrants----of whom there are few in this region---are inoffensive and don’t make trouble, in striking contrast to other immigrant groups. Too many immigrants, one Italian tells me, won’t work in old, established societies such as France and Italy that have a great national culture to protect. In newer societies such as that of Canada, he says, this doesn’t matter so much because Canadians don’t really have such a prized culture. (I’ve encountered this idea many times. Europeans puff themselves up and proclaim their strong identification with a culture that goes back a thousand years and more. They look at me as though I am a naked, barely formed creature as a Canadian with much less to lose than they. Meanwhile, I watch them signing up for wireless Internet, and getting ready to try out their skating skills on the artificial rink being readied for Christmas on the shore of the Mediterranean. Christmas here, where there is no snow, is tarted up with pine trees sprinkled with something that is supposed to look like snow. The big movie here in recent weeks was the new James Bond offering. Apparently cultures can absorb all of these inputs, while the sight of brown faces threatens the supposed connections dating back to the dawn of time.) I meet a middle aged British woman who says she now feels no affinity with London. It is no longer a city where you hear English spoken on the Underground she says. In Central London, all you hear is Russian, she claims.
If these constant ethnic and racial narratives form the background, there is also the foreground where naked racism is on display. A few weeks ago a mob of Paris Saint Germain supporters converged on a McDonald’s in central Paris after a soccer game with an Israeli team. They moved in threateningly on one Israeli supporter and a black man who was nearby. Under threat, the black man, who was an undercover cop drew his weapon and fired, killing one man and wounding another. The policeman has since been cleared of wrong-doing on the grounds of self-defence.
The PSG fans were from an extremist group known as the Kop of Boulogne, whose adherents have attended games. Their practice was to sit together in one section where they chanted racist slogans and picked fights with other fans and supporters of other teams. Following the shooting at the McDonalds, the Kop of Boulogne section of the stands has been shut down and members of the group are banned from the games.
The fact that such racist groups have attached themselves to soccer teams in France, England, Italy and other European countries, bespeaks the wider problem of overt racist dialogue and thuggery.
I’ll have more to say on this question of “belonging and not belonging” in Europe in future posts.
In France, the great current national debate is about “belonging and not belonging”. Who is French and who is not? France has had a divided soul on this question dating all the way back to the French Revolution. Much earlier than most other countries, France separated citizenship from ethnicity. In theory at least a citizen of France was French regardless of ethnicity. From this starting point---by the beginning of the 20th century---the concept of a secular educational system developed in which the teaching of religion and the display of religious symbols was banned.
But France has been very leaky around the edges since time immemorial on the creation of a society in which ethnicity and religion are not factors in determining social ranking. Although France was a country that opened its doors to immigrants for many decades---without immigration since 1945, the population of the country would be millions fewer than the current population of 62 million---the prejudice against immigrants has been a powerful, politically salient, issue over the past couple of decades.
The central target of anti-immigrant sentiment is the six million strong community of Muslims, who are mostly of North African origin. Several years ago, the French National Assembly passed legislation banning the wearing of religion symbols by students in public schools. While Muslims were not singled out in the legislation, the visceral political goal of the exercise was to ban the wearing of the voile (head scarf) by Muslim school girls. While secular republicanism was being proclaimed, a line was being drawn between the majority and the Muslim minority.
It is not difficult to encounter the sentiments that keep race, religion and immigration live issues in France. Over the past month in the corner of France where I reside---Menton and the rest of the Cote d’Azur---immigrant bashing has come up in many conversations, no matter what has been the ostensible topic of conversation.
Some immigrants fit in much better than others is the sentiment of one group of older French and Italian and speakers I encountered. This group settles on the idea that Chinese immigrants----of whom there are few in this region---are inoffensive and don’t make trouble, in striking contrast to other immigrant groups. Too many immigrants, one Italian tells me, won’t work in old, established societies such as France and Italy that have a great national culture to protect. In newer societies such as that of Canada, he says, this doesn’t matter so much because Canadians don’t really have such a prized culture. (I’ve encountered this idea many times. Europeans puff themselves up and proclaim their strong identification with a culture that goes back a thousand years and more. They look at me as though I am a naked, barely formed creature as a Canadian with much less to lose than they. Meanwhile, I watch them signing up for wireless Internet, and getting ready to try out their skating skills on the artificial rink being readied for Christmas on the shore of the Mediterranean. Christmas here, where there is no snow, is tarted up with pine trees sprinkled with something that is supposed to look like snow. The big movie here in recent weeks was the new James Bond offering. Apparently cultures can absorb all of these inputs, while the sight of brown faces threatens the supposed connections dating back to the dawn of time.) I meet a middle aged British woman who says she now feels no affinity with London. It is no longer a city where you hear English spoken on the Underground she says. In Central London, all you hear is Russian, she claims.
If these constant ethnic and racial narratives form the background, there is also the foreground where naked racism is on display. A few weeks ago a mob of Paris Saint Germain supporters converged on a McDonald’s in central Paris after a soccer game with an Israeli team. They moved in threateningly on one Israeli supporter and a black man who was nearby. Under threat, the black man, who was an undercover cop drew his weapon and fired, killing one man and wounding another. The policeman has since been cleared of wrong-doing on the grounds of self-defence.
The PSG fans were from an extremist group known as the Kop of Boulogne, whose adherents have attended games. Their practice was to sit together in one section where they chanted racist slogans and picked fights with other fans and supporters of other teams. Following the shooting at the McDonalds, the Kop of Boulogne section of the stands has been shut down and members of the group are banned from the games.
The fact that such racist groups have attached themselves to soccer teams in France, England, Italy and other European countries, bespeaks the wider problem of overt racist dialogue and thuggery.
I’ll have more to say on this question of “belonging and not belonging” in Europe in future posts.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
December 7, 2006: Sixty-Five Years After Pearl Harbour
Sixty-five years ago today, Japan launched its sneak attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour. The day before the attack, the Soviet army stopped the Germans on the outskirts of Moscow.
On these two days, December 6 and December 7, 1941, the outline of the world order to come over the next half century became dimly visible.
The Americans, who had wrestled with their attitude to Hitler’s war, were suddenly forced into a Pacific and a European war. From the disaster of Pearl Harbour, the American Empire (largely a Western Hemisphere affair until then) was catapulted into a true world empire. And the Soviet Union gave the first convincing demonstration that it would survive Hitler’s invasion.
This week the Baker-Hamilton Report, and Defense Secretary Designate Robert Gates in testimony before Congress, have said that the U.S. is not winning the war in Iraq. Just over a month ago, before the Republicans lost the Congressional elections, this would have been heresy. The Baker-Hamilton Report, not only advocates a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq sometime in 2008, but calls for negotiations with Syria and Iran, leading examples of states that sponsor terror according to Bush administration orthodoxy.
While releasing his report, James Baker, patrician elder statesman from the Bush Sr. administration, reminded the media that it was American policy to talk to foes during the more than four decades of the Cold War.
On December 7, 1941, Americans resolved that they would mobilize their unmatched industrial might to defeat Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (war with Germany came four days later when Hitler declared war on the United States.)
In the United States, the theory that, given a chance, war can yield stellar results, lasted only until the Korean War in the early 1950s. Fought to a standstill by North Korean and Chinese troops, Americans turned to war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower to end the Korean conflict. Eisenhower, the conqueror of Western Europe, enjoyed the standing to negotiate a halt to the fighting. That was something Lyndon Johnson, who was not a war hero did not dare to do a decade later when he inherited the presidency and the Vietnam War. The quagmire and humiliation of Vietnam (ending with Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency in August 1974), inoculated the American people and future administrations against serious wars, that is, until George W. Bush came to office. (George Bush Sr.’s first Gulf War was a cake walk with few American casualties, but he was wise enough not to march to Baghdad.)
September 11, 2001, the terror attack on New York and Washington, was the defining event in the presidency of George W. Bush. It was regularly compared to Pearl Harbour in the weeks following the attack. But September 11 did not turn out the way Pearl Harbour did. While Pearl Harbour provoked the rise of an American global empire, September 11 spawned two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of them going badly for the United States. While the New York Times still calls the Afghan conflict “the good war”, it too will not end in a glorious American victory.
December 7, Pearl Harbour Day, is usually an occasion for Americans to watch war movies and to remind themselves that they must never allow themselves to be taken by surprise by any foe again. This year, two-thirds of a century on from the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt said “would live in infamy”, Americans are contemplating the limits of the utility of force.
On these two days, December 6 and December 7, 1941, the outline of the world order to come over the next half century became dimly visible.
The Americans, who had wrestled with their attitude to Hitler’s war, were suddenly forced into a Pacific and a European war. From the disaster of Pearl Harbour, the American Empire (largely a Western Hemisphere affair until then) was catapulted into a true world empire. And the Soviet Union gave the first convincing demonstration that it would survive Hitler’s invasion.
This week the Baker-Hamilton Report, and Defense Secretary Designate Robert Gates in testimony before Congress, have said that the U.S. is not winning the war in Iraq. Just over a month ago, before the Republicans lost the Congressional elections, this would have been heresy. The Baker-Hamilton Report, not only advocates a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq sometime in 2008, but calls for negotiations with Syria and Iran, leading examples of states that sponsor terror according to Bush administration orthodoxy.
While releasing his report, James Baker, patrician elder statesman from the Bush Sr. administration, reminded the media that it was American policy to talk to foes during the more than four decades of the Cold War.
On December 7, 1941, Americans resolved that they would mobilize their unmatched industrial might to defeat Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (war with Germany came four days later when Hitler declared war on the United States.)
In the United States, the theory that, given a chance, war can yield stellar results, lasted only until the Korean War in the early 1950s. Fought to a standstill by North Korean and Chinese troops, Americans turned to war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower to end the Korean conflict. Eisenhower, the conqueror of Western Europe, enjoyed the standing to negotiate a halt to the fighting. That was something Lyndon Johnson, who was not a war hero did not dare to do a decade later when he inherited the presidency and the Vietnam War. The quagmire and humiliation of Vietnam (ending with Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency in August 1974), inoculated the American people and future administrations against serious wars, that is, until George W. Bush came to office. (George Bush Sr.’s first Gulf War was a cake walk with few American casualties, but he was wise enough not to march to Baghdad.)
September 11, 2001, the terror attack on New York and Washington, was the defining event in the presidency of George W. Bush. It was regularly compared to Pearl Harbour in the weeks following the attack. But September 11 did not turn out the way Pearl Harbour did. While Pearl Harbour provoked the rise of an American global empire, September 11 spawned two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of them going badly for the United States. While the New York Times still calls the Afghan conflict “the good war”, it too will not end in a glorious American victory.
December 7, Pearl Harbour Day, is usually an occasion for Americans to watch war movies and to remind themselves that they must never allow themselves to be taken by surprise by any foe again. This year, two-thirds of a century on from the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt said “would live in infamy”, Americans are contemplating the limits of the utility of force.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Stephane Dion: Next Steps on the Journey
Stephane Dion. Stephane Dion. I have to repeat the name because I’m still getting used to the idea that he is the leader of the Liberal Party.
I was wrong in my take on the race. While, I calculated correctly that in the end Liberals would reject the “shooting star” candidacy of Michael Ignatieff, that led me to the conclusion that either Gerard Kennedy or Bob Rae would win. Wrong.
As author of the Clarity Act, I thought---and still think---that Dion has problems with a very large number of Quebecers. As a former minister of the environment, during a time when the Liberals were doing nothing useful to clean up the environment, I thought---and still think---Dion had baggage. As a former member of the Chretien cabinet, I thought---and still think---that Dion would be the recipient from Stephen Harper of cheap shots at him as a passenger in a vehicle powered by corruption. As a rather scratchy guy, I wondered---and still wonder---how Dion would do in Ontario as Liberal leader.
In the end, it was Michael Ignatieff who did himself in. His missteps on too many issues convinced people that he was not ready to lead a political party. Where he will be in three or four years, no one knows, but he’ll never be Liberal leader. Neither will Bob Rae, who made a better run of it than I thought he would when he announced his candidacy. Rae comes out of the campaign with honour. He enriched the dialogue and he still has much to contribute. Gerard Kennedy may well have done the right thing in going over to Dion at the critical moment. He will have to play a large role in the next election campaign in Ontario and the West if the Liberals are to win.
I’m warily optimistic about the road ahead. The issue in the next campaign will be Stephen Harper and his record. For Dion to win, Harper will have to shoot himself in the foot. And he’s been doing that on a host of issues. While I give him credit for his action on Income Trusts and on Quebec as a nation in Canada (whatever his motives), on childcare, the Kelowna aboriginal development agreement, Afghanistan and the environment, he has been dead wrong.
A cleaned up Liberal Party running on a progressive platform can defeat Harper. And hopefully Jack Layton will add to the progressive momentum by making the Conservatives the target next time out, rather than trying to sink Dion. (Jack’s comment at the last NDP convention that Dion was a man of principle and that for that reason he was highly unlikely to be chosen Liberal leader, will make an all out assault a little more difficult.)
Elizabeth May and the Greens can also contribute to the progressive momentum.
I was wrong in my take on the race. While, I calculated correctly that in the end Liberals would reject the “shooting star” candidacy of Michael Ignatieff, that led me to the conclusion that either Gerard Kennedy or Bob Rae would win. Wrong.
As author of the Clarity Act, I thought---and still think---that Dion has problems with a very large number of Quebecers. As a former minister of the environment, during a time when the Liberals were doing nothing useful to clean up the environment, I thought---and still think---Dion had baggage. As a former member of the Chretien cabinet, I thought---and still think---that Dion would be the recipient from Stephen Harper of cheap shots at him as a passenger in a vehicle powered by corruption. As a rather scratchy guy, I wondered---and still wonder---how Dion would do in Ontario as Liberal leader.
In the end, it was Michael Ignatieff who did himself in. His missteps on too many issues convinced people that he was not ready to lead a political party. Where he will be in three or four years, no one knows, but he’ll never be Liberal leader. Neither will Bob Rae, who made a better run of it than I thought he would when he announced his candidacy. Rae comes out of the campaign with honour. He enriched the dialogue and he still has much to contribute. Gerard Kennedy may well have done the right thing in going over to Dion at the critical moment. He will have to play a large role in the next election campaign in Ontario and the West if the Liberals are to win.
I’m warily optimistic about the road ahead. The issue in the next campaign will be Stephen Harper and his record. For Dion to win, Harper will have to shoot himself in the foot. And he’s been doing that on a host of issues. While I give him credit for his action on Income Trusts and on Quebec as a nation in Canada (whatever his motives), on childcare, the Kelowna aboriginal development agreement, Afghanistan and the environment, he has been dead wrong.
A cleaned up Liberal Party running on a progressive platform can defeat Harper. And hopefully Jack Layton will add to the progressive momentum by making the Conservatives the target next time out, rather than trying to sink Dion. (Jack’s comment at the last NDP convention that Dion was a man of principle and that for that reason he was highly unlikely to be chosen Liberal leader, will make an all out assault a little more difficult.)
Elizabeth May and the Greens can also contribute to the progressive momentum.
Nicolas Sarkozy Serves Up a Helping of Economic Liberalism, Spiced with Law and Order
Menton, France: It surprised no one when Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s Minister of the Interior announced last week that he would be a candidate for the French presidency, in elections to be held next spring. He moved his announcement up a little to counter the positive media run Segolene Royal has been enjoying since she was named as the candidate of the Socialist Party. Sarkozy will have to face competition from other contenders, most notably Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, but he is almost certain to win the nomination of the mainstream right in January.
Sarkozy is a formidable candidate, more than that, he is a political phenomenon. Since he burst on the political scene a couple of decades ago, as a young stalwart who was often seen in the company of Jacques Chirac---the two men are no longer fond of one another---Sarkozy’s hunger for advancement has stood out in every photograph, every interview, every speech. This man schemes for the top job with an appetite that has caused people to scrutinize him with equal helpings of admiration and anxiety. Members of France’s political class often display hubris, large egos and disdain for their competitors whether they are adherents of their own parties or of opposing parties. But none of them has done it with the ferocity and determination of Nicolas Sarkozy.
Sarkozy has preferred the job of Interior Minister, which gives him charge of the police and domestic security, in preference to that of prime minister. In France while presidents command respect, prime ministers do the dirty work, having to take care of the details of daily political life. If there is a disruptive strike, a spike in unemployment, a spate of plant closures, or an outcry among employers that the social charges they pay are too high, it is the prime minister who is roasted night after night on television news shows. While Chirac made it to the Elysee Palace (domicile of French presidents) after serving as prime minister, Sarkozy has been happy to leave the tougher job to de Villepin.
Sarkozy basks in the glory of being France’s tough guy. Whenever a riot occurs, he is there within hours, accompanied by the forces of France’s CRS, the tough national police, who don’t resemble any cop you’ve ever met on a beat. He cloaks himself in the colours of the French Republic, insisting that all will be treated equally, but that anyone who runs afoul of the law will receive stern punishment. Last year’s riots that erupted in the Paris suburbs, and spread to other parts of the country, where youths of North African origin feel deeply alienated from the mainstream culture that marginalizes them, made Sarkozy’s message resonate with a very large part of the French population.
Fear of social unrest and violence that wells up from marginalized and poorly understood segments of the population has fueled right-wing politics in many industrialized countries in recent decades. Without this fuel, Sarkozy would never have emerged as the leading candidate of the mainstream right.
Along with law and order, Sarkozy is running on a program the French call economic “liberalism”, which means a more market driven economy, with a reduction in social support for employees. The program is not original. It is a call to greater competitiveness on the backs of wage and salary earners that is the common political currency of the right everywhere in the industrialized world.
Nor is the combination of law and order and economic liberalism----which we in the English-speaking world call neo-conservatism---particularly original. In the very different social context of the United States, that combination has been the bread and butter of the Republican Party since Barry Goldwater won the party’s presidential nomination in 1964.
All political struggles are arguments about how the state should be structured and whom it should serve. The political right in the West marshals those forces that desire a shift in the balance within capitalism that favours capital against labour. The right uses the law and order issue to dress itself in populist garb. The political left tries to make gains for working people when possible. When the tide is running the other way, the left tries to hang onto the ground gained in the past.
In an age when capital can flow anywhere and there is plenty of cheap labour in Asia and other parts of the world, working people in the West are on the defensive. And their position is weakened further when the cry for law and order resonates.
That is why Sarkozy starts his campaign for the presidency from a position of strength. But he is far from unassailable. For one thing, if his political program is supposed to guarantee social peace, why have social tensions grown in France during his watch as Minister of the Interior?
Moreover, Segolene Royal is a formidable candidate. She speaks plainly about the conditions faced by working people, the marginalized in the suburbs and about the problems of an economy in which jobs are being lost in manufacturing almost every week. She talks tough about crime, but also about addressing the social causes of unrest.
The latest public opinion poll puts Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy dead even, each with fifty per cent support.
Sarkozy is a formidable candidate, more than that, he is a political phenomenon. Since he burst on the political scene a couple of decades ago, as a young stalwart who was often seen in the company of Jacques Chirac---the two men are no longer fond of one another---Sarkozy’s hunger for advancement has stood out in every photograph, every interview, every speech. This man schemes for the top job with an appetite that has caused people to scrutinize him with equal helpings of admiration and anxiety. Members of France’s political class often display hubris, large egos and disdain for their competitors whether they are adherents of their own parties or of opposing parties. But none of them has done it with the ferocity and determination of Nicolas Sarkozy.
Sarkozy has preferred the job of Interior Minister, which gives him charge of the police and domestic security, in preference to that of prime minister. In France while presidents command respect, prime ministers do the dirty work, having to take care of the details of daily political life. If there is a disruptive strike, a spike in unemployment, a spate of plant closures, or an outcry among employers that the social charges they pay are too high, it is the prime minister who is roasted night after night on television news shows. While Chirac made it to the Elysee Palace (domicile of French presidents) after serving as prime minister, Sarkozy has been happy to leave the tougher job to de Villepin.
Sarkozy basks in the glory of being France’s tough guy. Whenever a riot occurs, he is there within hours, accompanied by the forces of France’s CRS, the tough national police, who don’t resemble any cop you’ve ever met on a beat. He cloaks himself in the colours of the French Republic, insisting that all will be treated equally, but that anyone who runs afoul of the law will receive stern punishment. Last year’s riots that erupted in the Paris suburbs, and spread to other parts of the country, where youths of North African origin feel deeply alienated from the mainstream culture that marginalizes them, made Sarkozy’s message resonate with a very large part of the French population.
Fear of social unrest and violence that wells up from marginalized and poorly understood segments of the population has fueled right-wing politics in many industrialized countries in recent decades. Without this fuel, Sarkozy would never have emerged as the leading candidate of the mainstream right.
Along with law and order, Sarkozy is running on a program the French call economic “liberalism”, which means a more market driven economy, with a reduction in social support for employees. The program is not original. It is a call to greater competitiveness on the backs of wage and salary earners that is the common political currency of the right everywhere in the industrialized world.
Nor is the combination of law and order and economic liberalism----which we in the English-speaking world call neo-conservatism---particularly original. In the very different social context of the United States, that combination has been the bread and butter of the Republican Party since Barry Goldwater won the party’s presidential nomination in 1964.
All political struggles are arguments about how the state should be structured and whom it should serve. The political right in the West marshals those forces that desire a shift in the balance within capitalism that favours capital against labour. The right uses the law and order issue to dress itself in populist garb. The political left tries to make gains for working people when possible. When the tide is running the other way, the left tries to hang onto the ground gained in the past.
In an age when capital can flow anywhere and there is plenty of cheap labour in Asia and other parts of the world, working people in the West are on the defensive. And their position is weakened further when the cry for law and order resonates.
That is why Sarkozy starts his campaign for the presidency from a position of strength. But he is far from unassailable. For one thing, if his political program is supposed to guarantee social peace, why have social tensions grown in France during his watch as Minister of the Interior?
Moreover, Segolene Royal is a formidable candidate. She speaks plainly about the conditions faced by working people, the marginalized in the suburbs and about the problems of an economy in which jobs are being lost in manufacturing almost every week. She talks tough about crime, but also about addressing the social causes of unrest.
The latest public opinion poll puts Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy dead even, each with fifty per cent support.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
The Quebec Question: Something Old, Something New
When Stephen Harper announced that he intended to introduce a motion in the House of Commons declaring that Quebec constituted a nation within Canada, this seemingly profound gesture was more about political tactics that about setting right historic wrongs. Harper deftly inserted himself between the Bloc Quebecois and a divided Liberal party on the eve on its leadership convention with his sudden initiative.
What set the dominoes falling in the first place was the position adopted by Michael Ignatieff that the way to resolve the Quebec question was with the formula: “Quebec is my nation; Canada is my country.” To this the Bloc responded with its own initiative---a Commons resolution to declare that Quebec was a nation tout court. Ignatieff’s maladroitly handled foray on the Quebec question led to an effective riposte from leadership rival Bob Rae. When Ignatieff, who has an unerring eye for the maladroit, warned that Canada could face civil war unless the Quebec question was resolved, Rae had him. Only someone who was not around for the Meech Lake and Charlottetown melodramas would reopen this can of worms, said Rae, who presents himself as the man of experience and reasoned calm.
Now Harper has landed the Liberals in a quagmire, or has he? He has forced the Liberals (with a few possible dissenters), as well as the Bloc and the NDP to support his motion. When the Liberals vote for the resolution recognizing Quebec as a nation on Monday, they will concede a tactical victory to Harper. If they had refused, they would have offended the large majority of Quebecers---with their National Assembly and national capital region (around Quebec City)---who have long thought of themselves as constituting a nation.
And what are the Liberals to do when they get to Montreal with the resolution advanced by the Ignatieff camp that would embed the recognition of Quebec as a nation in the constitution, when the conditions for this permit, something the Harper resolution decidedly does not do?
Before assessing the significance of all this, we need to take a brief journey through history to review the evolution of this thorny question.
The idea that French Canadians or Quebecers (both notions were advanced) constitute a nation has a very long pedigree. It had been around for decades by the time the Quiet Revolution got underway in Quebec in the 1960s. The question was transformed during the sixties, a time when nations in Africa and elsewhere were throwing off the chains of colonialism and establishing sovereign states---so that, in theory at least, they would no longer be ruled by the old imperial powers. With the Union Nationale regime out of the way, young Quebec nationalists were proclaiming that Quebec was just as much a nation---with its shared history, common culture, religion and large territory---as the newly independent states that were making their debut.
Many were inspired by the recent Cuban Revolution. I remember student leaders, at the time, who displayed maps of Cuba on the walls of their offices. “If Cuba can do it, why not Quebec with its higher level of development, vaster resources and ample territory?” they asked rhetorically.
From this point, federal political parties tried placing a toe in these frigid waters.
The first federal party to state that Canada was a country made up of “two founding nations” was the NDP at its inaugural convention in Ottawa in 1961. The term “nation” it was carefully explained, was used in a sociological sense, in accordance with the meaning of the French word nation to convey the idea that French speakers in Canada constituted a people. The NDP took this step in the early days of the Quiet Revolution. The gesture was somewhat costly politically. A few distinguished social democrats, long time members of the CCF, such as Eugene Forsey, were so annoyed that they refused to join the fledgling NDP.
After Robert Stanfield became federal Conservative leader in 1967, his party took tentative steps, as well, to declare that Canada was composed of two nations.
What was significant was that both these attempts to recognize the national character of the French fact in Canada---unclear though they were about whether these propositions referred to French Canada as a whole or to Quebec---came from political parties overwhelmingly based in English Canada. These well meaning attempts to reach an understanding with Quebec nationalists were stopped dead in their tracks by the rise of the personality who dominated the era---Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
When Trudeau entered federal politics, he brought with him his deep-seated disdain for nationalism. His interpretation of modern history was that the idea that as a consequence of their unique personalities (cultures), nations have the right to self-determination was the root of much of the world’s misery.
What Quebec needed, he insisted, was the development of the capacities of individual Quebecers. Through education, enterprise and a mastery of technology, Quebecers would make themselves a force to be reckoned with across Canada. Their achievements would win them power in Ottawa in addition to the power they already had in Quebec City and would assure the survival of their language and culture. Quebec had no need of special recognition as the homeland of a nation, he argued. He held solidly to this position in power and out. After leaving office, he railed against the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, deploring any arrangement that would bestow “distinct society” status on Quebec.
While Trudeau’s position never won over more than a few politicians in provincial politics in Quebec, it had a decisive impact in English Canada. His insistence that all provinces must be treated alike and that none had more importance than any other in its role in guaranteeing the linguistic and cultural rights of Francophones won easy ascendancy in English Canada. After all, here was a Quebecer who was keeping Quebec in its place. Trudeau’s new constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms took deeper root in English Canada than in Quebec and when he died he was mourned more deeply in Ontario than in Quebec.
Great though his influence was, Trudeau could not will the Quebec national question away. The insistence that Quebec must be accorded recognition for its collective character, its national character, has remained. A few Francophones like Stephane Dion, the author of the Clarity Act, clung to the Trudeau mantra, notwithstanding Dion’s decision to vote for Harper’s motion. For the rest, federalists or sovereignists, recognition of Quebec as a nation is desired, for the former to win soft nationalists to the federal cause, for the latter as a stepping stone to sovereignty.
Michael Ignatieff must be credited with having revisited a question that endures, while being reproached for having done it badly. For his part, the emptiness of Stephen Harper’s gesture is revealed in the fact that his resolution is like the Cheshire Cat, Quebec gets nothing from it but the smile. The moment Harper offered something substantial to Quebec, his political base in Alberta would rise in condemnation.
The worst thing about the historical legacy of Pierre Trudeau was to convince English Canadians that they need not trouble themselves with the Quebec question. For that reason, at least, the resolution with a smile is worth passing. With genuine recognition of Quebec as a nation, which must come one day, Canada can and will survive, but as a country made up not only of individuals, but also of collectivities, of which Quebec is one. Canadians have nothing to fear from embracing the deep diversity that has always characterized their country.
What set the dominoes falling in the first place was the position adopted by Michael Ignatieff that the way to resolve the Quebec question was with the formula: “Quebec is my nation; Canada is my country.” To this the Bloc responded with its own initiative---a Commons resolution to declare that Quebec was a nation tout court. Ignatieff’s maladroitly handled foray on the Quebec question led to an effective riposte from leadership rival Bob Rae. When Ignatieff, who has an unerring eye for the maladroit, warned that Canada could face civil war unless the Quebec question was resolved, Rae had him. Only someone who was not around for the Meech Lake and Charlottetown melodramas would reopen this can of worms, said Rae, who presents himself as the man of experience and reasoned calm.
Now Harper has landed the Liberals in a quagmire, or has he? He has forced the Liberals (with a few possible dissenters), as well as the Bloc and the NDP to support his motion. When the Liberals vote for the resolution recognizing Quebec as a nation on Monday, they will concede a tactical victory to Harper. If they had refused, they would have offended the large majority of Quebecers---with their National Assembly and national capital region (around Quebec City)---who have long thought of themselves as constituting a nation.
And what are the Liberals to do when they get to Montreal with the resolution advanced by the Ignatieff camp that would embed the recognition of Quebec as a nation in the constitution, when the conditions for this permit, something the Harper resolution decidedly does not do?
Before assessing the significance of all this, we need to take a brief journey through history to review the evolution of this thorny question.
The idea that French Canadians or Quebecers (both notions were advanced) constitute a nation has a very long pedigree. It had been around for decades by the time the Quiet Revolution got underway in Quebec in the 1960s. The question was transformed during the sixties, a time when nations in Africa and elsewhere were throwing off the chains of colonialism and establishing sovereign states---so that, in theory at least, they would no longer be ruled by the old imperial powers. With the Union Nationale regime out of the way, young Quebec nationalists were proclaiming that Quebec was just as much a nation---with its shared history, common culture, religion and large territory---as the newly independent states that were making their debut.
Many were inspired by the recent Cuban Revolution. I remember student leaders, at the time, who displayed maps of Cuba on the walls of their offices. “If Cuba can do it, why not Quebec with its higher level of development, vaster resources and ample territory?” they asked rhetorically.
From this point, federal political parties tried placing a toe in these frigid waters.
The first federal party to state that Canada was a country made up of “two founding nations” was the NDP at its inaugural convention in Ottawa in 1961. The term “nation” it was carefully explained, was used in a sociological sense, in accordance with the meaning of the French word nation to convey the idea that French speakers in Canada constituted a people. The NDP took this step in the early days of the Quiet Revolution. The gesture was somewhat costly politically. A few distinguished social democrats, long time members of the CCF, such as Eugene Forsey, were so annoyed that they refused to join the fledgling NDP.
After Robert Stanfield became federal Conservative leader in 1967, his party took tentative steps, as well, to declare that Canada was composed of two nations.
What was significant was that both these attempts to recognize the national character of the French fact in Canada---unclear though they were about whether these propositions referred to French Canada as a whole or to Quebec---came from political parties overwhelmingly based in English Canada. These well meaning attempts to reach an understanding with Quebec nationalists were stopped dead in their tracks by the rise of the personality who dominated the era---Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
When Trudeau entered federal politics, he brought with him his deep-seated disdain for nationalism. His interpretation of modern history was that the idea that as a consequence of their unique personalities (cultures), nations have the right to self-determination was the root of much of the world’s misery.
What Quebec needed, he insisted, was the development of the capacities of individual Quebecers. Through education, enterprise and a mastery of technology, Quebecers would make themselves a force to be reckoned with across Canada. Their achievements would win them power in Ottawa in addition to the power they already had in Quebec City and would assure the survival of their language and culture. Quebec had no need of special recognition as the homeland of a nation, he argued. He held solidly to this position in power and out. After leaving office, he railed against the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, deploring any arrangement that would bestow “distinct society” status on Quebec.
While Trudeau’s position never won over more than a few politicians in provincial politics in Quebec, it had a decisive impact in English Canada. His insistence that all provinces must be treated alike and that none had more importance than any other in its role in guaranteeing the linguistic and cultural rights of Francophones won easy ascendancy in English Canada. After all, here was a Quebecer who was keeping Quebec in its place. Trudeau’s new constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms took deeper root in English Canada than in Quebec and when he died he was mourned more deeply in Ontario than in Quebec.
Great though his influence was, Trudeau could not will the Quebec national question away. The insistence that Quebec must be accorded recognition for its collective character, its national character, has remained. A few Francophones like Stephane Dion, the author of the Clarity Act, clung to the Trudeau mantra, notwithstanding Dion’s decision to vote for Harper’s motion. For the rest, federalists or sovereignists, recognition of Quebec as a nation is desired, for the former to win soft nationalists to the federal cause, for the latter as a stepping stone to sovereignty.
Michael Ignatieff must be credited with having revisited a question that endures, while being reproached for having done it badly. For his part, the emptiness of Stephen Harper’s gesture is revealed in the fact that his resolution is like the Cheshire Cat, Quebec gets nothing from it but the smile. The moment Harper offered something substantial to Quebec, his political base in Alberta would rise in condemnation.
The worst thing about the historical legacy of Pierre Trudeau was to convince English Canadians that they need not trouble themselves with the Quebec question. For that reason, at least, the resolution with a smile is worth passing. With genuine recognition of Quebec as a nation, which must come one day, Canada can and will survive, but as a country made up not only of individuals, but also of collectivities, of which Quebec is one. Canadians have nothing to fear from embracing the deep diversity that has always characterized their country.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
The Americans are Rethinking their Empire
The stunning defeat of the Republicans in the U.S. Congressional elections two weeks ago has prompted a much needed rethink about the global strategy of the American Empire.
Nearly four years after the invasion of the country by the “coalition of the willing”, Iraq is sinking into civil war. The American occupiers have been reduced to the level of spectators as sectarian violence drives Iraq toward balkanization. Political elders have been called in to seek a graceful way out of Iraq for the Bush administration. Disillusioned with the war and the broader vision of the administration, American voters punished the Republicans when they handed control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats.
More than the Bush administration is in crisis. The American global position is threatened. The U.S. military is overstretched. Iran appears to be the major winner as a consequence of the Iraq debacle, more likely than ever to develop nuclear weapons, and to become a more decisive regional player. North Korea defied the will of the international system with its nuclear test in the autumn of 2006. Washington relies ever more on China, its ultimate global rival, to rein in the regime in Pyongyang.
The financial position of the United States in the global system grows over more imperiled, in need of a major correction. Americans owe more than two trillion dollars more to foreigners than is owed by foreigners to them. More than a trillion dollars in U.S. securities are held by the Chinese and the Japanese. The position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is in doubt.
Pulling back from the details, what snaps into focus is the fact that the American Empire is in crisis. The United States faces problems remarkably similar in kind to those experienced by previous empires.
With the presidency of George W. Bush in tatters, the unilateralist experiment undertaken by the neo-conservative leadership of the United States since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 has been repudiated by the American people. The warrior ethnic promulgated by the authors of the invasion of Iraq----Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others---has landed the United States in a quagmire in some ways more difficult than that of Vietnam. Since 1945, it has been a feature of every American administration to maintain domination over the critical region of the Persian Gulf with its vast petroleum reserves. Losing in Vietnam was humiliating for the United States and led to deep national soul-searching and self-doubt. Losing in Iraq means that American power in a more critical region of the world has been irretrievably checked.
Over the next two years, leading up to the presidential elections of 2008, we will be witness to a fundamental debate, not about whether the American Empire should continue to exist, but about how its strategic position in the world can be salvaged in the aftermath of the Iraq catastrophe.
Nearly four years after the invasion of the country by the “coalition of the willing”, Iraq is sinking into civil war. The American occupiers have been reduced to the level of spectators as sectarian violence drives Iraq toward balkanization. Political elders have been called in to seek a graceful way out of Iraq for the Bush administration. Disillusioned with the war and the broader vision of the administration, American voters punished the Republicans when they handed control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats.
More than the Bush administration is in crisis. The American global position is threatened. The U.S. military is overstretched. Iran appears to be the major winner as a consequence of the Iraq debacle, more likely than ever to develop nuclear weapons, and to become a more decisive regional player. North Korea defied the will of the international system with its nuclear test in the autumn of 2006. Washington relies ever more on China, its ultimate global rival, to rein in the regime in Pyongyang.
The financial position of the United States in the global system grows over more imperiled, in need of a major correction. Americans owe more than two trillion dollars more to foreigners than is owed by foreigners to them. More than a trillion dollars in U.S. securities are held by the Chinese and the Japanese. The position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is in doubt.
Pulling back from the details, what snaps into focus is the fact that the American Empire is in crisis. The United States faces problems remarkably similar in kind to those experienced by previous empires.
With the presidency of George W. Bush in tatters, the unilateralist experiment undertaken by the neo-conservative leadership of the United States since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 has been repudiated by the American people. The warrior ethnic promulgated by the authors of the invasion of Iraq----Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others---has landed the United States in a quagmire in some ways more difficult than that of Vietnam. Since 1945, it has been a feature of every American administration to maintain domination over the critical region of the Persian Gulf with its vast petroleum reserves. Losing in Vietnam was humiliating for the United States and led to deep national soul-searching and self-doubt. Losing in Iraq means that American power in a more critical region of the world has been irretrievably checked.
Over the next two years, leading up to the presidential elections of 2008, we will be witness to a fundamental debate, not about whether the American Empire should continue to exist, but about how its strategic position in the world can be salvaged in the aftermath of the Iraq catastrophe.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Socialist Candidate Segolene Royal: Can She Win the French Presidency?
Menton: France: Segolene Royal, the fifty-three year old politician, has won the nomination to be the Socialist candidate in the French presidential election in the spring of 2007. Against two rivals, the old “elephants” as they were called, Royal won over 60 per cent of the votes cast. Just over 200,000 party members voted in the contest in which individual members decided the issue. She has become the first woman to be in a position to be elected president of the French Republic.
The elephants she defeated were Laurent Fabius, famous for having become France’s youngest prime minister ever when he was named to the position in 1984 by President Francois Mitterrand. The last two decades have not been kind to the boy wonder of the Socialist Party who ended up third in the race with 18 per cent of the vote. The second place candidate, with just over 20 per cent of the vote, was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former economic minister of France, whose career was soiled when he was embroiled in a kick-back scheme to finance the Socialist Party, an offence all too common among French politicians.
The struggle for the nomination was nasty. Supporters of her opponents tried to throw Segolene Royal off her stride with their boisterous behaviour during all-candidates debates. Both Fabius and Strauss-Kahn seemed to believe that the nomination should come to people like them, men with long histories in the French political wars, and not a woman, who appears not to be a member of the country’s political class. But that is where they made their miscalculation. In France, the political class is a species wondrous to behold, made up of men who have been in the limelight for decades. When I came to France in 1986 to spend a year here for the first time, I grew familiar, during evening telecasts, with many of the politicians who are still to be seen today.
Even more than is the case with politicians in other countries, there is a separation between the members of the political class and the people. Politicians, of whatever political stripe, speak in the same tones, with their regional accents stamped out, and with a supply of rhetoric that is stupefying. For those who become big time players, political life goes on forever, as these personalities slowly grow into caricatures of themselves. That is what happened to Fabius and Strauss-Kahn.
Naturally, for their kind and for the aging men who are attached to their kind of politics, there is wonderment and alarm about what is being called Segomania in France. I encountered a well-educated, aging man in Menton today who expressed the view that Royal is an air-head who has managed to charm a large number of people with little more than a winning smile. For many who are in shock, the dismissal of the victorious candidate is a coded attack against the idea that any woman could be ready to become the president of the republic.
In truth Segolene Royal is a very experienced politician, who has served in the cabinet, and who has learned the hard-knuckle game of French politics. But she has managed to do it with a style of communication that is something new in France. While she summons plenty of dignity in her speeches and public appearances, she doesn’t talk like a politician. She speaks with clarity about the problems of working people, women and minorities in France in a way the country has not seen. She communicates easily with people, whether they are homeless, those without papers to remain in the country, or are members of France’s economic and political elites. She talks of a new and more inclusive French society in a way that calls up a vision of the future, in sharp contrast to the elephants in her party who seemed mired in the wars of the past. She generates hope like no candidate of the left since Francois Mitterrand in his greatest days.
Now she faces the great struggle that will be decided in the months to come---the battle, almost certainly against Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, for the presidency. While the right has not yet picked its candidate, Sarkozy is presumed by almost everyone to be the standard-bearer.
Like Royal, he does not communicate in the orotund tones of the political class. He speaks to his adherents with a spare and pugnacious directness. His appeal is to those who are insecure, whatever their rank in French society---insecure about the effects of globalization, about the rising visibility of North Africans and Muslims in France, and about the capacity of France to count for something in the world of the 21st century. His stock-in-trade is fear, which is why he is always on the scene within hours of a social outburst in one of the dispiriting suburbs of the great French cities.
There is an almost unnatural energy about Sarkozy as he strides to a microphone with gendarmes in the background. He is the little tough guy who is promising to straighten this country out. It scarcely matters to his adherents that he is wedded to the liberal economics (we would call these views neo-con) that visits the tempest of globalization on businesspeople and workers alike.
France is facing one of the major political turning points of its history. For over two centuries, the forces of expanding democracy and of reaction have been in contention, sometimes with one side in the ascendancy, sometimes the other. The trump card in Sarkozy’s frenetic crusade of the right is race. While he codes his message in a way that the right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the Front National, does not, he is clear enough in what he intends. Sarkozy promises to put the trouble makers in their place, back into the shadows, where they cannot trouble the citizenry at large. The mailed-fist of the uncompromising state would be his weapon. And he has shown that he knows how to use it.
Two alternative political courses are in view, the one that leads to a broader democracy and the other that leads to repression.
The elephants she defeated were Laurent Fabius, famous for having become France’s youngest prime minister ever when he was named to the position in 1984 by President Francois Mitterrand. The last two decades have not been kind to the boy wonder of the Socialist Party who ended up third in the race with 18 per cent of the vote. The second place candidate, with just over 20 per cent of the vote, was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former economic minister of France, whose career was soiled when he was embroiled in a kick-back scheme to finance the Socialist Party, an offence all too common among French politicians.
The struggle for the nomination was nasty. Supporters of her opponents tried to throw Segolene Royal off her stride with their boisterous behaviour during all-candidates debates. Both Fabius and Strauss-Kahn seemed to believe that the nomination should come to people like them, men with long histories in the French political wars, and not a woman, who appears not to be a member of the country’s political class. But that is where they made their miscalculation. In France, the political class is a species wondrous to behold, made up of men who have been in the limelight for decades. When I came to France in 1986 to spend a year here for the first time, I grew familiar, during evening telecasts, with many of the politicians who are still to be seen today.
Even more than is the case with politicians in other countries, there is a separation between the members of the political class and the people. Politicians, of whatever political stripe, speak in the same tones, with their regional accents stamped out, and with a supply of rhetoric that is stupefying. For those who become big time players, political life goes on forever, as these personalities slowly grow into caricatures of themselves. That is what happened to Fabius and Strauss-Kahn.
Naturally, for their kind and for the aging men who are attached to their kind of politics, there is wonderment and alarm about what is being called Segomania in France. I encountered a well-educated, aging man in Menton today who expressed the view that Royal is an air-head who has managed to charm a large number of people with little more than a winning smile. For many who are in shock, the dismissal of the victorious candidate is a coded attack against the idea that any woman could be ready to become the president of the republic.
In truth Segolene Royal is a very experienced politician, who has served in the cabinet, and who has learned the hard-knuckle game of French politics. But she has managed to do it with a style of communication that is something new in France. While she summons plenty of dignity in her speeches and public appearances, she doesn’t talk like a politician. She speaks with clarity about the problems of working people, women and minorities in France in a way the country has not seen. She communicates easily with people, whether they are homeless, those without papers to remain in the country, or are members of France’s economic and political elites. She talks of a new and more inclusive French society in a way that calls up a vision of the future, in sharp contrast to the elephants in her party who seemed mired in the wars of the past. She generates hope like no candidate of the left since Francois Mitterrand in his greatest days.
Now she faces the great struggle that will be decided in the months to come---the battle, almost certainly against Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, for the presidency. While the right has not yet picked its candidate, Sarkozy is presumed by almost everyone to be the standard-bearer.
Like Royal, he does not communicate in the orotund tones of the political class. He speaks to his adherents with a spare and pugnacious directness. His appeal is to those who are insecure, whatever their rank in French society---insecure about the effects of globalization, about the rising visibility of North Africans and Muslims in France, and about the capacity of France to count for something in the world of the 21st century. His stock-in-trade is fear, which is why he is always on the scene within hours of a social outburst in one of the dispiriting suburbs of the great French cities.
There is an almost unnatural energy about Sarkozy as he strides to a microphone with gendarmes in the background. He is the little tough guy who is promising to straighten this country out. It scarcely matters to his adherents that he is wedded to the liberal economics (we would call these views neo-con) that visits the tempest of globalization on businesspeople and workers alike.
France is facing one of the major political turning points of its history. For over two centuries, the forces of expanding democracy and of reaction have been in contention, sometimes with one side in the ascendancy, sometimes the other. The trump card in Sarkozy’s frenetic crusade of the right is race. While he codes his message in a way that the right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the Front National, does not, he is clear enough in what he intends. Sarkozy promises to put the trouble makers in their place, back into the shadows, where they cannot trouble the citizenry at large. The mailed-fist of the uncompromising state would be his weapon. And he has shown that he knows how to use it.
Two alternative political courses are in view, the one that leads to a broader democracy and the other that leads to repression.
Monday, November 13, 2006
Segolene Versus Sarko
For the next five months, my blog will be coming to you from Menton, France. I’ll be there working on two books, one on a comparison of the American Empire with its predecessors, to be published by Penguin Books next fall. The other book, titled Oil, is also to appear next fall in the Groundwork Guide Series.
(I’ll be puttering away, as well, on a book I’ve been writing for fifteen years on the wacky life of the exile in France. It’s working title is Jamais Provence, and I haven’t yet pitched it to a publisher.)
I will post regularly from Menton on my usual subjects, and to these I’ll add observations about French and European society, especially on the hugely important issue of “belonging and not belonging”, how Europeans are coping with multi-cultural challenges.
I’ll write about the upcoming Presidential election in France. At present the leading candidate for the Socialists is Segolene Royal. The front-runner for the right is Nicolas Sarkozy, the law and order, minister of the interior, who shows up within hours on the scene of any protest from minorities against their lot in France, driving home his message that with him in the Elysee Palace, security will be the leading priority.
I also plan to write a series of posts arguing the case for the withdrawal of Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan.
In a few days, I’ll be checking in from Menton, as soon as France Telecom sets up my Internet access.
(I’ll be puttering away, as well, on a book I’ve been writing for fifteen years on the wacky life of the exile in France. It’s working title is Jamais Provence, and I haven’t yet pitched it to a publisher.)
I will post regularly from Menton on my usual subjects, and to these I’ll add observations about French and European society, especially on the hugely important issue of “belonging and not belonging”, how Europeans are coping with multi-cultural challenges.
I’ll write about the upcoming Presidential election in France. At present the leading candidate for the Socialists is Segolene Royal. The front-runner for the right is Nicolas Sarkozy, the law and order, minister of the interior, who shows up within hours on the scene of any protest from minorities against their lot in France, driving home his message that with him in the Elysee Palace, security will be the leading priority.
I also plan to write a series of posts arguing the case for the withdrawal of Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan.
In a few days, I’ll be checking in from Menton, as soon as France Telecom sets up my Internet access.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
We Don't Need Hot Air From Jack Layton
Canada is emitting enough greenhouse gases without additional hot air from NDP leader Jack Layton.
At the beginning of November, Jack Layton threw a parliamentary life-line to Stephen Harper. He met with the prime minister after threatening that the NDP was prepared to introduce a motion of non-confidence in the Conservatives if they did not show flexibility on the issue of climate change. The maneuver was designed to resemble the NDP’s ultimatum to Paul Martin’s government in 2005 on the issue of the Liberal budget.
The difference was that the challenge to the Liberals bore fruit. Real changes were made to the budget that benefited ordinary Canadians. The ultimatum to Harper won’t end up reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by one ton.
Following his meeting with Layton, Stephen Harper announced that the government would send its Clean Air Act to a parliamentary committee prior to second reading. The NDP backed away from its threatened confidence motion and sent out a release headlined: “NDP achieves victory on climate change.”
“This breaks the parliamentary logjam,” declared Jack Layton. “What has been achieved over the last 48 hours means that this minority parliament will move forward on vital climate change legislation. This is a victory for all Canadians.”
Just what victory has been achieved “for all Canadians”?
A recent public opinion poll released by the CBC and Environics revealed that 71 per cent of Canadians believe the Conservatives’ Clean Air Act is not tough enough. On the issue of climate change, the Conservatives have become a bad joke. Defending the government’s phony mid century targets for achieving emission reductions has made Environment Minister Rona Ambrose a national embarrassment as she takes to the world stage at the UN conference on climate change in Nairobi.
So along comes Jack Layton to ease Stephen Harper’s pain. He meets with the prime minister, declares victory and today he fails to show up with Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe and Interim Liberal Leader Bill Graham at a joint news conference to condemn the Conservatives for their disgraceful environmental policy.
Instead of forging a united parliamentary opposition to Stephen Harper on climate change, the NDP plays its own game, whose cynical goal is all-too-obvious. The NDP hopes to make Harper look better than he really is, and wants to make the Liberals look worse than they are now prepared to be. This has everything to do with setting the stage for Jack Layton’s next election campaign and nothing to do with achieving real action on climate change.
Everybody knows that the late Liberal government had an abominable environmental record during its thirteen years in office. But anybody who has been watching the Liberal leadership contest knows that the four leading candidates are all committed to serious action on climate change. There has been a sea-change in the urgency with which Canadians now approach this question. If Stephen Harper is driven from office in the next election, climate change will be the first item on the new government’s agenda, whoever is installed at 24 Sussex Drive.
Meanwhile Stephen Harper, whose image is being air-brushed by Jack Layton, is the one national leader who is solidly committed to doing nothing on greenhouse gas emissions. Has the NDP forgotten that the Conservatives are the party of, by and for Big Oil? This is the party that advertises Canada as the most secure source of petroleum for the United States. Stephen Harper and his friends in the oil patch are dedicated to ramping up the production of oil from the Alberta oil sands as rapidly as possible. There are billions of dollars to be made from this.
Present oil sands technology involves the use of clean natural gas and enormous supplies of water to produce dirty oil. While oil sands production is transforming much of northern Alberta into a lobotomized lunarscape, greenhouse gas emissions are skyrocketing. The plain fact is that as long as this country fails to face up to the consequences of its position as the number one external supplier of oil to the U.S., it cannot play a positive role on the issue of climate change.
Stephen Harper may shift his rhetoric a little to help the NDP keep its share of the non-Conservative vote, but he will never budge on his commitment to Big Oil.
Who is Jack Layton trying to kid?
At the beginning of November, Jack Layton threw a parliamentary life-line to Stephen Harper. He met with the prime minister after threatening that the NDP was prepared to introduce a motion of non-confidence in the Conservatives if they did not show flexibility on the issue of climate change. The maneuver was designed to resemble the NDP’s ultimatum to Paul Martin’s government in 2005 on the issue of the Liberal budget.
The difference was that the challenge to the Liberals bore fruit. Real changes were made to the budget that benefited ordinary Canadians. The ultimatum to Harper won’t end up reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by one ton.
Following his meeting with Layton, Stephen Harper announced that the government would send its Clean Air Act to a parliamentary committee prior to second reading. The NDP backed away from its threatened confidence motion and sent out a release headlined: “NDP achieves victory on climate change.”
“This breaks the parliamentary logjam,” declared Jack Layton. “What has been achieved over the last 48 hours means that this minority parliament will move forward on vital climate change legislation. This is a victory for all Canadians.”
Just what victory has been achieved “for all Canadians”?
A recent public opinion poll released by the CBC and Environics revealed that 71 per cent of Canadians believe the Conservatives’ Clean Air Act is not tough enough. On the issue of climate change, the Conservatives have become a bad joke. Defending the government’s phony mid century targets for achieving emission reductions has made Environment Minister Rona Ambrose a national embarrassment as she takes to the world stage at the UN conference on climate change in Nairobi.
So along comes Jack Layton to ease Stephen Harper’s pain. He meets with the prime minister, declares victory and today he fails to show up with Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe and Interim Liberal Leader Bill Graham at a joint news conference to condemn the Conservatives for their disgraceful environmental policy.
Instead of forging a united parliamentary opposition to Stephen Harper on climate change, the NDP plays its own game, whose cynical goal is all-too-obvious. The NDP hopes to make Harper look better than he really is, and wants to make the Liberals look worse than they are now prepared to be. This has everything to do with setting the stage for Jack Layton’s next election campaign and nothing to do with achieving real action on climate change.
Everybody knows that the late Liberal government had an abominable environmental record during its thirteen years in office. But anybody who has been watching the Liberal leadership contest knows that the four leading candidates are all committed to serious action on climate change. There has been a sea-change in the urgency with which Canadians now approach this question. If Stephen Harper is driven from office in the next election, climate change will be the first item on the new government’s agenda, whoever is installed at 24 Sussex Drive.
Meanwhile Stephen Harper, whose image is being air-brushed by Jack Layton, is the one national leader who is solidly committed to doing nothing on greenhouse gas emissions. Has the NDP forgotten that the Conservatives are the party of, by and for Big Oil? This is the party that advertises Canada as the most secure source of petroleum for the United States. Stephen Harper and his friends in the oil patch are dedicated to ramping up the production of oil from the Alberta oil sands as rapidly as possible. There are billions of dollars to be made from this.
Present oil sands technology involves the use of clean natural gas and enormous supplies of water to produce dirty oil. While oil sands production is transforming much of northern Alberta into a lobotomized lunarscape, greenhouse gas emissions are skyrocketing. The plain fact is that as long as this country fails to face up to the consequences of its position as the number one external supplier of oil to the U.S., it cannot play a positive role on the issue of climate change.
Stephen Harper may shift his rhetoric a little to help the NDP keep its share of the non-Conservative vote, but he will never budge on his commitment to Big Oil.
Who is Jack Layton trying to kid?
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Veiling Intolerance in Liberal Discourse
On its surface, the debate in Europe, and to a lesser extent in Canada, about Muslim women wearing the veil appears to be a relatively harmless affair. Please take off the veil, Jack Straw, the former British foreign minister, urges the few women in his constituency who wear it, when they visit his office. That will allow for a more successful conversation, and there will be another woman present.
Then British Prime Minister Tony Blair weighs in, calling the niqab a “mark of separation” which makes non-Muslims “uncomfortable”. Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi says similar things.
What is noteworthy is the spectacle of very powerful male politicians publicly criticizing a small number of women, who are hardly members of their countries’ elites, for what they choose to wear. The criticism is made palatable because it is veiled (pun intended) in liberal discourse. These leaders are inviting the women wearing the niqab to abandon this mark of separation from the rest of society. After all, we are reminded by many of those who have written on the issue, the niqab is a symbol of the repression of women in highly intolerant societies.
What could be more benign than the invitation of oppressed women to stride into liberal enlightenment through the removal of a strip of cloth?
In all dialogues of this sort, it is crucial to keep in mind the power relations among those who are doing the talking. What I see is something far from benign. A great deal of pressure is being brought to bear on a few women for reasons that extend well beyond the niqab. After all, if politicians and journalists in the West wanted to draw critical attention to groups of people wearing costumes that set them apart, that convey a message of separateness, they could point out Old Order Mennonites, Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, or maybe even the outfits worn by the Pope and the Dalai Lama.
What gives the narrative about the niqab its traction in the media is that it is the thin edge of the wedge in a critique of Muslims in general, not just those who wear the niqab. The question that is being asked, in a highly coded way to be sure, is whether Muslims constitute an alien presence in our society. Can they be relied upon to fit in as immigrants, to assimilate and become members of our society? Or will they be a dangerous, separate people, and even a source of terrorist recruits for attacks on us, with repeats of attacks like the suicide bombings in London in the summer of 2005?
As a society largely of immigrants, more or less recent, Canadians have been down this road before. In Ontario, in the 1850s and 1860s, following a wave of Irish Catholic immigrants in the wake of the Irish famine, people questioned whether the Irish would be unruly, un-British, a mass that could never adopt our ways. Would they join with the Fenian terrorists who were plotting to attack Canada (and actually did attack) in a campaign to liberate Ireland from British rule?
In the early 20th century, people wondered whether Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish migrants to Winnipeg would assimilate or would they try to plot a Bolshevik revolution, as some thought they had in the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. In recent decades, Chinese immigrants have been similarly subjected to suspicion and doubt. Were the Chinese residents of Richmond B.C., who shopped at malls where the signs were almost all in Chinese, going to become real Canadians? Or had we encountered the mass that would never be like us?
And, with tragic consequences, Europeans have been down this road before. When Russian and Polish Jews, many of them in costumes that made them appear alien to Europeans, emigrated in large numbers to Vienna, Berlin and other centres, there was an outcry against them. Much of the dialogue bore a resemblance to the present one about the niqab. Were these newcomers representatives of a primitive past that enlightened Europeans had put behind them?
Not surprisingly, some of the highly assimilated Jews in Germany and Austria found the newcomers something of an embarrassment and feared that their appearance could stoke the flames of prejudice against all Jews. We have seen a similar, and understandable, response among some Muslims in the West to the wearing of the niqab.
People have a perfect right, of course, to subject the streams of thought within particular religions to scrutiny and to critique their social implications.
When the powerful within a society begin a narrative of the kind we have seen about the niqab, however, that is not what is going on. Muslims are being set apart as the “other”. Though we may pride ourselves on our liberalism, in our civilization when people are set apart and critiqued as not really belonging in our midst, the consequences can be terrible.
(A slightly edited version of this post ran in today’s Globe and Mail.)
Then British Prime Minister Tony Blair weighs in, calling the niqab a “mark of separation” which makes non-Muslims “uncomfortable”. Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi says similar things.
What is noteworthy is the spectacle of very powerful male politicians publicly criticizing a small number of women, who are hardly members of their countries’ elites, for what they choose to wear. The criticism is made palatable because it is veiled (pun intended) in liberal discourse. These leaders are inviting the women wearing the niqab to abandon this mark of separation from the rest of society. After all, we are reminded by many of those who have written on the issue, the niqab is a symbol of the repression of women in highly intolerant societies.
What could be more benign than the invitation of oppressed women to stride into liberal enlightenment through the removal of a strip of cloth?
In all dialogues of this sort, it is crucial to keep in mind the power relations among those who are doing the talking. What I see is something far from benign. A great deal of pressure is being brought to bear on a few women for reasons that extend well beyond the niqab. After all, if politicians and journalists in the West wanted to draw critical attention to groups of people wearing costumes that set them apart, that convey a message of separateness, they could point out Old Order Mennonites, Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, or maybe even the outfits worn by the Pope and the Dalai Lama.
What gives the narrative about the niqab its traction in the media is that it is the thin edge of the wedge in a critique of Muslims in general, not just those who wear the niqab. The question that is being asked, in a highly coded way to be sure, is whether Muslims constitute an alien presence in our society. Can they be relied upon to fit in as immigrants, to assimilate and become members of our society? Or will they be a dangerous, separate people, and even a source of terrorist recruits for attacks on us, with repeats of attacks like the suicide bombings in London in the summer of 2005?
As a society largely of immigrants, more or less recent, Canadians have been down this road before. In Ontario, in the 1850s and 1860s, following a wave of Irish Catholic immigrants in the wake of the Irish famine, people questioned whether the Irish would be unruly, un-British, a mass that could never adopt our ways. Would they join with the Fenian terrorists who were plotting to attack Canada (and actually did attack) in a campaign to liberate Ireland from British rule?
In the early 20th century, people wondered whether Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish migrants to Winnipeg would assimilate or would they try to plot a Bolshevik revolution, as some thought they had in the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. In recent decades, Chinese immigrants have been similarly subjected to suspicion and doubt. Were the Chinese residents of Richmond B.C., who shopped at malls where the signs were almost all in Chinese, going to become real Canadians? Or had we encountered the mass that would never be like us?
And, with tragic consequences, Europeans have been down this road before. When Russian and Polish Jews, many of them in costumes that made them appear alien to Europeans, emigrated in large numbers to Vienna, Berlin and other centres, there was an outcry against them. Much of the dialogue bore a resemblance to the present one about the niqab. Were these newcomers representatives of a primitive past that enlightened Europeans had put behind them?
Not surprisingly, some of the highly assimilated Jews in Germany and Austria found the newcomers something of an embarrassment and feared that their appearance could stoke the flames of prejudice against all Jews. We have seen a similar, and understandable, response among some Muslims in the West to the wearing of the niqab.
People have a perfect right, of course, to subject the streams of thought within particular religions to scrutiny and to critique their social implications.
When the powerful within a society begin a narrative of the kind we have seen about the niqab, however, that is not what is going on. Muslims are being set apart as the “other”. Though we may pride ourselves on our liberalism, in our civilization when people are set apart and critiqued as not really belonging in our midst, the consequences can be terrible.
(A slightly edited version of this post ran in today’s Globe and Mail.)
Friday, October 20, 2006
The American Empire: In Need of New Management
Putting aside the issue of whether an empire is a desirable form of political and social organization, there is the not inconsiderable question of whether the empire is competently run. Many of those who have made the case that the American Empire plays a positive, indeed essential, role in the international system, pose the challenge: “Would you rather live in an empire run by anyone else?”
Whatever one’s existential response to the abstract query, let me make the far from abstract case that, at present, the American Empire is being atrociously mismanaged.
The case for empire is that it takes a dominating power to preside over the global economy, to keep the peace and to ensure that the other players in the system abide by its rules and norms. The empire is supposed to be a force for stability and security. To use the jargon, the dominating power of the day---in our case the American Empire---is expected to play the part of a “status quo” power. Amongst its tasks, it is expected to keep “revisionist powers”, those countries seeking a change in the global system, in check. If a transformation must occur, such as the rise of China, the empire is supposed to manage the change so that it does not threaten the overall stability of the system.
The American Empire, under the current management of the Bush administration, is ineptly handling two huge sets of questions: geopolitical issues; and the economic management of the system.
On the paramount issue of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the U.S. has bungled almost imaginably. The principal instrument to block non-nuclear states from developing nuclear arsenals is the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Along with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (abrogated by the Bush administration), this treaty is the keystone in the non-proliferation structure.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty is a two-sided affair. Non-nuclear powers have signed on to it, pledging that they will not develop a nuclear arsenal, in return for an undertaking by the nuclear powers not to use nuclear weapons against them, and a further undertaking that the nuclear powers will dismantle their stock of nuclear weapons over the long term.
Far from upholding the system that has been erected to prevent the further proliferation of nuclear weapons, the United States has undertaken repeated assaults against that system. The U.S. refuses to endorse the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on the grounds that it intends to develop new generations of nuclear weapons, fine-tuned for such purposes as bunker-busting (small weapons that can obliterate underground facilities), and may need to test nukes in the future. That intention, at least implicitly, violates the American undertaking to dismantle its own stock of nuclear weapons. In addition, the U.S. abrogation of the ABM Treaty opens the door for the U.S. to shield itself against a limited nuclear attack, thus reinforcing its capacity to undertake a nuclear first strike against states with small nuclear arsenals without having to fear effective retaliation.
Further exacerbating the situation, in his State of the Union address in January 2002, President George W. Bush concocted the term “Axis of Evil” to put the governments of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea on a “wanted list” of rogue regimes that Washington intended to confront. Just over a year later, the U.S. invaded Iraq on the grounds that it possessed weapons of mass destruction (which it did not), and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. The message to the governments of Iran and North Korea was loud and clear---Washington was prepared to back its desire for regime change with military action. Possession of nuclear weapons, while no guarantee against a U.S. assault, was the prudent course to take.
Governments in non-nuclear states have closely watched the behaviour of the U.S. vis a vis India, Pakistan, and Israel, all non-signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India and Pakistan have tested nuclear weapons. Following a period of official displeasure with India over its development of nuclear weapons, the Bush administration reached a deal with the Indian government in 2006, opening the way for the transfer of civilian nuclear material to that country, even though India remained outside the non-proliferation regime. Although Israel refuses to confirm its status as a nuclear power, it is an open secret that the country has developed a large nuclear arsenal, totaling as many as two hundred weapons. The lesson is that the United States is prepared to wink at those who escape the non-proliferation regime and will come to terms with “facts on the ground”.
While Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it claims the right to enrich uranium for what it asserts is a civilian nuclear energy program. Insisting that Teheran plans to develop nuclear weapons, the Bush administration has succeeded in pressing the UN Security Council to demand that Iran stop enriching uranium. North Korea, a signatory to the treaty, is the only country to have withdrawn from the treaty, a step it took in 2003. With its recent nuclear test, immediately condemned by the UN Security Council, Pyongyang has made the bet that it will hold a stronger hand with nukes than without them.
The Bush administration’s refusal to hold one-on-one talks with North Korea and to consider a non-aggression pact with that country in return for the dismantling of its nuclear program, has backed that paranoid regime ever further into a corner.
On nuclear weapons, the American insistence on retaining a completely free hand for itself has undermined a regime in which the U.S. was in the strongest position. Washington’s unwillingness to place any real limits on itself and its erratic behaviour toward potential nuclear states, has made the whole world, including the United States, less safe.
Meanwhile, the American position in Iraq, the “Axis of Evil” country it did invade, has become so perilous, that elites in Washington are now plotting a graceful way out of the civil-war torn country.
Matching its geo-political mismanagement has been the Bush administration’s disastrous handling of the global economic system and the position of the United States in it. There is an indissoluble link between these two aspects of the growing crisis of the American Empire.
As has been the case with earlier empires, America faces the problem of imperial overstretch. For the Americans, convincing their upper classes to submit to a level of taxation required to sustain the empire is a daunting problem. Ruling classes never submit easily to the idea of paying their way. But some have done a better job of it than others. The British ruling class, for instance, with its quasi-aristocratic background and its schooling in traditional toryism, proved more capable of taking the long view than has been the case with the Americans. The American ruling class, by contrast, has lacked the ideological and class cohesion that served the British ruling class so well. Moreover, the American ruling class has been deeply attached to the liberal idea of the small state. This idea, whose practical benefit has been low taxes for them, makes it extremely difficult for political leaders to convince the rich in America to pay enough to safeguard their position for the long term.
The segment of the American political elite that most fervently favours a higher military budget for the United States is also the wing of the American leadership that is mostly strongly opposed to high taxes. Since George W. Bush was sworn in as president in January 2001, this militarist wing of the U.S. leadership has held the reins of power, controlling not only the White House, but since the Congressional elections of 2002, both houses of Congress as well. The Bush administration carried out invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, while simultaneously pushing tax cuts through Congress, tax cuts whose benefits went disproportionately to the wealthy. As a consequence of its policies during a period of reduced economic growth, the Bush administration has saddled the United States with record high government deficits. The soaring deficits have come just a few years after the Clinton administration achieved the first balanced budget and then surplus in many years. The result is that the federal government of the United States is plunging into debt, a debt on which interest must be paid. A high proportion of the treasury bills sold to finance the U.S. debt are held by foreigners, approximately two trillion dollars of this by the central banks of Japan and China.
The position of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency is becoming ever more precarious. The Euro has been in the wings for years as a potential alternative reserve currency and even though the economic performance of the leading Euro countries has been sluggish, the countries of the Euro zone have a rock solid current account performance. For countries highly dependent on selling raw materials, particularly crude oil and natural gas, the temptation to dominate their sales in Euros rather than in depreciating dollars has been growing ever stronger. If the U.S. dollar was to lose its position as global reserve currency, either partially or generally, it would hit the American economy with price shocks in the broad area of primary products, most importantly petroleum. In addition, the freedom of the U.S. to run a continuous current account deficit would be sharply curtailed if the Euro were to seriously challenge the dollar as a reserve currency. This is because major central banks and corporations would be bound to shift their holdings to a considerable extent from dollars to Euros, a development that would accelerate the downward pressure on the American dollar and would force a sharp hike in U.S. interest rates to prevent a flight of foreign capital from U.S. securities.
While other major countries would have a strong interest in managing such a transition from dollar to Euro as responsibly as possible, the risk of a severe crisis could not be ruled out. Not since the end of the First World War has the world seen a transition of the kind that could be in the offing. Moreover, the world economy is enormously more global in its functioning than it was eight or nine decades ago, with capital and currency transfers from market to market dwarfing those made in the days when the British pound was floundering and the dollar was taking its place.
Both the geopolitical and the economic aspects of the crisis of the American Empire are forcing a basic reconsideration of global strategy onto the American political agenda.
Everywhere one looks, the United States faces a series of interrelated problems. While the American Empire is by no means in imminent peril of collapse, it could be forced to pull back from some of its more exposed positions in particular in the Middle East. In the process, some influential voices in the U.S. will opt for moving over to a more multilateral strategy, bringing other major powers into its confidence, so that the burdens of empire can be shared with the Western Europeans, the Japanese and others. Accepting the restraints that would accompany multilateralism would be no easy thing for the American leadership, certainly the neo-conservative leadership that has been at the helm under George W. Bush. For the neo-conservatives, sharing power with the Europeans and the Japanese has been anathema, a sure way to blunt the effectiveness of American power in sensitive regions of the world. Despite their rapidly waning credibility, the neo-conservatives can be expected to insist on staying the course in the Middle East and Central Asia as well as in East Asia. To win they will have to count on molding a more martial culture in the United States, one in which both the elites and the people are willing to accept the long-term burdens of empire.
The challenges that now confront the American Empire are similar to the problems faced by previous empires---problems of imperial overstretch and of the challenge of fashioning legitimacy for their rule. What makes it especially difficult for the American political leadership to cope with these challenges is the extent to which the norms of American political culture confuse the issues and make it difficult to confront them directly. It is no easy thing to plan for the long-term viability of an empire in a political culture in which the very existence of the empire needs to be constantly denied, at least in public discourse.
Atrocious management has pushed the American Empire into a major crisis less than two decades after the expiration of its Soviet rival. It is almost unimaginable that the fruits of victory in the Cold War could have been so rapidly squandered.
Whatever one’s existential response to the abstract query, let me make the far from abstract case that, at present, the American Empire is being atrociously mismanaged.
The case for empire is that it takes a dominating power to preside over the global economy, to keep the peace and to ensure that the other players in the system abide by its rules and norms. The empire is supposed to be a force for stability and security. To use the jargon, the dominating power of the day---in our case the American Empire---is expected to play the part of a “status quo” power. Amongst its tasks, it is expected to keep “revisionist powers”, those countries seeking a change in the global system, in check. If a transformation must occur, such as the rise of China, the empire is supposed to manage the change so that it does not threaten the overall stability of the system.
The American Empire, under the current management of the Bush administration, is ineptly handling two huge sets of questions: geopolitical issues; and the economic management of the system.
On the paramount issue of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the U.S. has bungled almost imaginably. The principal instrument to block non-nuclear states from developing nuclear arsenals is the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Along with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (abrogated by the Bush administration), this treaty is the keystone in the non-proliferation structure.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty is a two-sided affair. Non-nuclear powers have signed on to it, pledging that they will not develop a nuclear arsenal, in return for an undertaking by the nuclear powers not to use nuclear weapons against them, and a further undertaking that the nuclear powers will dismantle their stock of nuclear weapons over the long term.
Far from upholding the system that has been erected to prevent the further proliferation of nuclear weapons, the United States has undertaken repeated assaults against that system. The U.S. refuses to endorse the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on the grounds that it intends to develop new generations of nuclear weapons, fine-tuned for such purposes as bunker-busting (small weapons that can obliterate underground facilities), and may need to test nukes in the future. That intention, at least implicitly, violates the American undertaking to dismantle its own stock of nuclear weapons. In addition, the U.S. abrogation of the ABM Treaty opens the door for the U.S. to shield itself against a limited nuclear attack, thus reinforcing its capacity to undertake a nuclear first strike against states with small nuclear arsenals without having to fear effective retaliation.
Further exacerbating the situation, in his State of the Union address in January 2002, President George W. Bush concocted the term “Axis of Evil” to put the governments of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea on a “wanted list” of rogue regimes that Washington intended to confront. Just over a year later, the U.S. invaded Iraq on the grounds that it possessed weapons of mass destruction (which it did not), and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. The message to the governments of Iran and North Korea was loud and clear---Washington was prepared to back its desire for regime change with military action. Possession of nuclear weapons, while no guarantee against a U.S. assault, was the prudent course to take.
Governments in non-nuclear states have closely watched the behaviour of the U.S. vis a vis India, Pakistan, and Israel, all non-signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India and Pakistan have tested nuclear weapons. Following a period of official displeasure with India over its development of nuclear weapons, the Bush administration reached a deal with the Indian government in 2006, opening the way for the transfer of civilian nuclear material to that country, even though India remained outside the non-proliferation regime. Although Israel refuses to confirm its status as a nuclear power, it is an open secret that the country has developed a large nuclear arsenal, totaling as many as two hundred weapons. The lesson is that the United States is prepared to wink at those who escape the non-proliferation regime and will come to terms with “facts on the ground”.
While Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it claims the right to enrich uranium for what it asserts is a civilian nuclear energy program. Insisting that Teheran plans to develop nuclear weapons, the Bush administration has succeeded in pressing the UN Security Council to demand that Iran stop enriching uranium. North Korea, a signatory to the treaty, is the only country to have withdrawn from the treaty, a step it took in 2003. With its recent nuclear test, immediately condemned by the UN Security Council, Pyongyang has made the bet that it will hold a stronger hand with nukes than without them.
The Bush administration’s refusal to hold one-on-one talks with North Korea and to consider a non-aggression pact with that country in return for the dismantling of its nuclear program, has backed that paranoid regime ever further into a corner.
On nuclear weapons, the American insistence on retaining a completely free hand for itself has undermined a regime in which the U.S. was in the strongest position. Washington’s unwillingness to place any real limits on itself and its erratic behaviour toward potential nuclear states, has made the whole world, including the United States, less safe.
Meanwhile, the American position in Iraq, the “Axis of Evil” country it did invade, has become so perilous, that elites in Washington are now plotting a graceful way out of the civil-war torn country.
Matching its geo-political mismanagement has been the Bush administration’s disastrous handling of the global economic system and the position of the United States in it. There is an indissoluble link between these two aspects of the growing crisis of the American Empire.
As has been the case with earlier empires, America faces the problem of imperial overstretch. For the Americans, convincing their upper classes to submit to a level of taxation required to sustain the empire is a daunting problem. Ruling classes never submit easily to the idea of paying their way. But some have done a better job of it than others. The British ruling class, for instance, with its quasi-aristocratic background and its schooling in traditional toryism, proved more capable of taking the long view than has been the case with the Americans. The American ruling class, by contrast, has lacked the ideological and class cohesion that served the British ruling class so well. Moreover, the American ruling class has been deeply attached to the liberal idea of the small state. This idea, whose practical benefit has been low taxes for them, makes it extremely difficult for political leaders to convince the rich in America to pay enough to safeguard their position for the long term.
The segment of the American political elite that most fervently favours a higher military budget for the United States is also the wing of the American leadership that is mostly strongly opposed to high taxes. Since George W. Bush was sworn in as president in January 2001, this militarist wing of the U.S. leadership has held the reins of power, controlling not only the White House, but since the Congressional elections of 2002, both houses of Congress as well. The Bush administration carried out invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, while simultaneously pushing tax cuts through Congress, tax cuts whose benefits went disproportionately to the wealthy. As a consequence of its policies during a period of reduced economic growth, the Bush administration has saddled the United States with record high government deficits. The soaring deficits have come just a few years after the Clinton administration achieved the first balanced budget and then surplus in many years. The result is that the federal government of the United States is plunging into debt, a debt on which interest must be paid. A high proportion of the treasury bills sold to finance the U.S. debt are held by foreigners, approximately two trillion dollars of this by the central banks of Japan and China.
The position of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency is becoming ever more precarious. The Euro has been in the wings for years as a potential alternative reserve currency and even though the economic performance of the leading Euro countries has been sluggish, the countries of the Euro zone have a rock solid current account performance. For countries highly dependent on selling raw materials, particularly crude oil and natural gas, the temptation to dominate their sales in Euros rather than in depreciating dollars has been growing ever stronger. If the U.S. dollar was to lose its position as global reserve currency, either partially or generally, it would hit the American economy with price shocks in the broad area of primary products, most importantly petroleum. In addition, the freedom of the U.S. to run a continuous current account deficit would be sharply curtailed if the Euro were to seriously challenge the dollar as a reserve currency. This is because major central banks and corporations would be bound to shift their holdings to a considerable extent from dollars to Euros, a development that would accelerate the downward pressure on the American dollar and would force a sharp hike in U.S. interest rates to prevent a flight of foreign capital from U.S. securities.
While other major countries would have a strong interest in managing such a transition from dollar to Euro as responsibly as possible, the risk of a severe crisis could not be ruled out. Not since the end of the First World War has the world seen a transition of the kind that could be in the offing. Moreover, the world economy is enormously more global in its functioning than it was eight or nine decades ago, with capital and currency transfers from market to market dwarfing those made in the days when the British pound was floundering and the dollar was taking its place.
Both the geopolitical and the economic aspects of the crisis of the American Empire are forcing a basic reconsideration of global strategy onto the American political agenda.
Everywhere one looks, the United States faces a series of interrelated problems. While the American Empire is by no means in imminent peril of collapse, it could be forced to pull back from some of its more exposed positions in particular in the Middle East. In the process, some influential voices in the U.S. will opt for moving over to a more multilateral strategy, bringing other major powers into its confidence, so that the burdens of empire can be shared with the Western Europeans, the Japanese and others. Accepting the restraints that would accompany multilateralism would be no easy thing for the American leadership, certainly the neo-conservative leadership that has been at the helm under George W. Bush. For the neo-conservatives, sharing power with the Europeans and the Japanese has been anathema, a sure way to blunt the effectiveness of American power in sensitive regions of the world. Despite their rapidly waning credibility, the neo-conservatives can be expected to insist on staying the course in the Middle East and Central Asia as well as in East Asia. To win they will have to count on molding a more martial culture in the United States, one in which both the elites and the people are willing to accept the long-term burdens of empire.
The challenges that now confront the American Empire are similar to the problems faced by previous empires---problems of imperial overstretch and of the challenge of fashioning legitimacy for their rule. What makes it especially difficult for the American political leadership to cope with these challenges is the extent to which the norms of American political culture confuse the issues and make it difficult to confront them directly. It is no easy thing to plan for the long-term viability of an empire in a political culture in which the very existence of the empire needs to be constantly denied, at least in public discourse.
Atrocious management has pushed the American Empire into a major crisis less than two decades after the expiration of its Soviet rival. It is almost unimaginable that the fruits of victory in the Cold War could have been so rapidly squandered.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Kennedy's Road to Victory
Changing the take of the nation’s mulish pundits on the Liberal leadership contest is a time-consuming process. This slow witted beast---it is one beast inhabiting many bodies---forgets nothing and learns little. The sages decided long ago that there were three serious candidates in this race: Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, and Stephane Dion. Gerard Kennedy---possibly because he looks so much younger than most of the nation’s aging pundits (I’m 64 and am allowed to say this)---was written off as a promising youth, at best a “king-maker”, whose real shot at the job would be next time.
Facts are inconvenient, but they’re worth mentioning. The latest update of the delegate totals from Super Weekend, with 458 of 471 meetings reporting, put Kennedy solidly in third place with 817 delegates to Dion’s 770 delegates. Given two things---Dion’s far from consensual approach to fellow candidates at the recent leadership debate in Toronto, and the fact that Kennedy can likely pick up more second ballot support than Dion from the delegates of the bottom four candidates---Kennedy will almost certainly be on the ballot after Dion expires.
What about Ignatieff and Rae?
Ignatieff has had a terrible week. On whether the Israeli attack on Qana was a war-crime, he has vacillated so absurdly that he looks more like a candidate for a position on a university senate than for the leadership of a political party. Today, in the Globe and Mail, he is trying to convince us (in a column by Lawrence Martin) that he really does not want to “live in an American imperial world.” But stay tuned, there could be an update next week. Ignatieff is a smart guy, he doesn’t have the set of smarts it takes to be a political leader, unless Hamlet’s old job as Prince of Denmark comes open.
Liberals are fast figuring out that Ignatieff is not the man to lead them back to office. With only 29 per cent of the delegates so far, and with little potential for growth after the first ballot, his campaign is mired. He will likely not win.
Bob Rae has a very good shot. Despite the problem with some of his B.C. delegates, he has been looking ever more prime ministerial. Polls show him running well in a contest against Stephen Harper, whose fortunes appear dire. Being relentlessly right-wing may have spared him the label of “Mr. Dithers” but it is quickly convincing Canadians that they don’t want him.
Rae can go on to victory on the strength of delegates joining him after their candidates drop. But can Rae get to the last ballot, where I believe he would beat Ignatieff?
That depends on Kennedy and it is becoming the crucial calculation on which the whole thing depends. Kennedy’s message about party renewal and a new way of doing politics is getting through---not to the pundits, but to the delegates, and especially to younger delegates. If he can convince the supporters of Dryden, Volpe, (less likely Brison), and Hall Findlay to join him and can knock off Dion, his moment is at hand. A strong campaign between now and the convention can convince the Dion supporters that they ought to throw their support behind this candidate who has done so well in English Canada.
If he makes it to the last ballot, Kennedy will beat Ignatieff.
One piece of advice for Kennedy: He should cut his hair to make it look more like Don Newman’s. That’ll help the media mules to see him in a new light.
Facts are inconvenient, but they’re worth mentioning. The latest update of the delegate totals from Super Weekend, with 458 of 471 meetings reporting, put Kennedy solidly in third place with 817 delegates to Dion’s 770 delegates. Given two things---Dion’s far from consensual approach to fellow candidates at the recent leadership debate in Toronto, and the fact that Kennedy can likely pick up more second ballot support than Dion from the delegates of the bottom four candidates---Kennedy will almost certainly be on the ballot after Dion expires.
What about Ignatieff and Rae?
Ignatieff has had a terrible week. On whether the Israeli attack on Qana was a war-crime, he has vacillated so absurdly that he looks more like a candidate for a position on a university senate than for the leadership of a political party. Today, in the Globe and Mail, he is trying to convince us (in a column by Lawrence Martin) that he really does not want to “live in an American imperial world.” But stay tuned, there could be an update next week. Ignatieff is a smart guy, he doesn’t have the set of smarts it takes to be a political leader, unless Hamlet’s old job as Prince of Denmark comes open.
Liberals are fast figuring out that Ignatieff is not the man to lead them back to office. With only 29 per cent of the delegates so far, and with little potential for growth after the first ballot, his campaign is mired. He will likely not win.
Bob Rae has a very good shot. Despite the problem with some of his B.C. delegates, he has been looking ever more prime ministerial. Polls show him running well in a contest against Stephen Harper, whose fortunes appear dire. Being relentlessly right-wing may have spared him the label of “Mr. Dithers” but it is quickly convincing Canadians that they don’t want him.
Rae can go on to victory on the strength of delegates joining him after their candidates drop. But can Rae get to the last ballot, where I believe he would beat Ignatieff?
That depends on Kennedy and it is becoming the crucial calculation on which the whole thing depends. Kennedy’s message about party renewal and a new way of doing politics is getting through---not to the pundits, but to the delegates, and especially to younger delegates. If he can convince the supporters of Dryden, Volpe, (less likely Brison), and Hall Findlay to join him and can knock off Dion, his moment is at hand. A strong campaign between now and the convention can convince the Dion supporters that they ought to throw their support behind this candidate who has done so well in English Canada.
If he makes it to the last ballot, Kennedy will beat Ignatieff.
One piece of advice for Kennedy: He should cut his hair to make it look more like Don Newman’s. That’ll help the media mules to see him in a new light.
Friday, October 13, 2006
The Vacant Mind of Margaret Wente
Someone had to do it. Not surprisingly, it was Margaret Wente who threw down the challenge to the women who wear the veil---the full shroud with only a slit left for the eyes.
Wente sees a growing number of Muslim women in this attire, and whenever she sees them she gets “a chill.”
“The trouble with the veil is not simply that it makes conversation difficult,” she writes. “It is that it stands for a set of behaviors and beliefs that are fundamentally incompatible with those of a liberal democracy. Take off your veils ladies. I beg you,” exhorts Wente.
In true Orwellian fashion, it is the vacant-minded views of Margaret Wente that are, in fact, fundamentally incompatible with those of a liberal democracy.
What makes Wente’s column a classic is that it has been written countless times in Canada over the last one hundred and fifty years.
Wente writes that while in “tolerant, conflict-averse Canada, it’s almost taboo” to ask whether the veil-wearers or the rest of us should adapt, in Europe today “there is a growing sentiment that immigrants should be more like ‘us’---if not in dress, then certainly in values---and a spreading unease that some Muslims and the mainstream may not be able to co-exist.”
What Wente has done is to depict Muslims as “the other,” as a mass or collectivity that is robbed of individuality. I’ve grown more sensitive to this because I’ve been on the road on a book tour with Haroon Siddiqui, the distinguished Toronto Star columnist who has written a book titled Being Muslim. Siddiqui makes that point that in our society today, Muslims are subjected to a psychic internment. When a Christian does something---smokes dope, exposes midriff, massacres students at an exurban high school---he or she is judged as an individual. By contrast, when a Muslim does something, a Muslim anywhere in the world---all Muslims are asked to pronounce on it, as though they are all somehow implicated, say in a suicide bombing or some other act of terrorism.
Out of this reduction of Muslims to the status of “the other” arises Wente’s query. Are these people going to fit in as immigrants? Can we assimilate them?
It’s a very old story. In Ontario, in the 1850s, following a wave of Irish Catholic immigrants in the wake of the Irish famine, people questioned whether the Irish would be unruly, un-British, a mass that could never adopt our ways. Would they join with the Fenian terrorists who were plotting to attack Canada (and actually did attack) in a campaign to liberate Ireland from British rule?
In the early 20th century, people wondered whether Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish migrants to Winnipeg would assimilate or would they try to plot a Bolshevik revolution, as some thought they had in the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. In recent decades, Chinese immigrants have been similarly subjected to suspicion and doubt. Were the Chinese residents of Richmond B.C., who shopped at malls where the signs were almost all in Chinese, going to become real Canadians? Or had we encountered the mass that would never be like us?
During my years teaching at York University, I’ve learned not to judge people by their appearance, or their dress. The Orthodox Jewish student with the big black hat---who looked like my rabbi grandfather in Montreal in the 1930s---insisted on spelling the name of the deity, G_d. But his essay was no less worthy in its analysis of Canadian society that that of the kid with the pierced tongue and eyebrows, who was always reading James Joyce.
The same has been true of the hundreds of Muslim students I have taught, with the veil, without the veil, with the shroud, without the shroud. They participated in class and in the papers they wrote, as individuals.
Bigots used to brag that they could always pick out the Jews from a series of photographs. When put to the test, it turned out that they couldn’t. I defy anyone to read the essays of my students---with the names removed---and to figure out their religion, ethnicity or gender.
It’s easy these days to pick at the Muslims in our midst and to increase their feeling of psychic internment. Margaret Wente has a perfect right to peddle her brand of breezy, seemingly frank and guileless horse-crap. Why the Globe and Mail chooses to sacrifice so many hectares of forest to that end is another question.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Stephen Harper: Man of Ideas
Canada’s prime minister is a man of firm views. He never dithers.
Where does he get his ideas? Does he pluck them from the air? Consider ten of his initiatives since he took office:
· Ditching the Kyoto Accord and replacing it with a “made in Canada” environmental approach that does nothing to reduce green house gases.
· Deep-sixing the national child care program, launched late in the life of the Martin government, in favour of a system of “choice” for parents.
· Extending Canada’s Afghanistan mission for two years, increasing military spending, and signaling that Canada will seek to expand its global influence through war-making, not peace-keeping.
· Dumping the historic aboriginal accord achieved in the autumn of 2005, thus denying first-nations billions of dollars in development capital.
· Unveiling “three strikes and you’re out” legislation to tie the hands of judges and to make it easier to lock up offenders throw the key away and make prison expansion a growth industry in Canada.
· Abandoning the gun registry in favour of the idea that guns don’t kill people, people do, and that after they have offended they will be harshly dealt with.
· Cutting the funding for women’s groups to lobby for greater gender equality.
· Dropping the funding of literacy programs from federal spending.
· Considering legislation to allow public servants to refuse to solemnize same-sex marriages, as well as legislation to protect groups who promulgate the view that biblical passages justify the killing of homosexuals.
· Strongly endorsing Israel’s “measured” military assault on Lebanon and branding those who point to atrocities committed in that assault as “anti-Israel”.
It looks like an application for membership in the Republican Party.
· Ditching the Kyoto Accord and replacing it with a “made in Canada” environmental approach that does nothing to reduce green house gases.
· Deep-sixing the national child care program, launched late in the life of the Martin government, in favour of a system of “choice” for parents.
· Extending Canada’s Afghanistan mission for two years, increasing military spending, and signaling that Canada will seek to expand its global influence through war-making, not peace-keeping.
· Dumping the historic aboriginal accord achieved in the autumn of 2005, thus denying first-nations billions of dollars in development capital.
· Unveiling “three strikes and you’re out” legislation to tie the hands of judges and to make it easier to lock up offenders throw the key away and make prison expansion a growth industry in Canada.
· Abandoning the gun registry in favour of the idea that guns don’t kill people, people do, and that after they have offended they will be harshly dealt with.
· Cutting the funding for women’s groups to lobby for greater gender equality.
· Dropping the funding of literacy programs from federal spending.
· Considering legislation to allow public servants to refuse to solemnize same-sex marriages, as well as legislation to protect groups who promulgate the view that biblical passages justify the killing of homosexuals.
· Strongly endorsing Israel’s “measured” military assault on Lebanon and branding those who point to atrocities committed in that assault as “anti-Israel”.
It looks like an application for membership in the Republican Party.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
On Appeasement and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Two charges are regularly made against those who advocate the withdrawal of western armies from Iraq and Afghanistan. The first, that they are craven because they would “cut and run” is nothing more than the usual excess of testosterone displayed by those who think that any brawl they get into must end with the annihilation of their opponents. The second charge is that those who would withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan are appeasers following in the footsteps of Neville Chamberlain at Munich.
The second accusation is more serious because it raises the question of what we can learn from history to prepare us to deal with the dilemmas of the present.
The story of the appeasers of the 1930s teaches us complex lessons about the uses and misuses of history. The appeasers in Britain and France, like Chamberlain and (in a more complicated way) Edouard Daladier, were strong anti-Communists. While not pro-Hitler, they, and many of their backers, were not averse to the prospect of Nazi Germany marching east against Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The appeasers who sold out Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938 were mostly on the political right. But it was more complicated than that. Right across the political spectrum in Britain and France, there was an intense aversion to war, the lesson of the First World War and the mechanized slaughter of millions in the trenches in France. Communists and some others on the left held the powerful conviction that Hitler and the fascists had to be stopped, if necessary by force. (The Communists were to face their own moment of bitter anguish in August 1939 when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that opened the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The Communists, also schooled in the lessons of history, accepted Stalin’s line that the war between the western powers and Nazi Germany in September 1939 was an inter-imperialist war, like the First World War, and that, therefore, the working class should stay out of it.)
There is a further wrinkle and it is of considerable importance. Much of the line later adopted by the right-wing appeasers in the 1930s, especially in Britain, was originally developed by liberals in the period immediately following World War I. After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote a highly influential book titled The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In it, Keynes denounced the treaty for its ruinously harsh treatment of Germany and for its imposition of reparations on the Germans (on the specious grounds that they were uniquely responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914.) He argued that peace and prosperity would only return to Europe through the more generous treatment of the defeated enemy.
Adding to the case developed by Keynes was the work of the historians in the 1920s, in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere that concluded that Britain, France and Russia shared responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War. The consequence was the rise of the so-called “lost generation” in the post-war years, whose cultural icons, like Ernest Hemingway, no longer believed in glory, war, patriotism and all the other slogans that had led humankind into the terrible world war.
Liberals wanted a better deal for the Germans and for a while during the mid 1920s it looked like Germany could be brought back into a peaceful European system. Other political forces were on the rise, however. The fascists took power in Italy. In Germany, the small Nazi movement became adept at playing on the evils of the Treaty of Versailles, the war guilt clause, and the payment of reparations (ironically, Germany ended up paying almost no reparations). Hitler used the case the liberals had constructed about the mistreatment of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles to keep the western powers off balance during his crucial first years in power. Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to reoccupy the Rhineland militarily, he argued, it was German territory wasn’t it? Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to build an air force and a large navy like the other powers? Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to absorb Austria in the Anchluss of 1938? After all, the Austrians were German speakers and they wanted to join Germany.
And on it went. Hitler and the appeasers made use of arguments devised by liberals in the very different conditions of the early post-war period. Hitler did it to guilt the West into inaction against him. The appeasers did it to excuse their ambivalence about how to deal with the Nazis in the context of the threat of Bolshevism.
If appeasement in the 1930s was the product of complex narratives, the lessons right-wingers drew from appeasement were much simpler in the era following the Second World War. The Cold Warriors of the post-war world used Chamberlain and Munich as symbols of sell out. The lesson they insisted on was that if you want peace you must prepare for war. Only a strong, well-armed, nuclear West could face down the Soviets, they maintained. In Vietnam, all these arguments were used. If the United States did not “stay the course”, if it chose to “cut and run”, the dominoes would fall, and Communism would march on to victory in country after country. If we didn’t fight them in Asia, we would have to fight them on our own doorstep.
The supposed lessons of appeasement and Munich taught the Americans how to do exactly the wrong thing. By the time Lyndon Johnson geared up for a major American troop build up in Vietnam in 1964, the Communist world was already bitterly divided between its two giants, the Soviet Union and China. They hated each other so much that they fought border wars against each other. And North Vietnam was a Soviet ally, highly suspicious of China, and soon fought a border war against the Chinese. The theory, on which the Vietnam War was premised, that the West was up against a unified Communist menace, was a crock. But anyone who insisted on saying that was accused of being an appeaser, a Neville Chamberlain. With the victory of North Vietnam in 1975, the dominoes did not fall. Communism did not march to victory. Indeed, fourteen years later, the Soviet Empire fell flat on its face and Vietnam soon became a favourite place for the U.S. to invest capital.
Today, we are again the recipients of lessons supposedly drawn from the experience of appeasement and Munich.
The real lesson of Munich, if there was one, was that you had to stand up against the imminent threat of a rising imperial power that had made it plain that its goal was conquest in Europe and beyond. Furthermore, that imperial power was an industrial giant that had rearmed and had created the world’s most advanced air force and mechanized army. If the West didn’t rearm and didn’t stand up to Hitler, all of Europe would end up in Hitler’s hands (as for a while most of it did).
Today, the West is engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and there is the potential for war against Iran. Those who insist that the two wars that are underway must be fought to victory claim that anything less will enliven the world-wide forces of Islamic jihad to set out to undertake ever more deadly assaults against the West. And if we do not use force if necessary to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, then the Hitler-like president of that country will plot assaults against the West. If we do not stop them on the borders of Pakistan and in the Persian Gulf, the argument goes, we will face them on our own turf.
Really. Increasingly, the evidence reveals that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are radicalizing tens of thousands of young men in the Middle East and Central Asia to hate the West and to take up arms against Europeans and North Americans. In addition, the evidence shows that neither country is making progress toward peace, prosperity, human rights and democracy as a result of the presence of western armies. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are sinking into civil wars. In both cases, the presence of western armies is seen by much of the population of the two countries, as an alien invasion. The oldest instinct in the world, the desire of people to be free of foreign invaders, is at work in kindling the insurrections in both countries. And resentment against the western occupations and the death toll that goes with them is being fanned far and wide across large parts of the Islamic world.
Let’s remember a few salient facts. The United States spends as much on its military as almost all the other nations in the world combined. The West is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Israel has its own nuclear weapons, with an arsenal estimated to include two hundred nuclear missiles. The idea that the West and its close allies face the prospect of invasion and defeat at the hands of would-be Hitlers is preposterous. It is a Big Lie, a lie being used to silence people in the United States, Canada and Europe who are coming to the conclusion that these wars are doing nothing to increase our security, and everything to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people in the zones of conflict.
It’s time for some genuinely fresh thinking about the utility of empire and war. To do that thinking we need to rid ourselves of ludicrous historical distortions that can only get in the way.
The second accusation is more serious because it raises the question of what we can learn from history to prepare us to deal with the dilemmas of the present.
The story of the appeasers of the 1930s teaches us complex lessons about the uses and misuses of history. The appeasers in Britain and France, like Chamberlain and (in a more complicated way) Edouard Daladier, were strong anti-Communists. While not pro-Hitler, they, and many of their backers, were not averse to the prospect of Nazi Germany marching east against Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The appeasers who sold out Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938 were mostly on the political right. But it was more complicated than that. Right across the political spectrum in Britain and France, there was an intense aversion to war, the lesson of the First World War and the mechanized slaughter of millions in the trenches in France. Communists and some others on the left held the powerful conviction that Hitler and the fascists had to be stopped, if necessary by force. (The Communists were to face their own moment of bitter anguish in August 1939 when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that opened the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The Communists, also schooled in the lessons of history, accepted Stalin’s line that the war between the western powers and Nazi Germany in September 1939 was an inter-imperialist war, like the First World War, and that, therefore, the working class should stay out of it.)
There is a further wrinkle and it is of considerable importance. Much of the line later adopted by the right-wing appeasers in the 1930s, especially in Britain, was originally developed by liberals in the period immediately following World War I. After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote a highly influential book titled The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In it, Keynes denounced the treaty for its ruinously harsh treatment of Germany and for its imposition of reparations on the Germans (on the specious grounds that they were uniquely responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914.) He argued that peace and prosperity would only return to Europe through the more generous treatment of the defeated enemy.
Adding to the case developed by Keynes was the work of the historians in the 1920s, in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere that concluded that Britain, France and Russia shared responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War. The consequence was the rise of the so-called “lost generation” in the post-war years, whose cultural icons, like Ernest Hemingway, no longer believed in glory, war, patriotism and all the other slogans that had led humankind into the terrible world war.
Liberals wanted a better deal for the Germans and for a while during the mid 1920s it looked like Germany could be brought back into a peaceful European system. Other political forces were on the rise, however. The fascists took power in Italy. In Germany, the small Nazi movement became adept at playing on the evils of the Treaty of Versailles, the war guilt clause, and the payment of reparations (ironically, Germany ended up paying almost no reparations). Hitler used the case the liberals had constructed about the mistreatment of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles to keep the western powers off balance during his crucial first years in power. Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to reoccupy the Rhineland militarily, he argued, it was German territory wasn’t it? Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to build an air force and a large navy like the other powers? Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to absorb Austria in the Anchluss of 1938? After all, the Austrians were German speakers and they wanted to join Germany.
And on it went. Hitler and the appeasers made use of arguments devised by liberals in the very different conditions of the early post-war period. Hitler did it to guilt the West into inaction against him. The appeasers did it to excuse their ambivalence about how to deal with the Nazis in the context of the threat of Bolshevism.
If appeasement in the 1930s was the product of complex narratives, the lessons right-wingers drew from appeasement were much simpler in the era following the Second World War. The Cold Warriors of the post-war world used Chamberlain and Munich as symbols of sell out. The lesson they insisted on was that if you want peace you must prepare for war. Only a strong, well-armed, nuclear West could face down the Soviets, they maintained. In Vietnam, all these arguments were used. If the United States did not “stay the course”, if it chose to “cut and run”, the dominoes would fall, and Communism would march on to victory in country after country. If we didn’t fight them in Asia, we would have to fight them on our own doorstep.
The supposed lessons of appeasement and Munich taught the Americans how to do exactly the wrong thing. By the time Lyndon Johnson geared up for a major American troop build up in Vietnam in 1964, the Communist world was already bitterly divided between its two giants, the Soviet Union and China. They hated each other so much that they fought border wars against each other. And North Vietnam was a Soviet ally, highly suspicious of China, and soon fought a border war against the Chinese. The theory, on which the Vietnam War was premised, that the West was up against a unified Communist menace, was a crock. But anyone who insisted on saying that was accused of being an appeaser, a Neville Chamberlain. With the victory of North Vietnam in 1975, the dominoes did not fall. Communism did not march to victory. Indeed, fourteen years later, the Soviet Empire fell flat on its face and Vietnam soon became a favourite place for the U.S. to invest capital.
Today, we are again the recipients of lessons supposedly drawn from the experience of appeasement and Munich.
The real lesson of Munich, if there was one, was that you had to stand up against the imminent threat of a rising imperial power that had made it plain that its goal was conquest in Europe and beyond. Furthermore, that imperial power was an industrial giant that had rearmed and had created the world’s most advanced air force and mechanized army. If the West didn’t rearm and didn’t stand up to Hitler, all of Europe would end up in Hitler’s hands (as for a while most of it did).
Today, the West is engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and there is the potential for war against Iran. Those who insist that the two wars that are underway must be fought to victory claim that anything less will enliven the world-wide forces of Islamic jihad to set out to undertake ever more deadly assaults against the West. And if we do not use force if necessary to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, then the Hitler-like president of that country will plot assaults against the West. If we do not stop them on the borders of Pakistan and in the Persian Gulf, the argument goes, we will face them on our own turf.
Really. Increasingly, the evidence reveals that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are radicalizing tens of thousands of young men in the Middle East and Central Asia to hate the West and to take up arms against Europeans and North Americans. In addition, the evidence shows that neither country is making progress toward peace, prosperity, human rights and democracy as a result of the presence of western armies. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are sinking into civil wars. In both cases, the presence of western armies is seen by much of the population of the two countries, as an alien invasion. The oldest instinct in the world, the desire of people to be free of foreign invaders, is at work in kindling the insurrections in both countries. And resentment against the western occupations and the death toll that goes with them is being fanned far and wide across large parts of the Islamic world.
Let’s remember a few salient facts. The United States spends as much on its military as almost all the other nations in the world combined. The West is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Israel has its own nuclear weapons, with an arsenal estimated to include two hundred nuclear missiles. The idea that the West and its close allies face the prospect of invasion and defeat at the hands of would-be Hitlers is preposterous. It is a Big Lie, a lie being used to silence people in the United States, Canada and Europe who are coming to the conclusion that these wars are doing nothing to increase our security, and everything to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people in the zones of conflict.
It’s time for some genuinely fresh thinking about the utility of empire and war. To do that thinking we need to rid ourselves of ludicrous historical distortions that can only get in the way.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Harper's Wager: Casualties for Global Influence
“The mounting Canadian death toll in Afghanistan is the price of leadership that comes with playing a significant role in global affairs”: Stephen Harper.
Note the statement. And think about the mind set of the Canadian leader who made it.
The statement is crass and vulgar. It is utilitarian in its willingness to trade blood for influence. It measures the worth of Canada and Canadians in quantitative terms---more casualties, more influence.
The statement sweeps to one side the moral worth of the Canada that has achieved greatness and respect throughout the world as a nation that values human life and embraces diversity. It dismisses the Canada that has lent its energies to peacekeeping.
Power grows out of the barrel of a gun this prime minister believes.
Above all, his statement betrays how envious Stephen Harper is of the big guys in Washington. In awe of military power, how tiny he must feel next to those whose hundreds of bases encircle the globe and whose naval task forces can sail into any sea and blast any country off the face of the earth.
And yet, the empire that presides over all that weaponry and death dealing power is stumbling in the Middle East, in Latin America, in the rise of its indebtedness, and even in the trust and respect the American people have for its leaders.
Canada has not survived and flourished over all the decades it has lived next door to the United States because of its military might. It has flourished because of the society we have constructed, with all its limitations, and the values we cherish.
The ability to deal death is only one form of power. The creative power to establish a better society, country and world far surpasses it.
Keep Harper’s statement in the back of your mind. And when the next election is called, it will be reason enough to show this prime minister the door.
Note the statement. And think about the mind set of the Canadian leader who made it.
The statement is crass and vulgar. It is utilitarian in its willingness to trade blood for influence. It measures the worth of Canada and Canadians in quantitative terms---more casualties, more influence.
The statement sweeps to one side the moral worth of the Canada that has achieved greatness and respect throughout the world as a nation that values human life and embraces diversity. It dismisses the Canada that has lent its energies to peacekeeping.
Power grows out of the barrel of a gun this prime minister believes.
Above all, his statement betrays how envious Stephen Harper is of the big guys in Washington. In awe of military power, how tiny he must feel next to those whose hundreds of bases encircle the globe and whose naval task forces can sail into any sea and blast any country off the face of the earth.
And yet, the empire that presides over all that weaponry and death dealing power is stumbling in the Middle East, in Latin America, in the rise of its indebtedness, and even in the trust and respect the American people have for its leaders.
Canada has not survived and flourished over all the decades it has lived next door to the United States because of its military might. It has flourished because of the society we have constructed, with all its limitations, and the values we cherish.
The ability to deal death is only one form of power. The creative power to establish a better society, country and world far surpasses it.
Keep Harper’s statement in the back of your mind. And when the next election is called, it will be reason enough to show this prime minister the door.
The Senate Report: The Truth About Missile Defence
The Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence has issued a report calling on Canada to sign-on to the U.S. missile defence program. “The Liberal Government declined last year,” said the report. “The current government should definitely not decline.”
Once again Canadians are being invited to opt for inclusion in an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system which would place us at the table where the decisions are made but would give Canada no decision-making power over the use or non-use of the system. That would be left in the hands of the Americans. A place at the table, so we can watch the Americans make decisions, is the notion of sovereignty that the report is trying to sell to Canadians. Along with this, Canadians are being fed the usual bromides about the proposed ABM system being purely defensive and not involving the weaponization of space.
What Canadians need to know is that the American proponents of the ABM system regard the program as crucial to increasing the offensive power of the United States against potential foes and see it explicitly as a step toward the weaponization of space.
The evidence for this comes in a report issued in 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, written by a group of neo-conservative heavy weights who have played a key role in defining the military policies of the Bush administration. I don’t know why the Canadian advocates of ABM never face up to the very clear things this report put on the public record.
Established in 1997, the Project for the New American Century included Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz----who were “concerned with the decline in the strength of America’s defences, and in the problems this would create for the exercise of American leadership around the globe…”
In its September 2000 report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century,” the authors stated that the U.S. military needed to be rebuilt around four key missions:
· the defence of the American homeland;
· the capacity to fight and decisively win, major theatre wars simultaneously;
· the performance the “constabulary” duties that arise out of the need to shape the security environment in critical regions;
· the transformation of the U.S. armed forces to exploit what the authors call the “revolution in military affairs.”
The Report’s unilateralism was unapologetic. On nuclear weapons, the authors excoriated the Clinton administration for its support for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which had been ratified by one hundred and fifty states. While the Clinton administration’s effort to ratify the treaty, was voted down by the U.S. Senate, the Clinton White House pledged that the U.S. would behave as though it was a party to the treaty and would not test nuclear weapons. In the long term, as far as the authors of the Report were concerned, this was not a tenable strategy. “If the United States is to have a nuclear deterrent that is both effective and safe,” the Report reads “it will need to test.” (The administration of George W. Bush has repudiated the CTBT.)
The authors of the Report envisaged a defence posture in which the U.S. military’s missions would range beyond the defence of America to the capacity to win wars far from U.S. shores and to be able to act as global policeman in laying down the law in unstable and strategically important parts of the world. That this was a blueprint for an empire rather than a nation state was made clear in the recommendation that a key task for the U.S. forces must be to control “the new ‘international commons’ of space and ‘cyberspace,’ and pave the way for the creation of a new military service----U.S. Space Forces---with the mission of space control.” The “weaponization of space”, routinely condemned by Canadian policy makers as potentially triggering a new and dangerous arms race, was thought highly desirable by this group of American thinkers.
That the authors of the Report were thinking in offensive, not defensive, terms about the mission of the U.S. military was made clear in the way they formulated their support for the development and deployment of a missile defence system for the United States. At first glance it would appear that the primary goal of missile defence would be to protect the United States against a nuclear attack by a rogue state. That, however, was not uppermost in the thinking of the authors. “Without it [missile defence],” the Report reasoned “weak states operating small arsenals of crude ballistic missiles, armed with basic nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction, will be in a strong position to deter the United States from using conventional force, no matter the technological or other advantages we may enjoy. Even if such enemies are merely able to threaten American allies rather than the United States homeland itself, America’s ability to project power will be deeply compromised.”
The authors, in language exceedingly frank on this subject, championed U.S. missile defence as a way to prevent small countries from deterring the U.S. from imposing its will by launching a conventional military assault on them. Seen this way, missile defence was a tool for maintaining and extending the sway of the American Empire. Military strategists have always warned against simplistic distinctions between offensive and defensive weapons systems. Apparently a defensive weapons system, missile defence was understood by the authors of the Report as key to maintaining America’s offensive capability vis a vis, not only small and truculent states, but even a looming giant such as China.
With an eye on the long-term future, the Report seized on the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that had been made possible by technological transformation and the need for the U.S. military to ride the wave of advance this promised. The authors linked the creation of a U.S. global system of missile defence to the larger goal of establishing American control of space and cyberspace. The Report called for the construction of a system of global missile defences. “A network against limited strikes, capable of protecting the United States, its allies and forward-deployed forces, must be constructed,” it stated. “This must be a layered system of land, sea, air and space-based components.”
Indeed, the weaponization of space, or the further weaponization of space as they conceived it was a crucial notion of these planners, who saw this as essential if American global preeminence was to be sustained. “No system of missile defences can be fully effective without placing sensors and weapons in space,” the Report stated. “Although this would appear to be creating a potential new theatre of warfare, in fact space has been militarized for the better part of four decades. Weather, communications, navigation and reconnaissance satellites are increasingly essential elements in American military power.”
“….over the longer term, maintaining control of space will inevitably require the application of force both in space and from space,” the Report continued “including but not limited to anti-missile defences and defensive systems…”
Ultimately this would require, in the opinion of the authors, the establishment of a new American military service, to be called U.S. Space Forces. They reasoned that “it is almost certain that the conduct of warfare in outer space will differ as much from traditional air warfare as air warfare has from warfare at sea or on land; space warfare will demand new organizations, operational strategies, doctrines and training schemes. Thus, the argument to replace U.S. Space Command with U.S. Space Forces---a separate service under the Defence Department----is compelling. While it is conceivable that, as military space capabilities develop, a transitory ‘Space Corps’ under the Department of the Air Force might make sense, it ought to be regarded as an intermediary step, analogous to the World War II-era Army Air Corps, not to the Marine Corps, which remains a part of the Navy Department.”
The U.S. posture advocated in the Report was aimed at sustaining American global preeminence into the indefinite future. There was not a hint of any need to develop a collective leadership that included other nations or to forge an international regime to guarantee the rights of all nations. What was aimed at was the preservation and enhancement of the American Empire.
A number of those who were involved in the Project for the New American Century went on to wield power during the presidency of George W. Bush. Most notably, there was Paul Wolfowitz, who as Undersecretary of State became a key advocate of the invasion of Iraq.
Canadians who are being urged in the Senate Report to revisit the issue of missile defence should not be lulled into the idea that the ABM system would create greater global stability by guarding against potential threats from rogue states. The ABM system, as the authors of the report of the Project for the New American Century openly proclaim, is a step toward the weaponization of space whose goal is to extend the ability of the United States to intervene as it pleases in military missions all over the world. Nothing could be more destabilizing for the global future.
Once again Canadians are being invited to opt for inclusion in an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system which would place us at the table where the decisions are made but would give Canada no decision-making power over the use or non-use of the system. That would be left in the hands of the Americans. A place at the table, so we can watch the Americans make decisions, is the notion of sovereignty that the report is trying to sell to Canadians. Along with this, Canadians are being fed the usual bromides about the proposed ABM system being purely defensive and not involving the weaponization of space.
What Canadians need to know is that the American proponents of the ABM system regard the program as crucial to increasing the offensive power of the United States against potential foes and see it explicitly as a step toward the weaponization of space.
The evidence for this comes in a report issued in 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, written by a group of neo-conservative heavy weights who have played a key role in defining the military policies of the Bush administration. I don’t know why the Canadian advocates of ABM never face up to the very clear things this report put on the public record.
Established in 1997, the Project for the New American Century included Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz----who were “concerned with the decline in the strength of America’s defences, and in the problems this would create for the exercise of American leadership around the globe…”
In its September 2000 report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century,” the authors stated that the U.S. military needed to be rebuilt around four key missions:
· the defence of the American homeland;
· the capacity to fight and decisively win, major theatre wars simultaneously;
· the performance the “constabulary” duties that arise out of the need to shape the security environment in critical regions;
· the transformation of the U.S. armed forces to exploit what the authors call the “revolution in military affairs.”
The Report’s unilateralism was unapologetic. On nuclear weapons, the authors excoriated the Clinton administration for its support for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which had been ratified by one hundred and fifty states. While the Clinton administration’s effort to ratify the treaty, was voted down by the U.S. Senate, the Clinton White House pledged that the U.S. would behave as though it was a party to the treaty and would not test nuclear weapons. In the long term, as far as the authors of the Report were concerned, this was not a tenable strategy. “If the United States is to have a nuclear deterrent that is both effective and safe,” the Report reads “it will need to test.” (The administration of George W. Bush has repudiated the CTBT.)
The authors of the Report envisaged a defence posture in which the U.S. military’s missions would range beyond the defence of America to the capacity to win wars far from U.S. shores and to be able to act as global policeman in laying down the law in unstable and strategically important parts of the world. That this was a blueprint for an empire rather than a nation state was made clear in the recommendation that a key task for the U.S. forces must be to control “the new ‘international commons’ of space and ‘cyberspace,’ and pave the way for the creation of a new military service----U.S. Space Forces---with the mission of space control.” The “weaponization of space”, routinely condemned by Canadian policy makers as potentially triggering a new and dangerous arms race, was thought highly desirable by this group of American thinkers.
That the authors of the Report were thinking in offensive, not defensive, terms about the mission of the U.S. military was made clear in the way they formulated their support for the development and deployment of a missile defence system for the United States. At first glance it would appear that the primary goal of missile defence would be to protect the United States against a nuclear attack by a rogue state. That, however, was not uppermost in the thinking of the authors. “Without it [missile defence],” the Report reasoned “weak states operating small arsenals of crude ballistic missiles, armed with basic nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction, will be in a strong position to deter the United States from using conventional force, no matter the technological or other advantages we may enjoy. Even if such enemies are merely able to threaten American allies rather than the United States homeland itself, America’s ability to project power will be deeply compromised.”
The authors, in language exceedingly frank on this subject, championed U.S. missile defence as a way to prevent small countries from deterring the U.S. from imposing its will by launching a conventional military assault on them. Seen this way, missile defence was a tool for maintaining and extending the sway of the American Empire. Military strategists have always warned against simplistic distinctions between offensive and defensive weapons systems. Apparently a defensive weapons system, missile defence was understood by the authors of the Report as key to maintaining America’s offensive capability vis a vis, not only small and truculent states, but even a looming giant such as China.
With an eye on the long-term future, the Report seized on the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that had been made possible by technological transformation and the need for the U.S. military to ride the wave of advance this promised. The authors linked the creation of a U.S. global system of missile defence to the larger goal of establishing American control of space and cyberspace. The Report called for the construction of a system of global missile defences. “A network against limited strikes, capable of protecting the United States, its allies and forward-deployed forces, must be constructed,” it stated. “This must be a layered system of land, sea, air and space-based components.”
Indeed, the weaponization of space, or the further weaponization of space as they conceived it was a crucial notion of these planners, who saw this as essential if American global preeminence was to be sustained. “No system of missile defences can be fully effective without placing sensors and weapons in space,” the Report stated. “Although this would appear to be creating a potential new theatre of warfare, in fact space has been militarized for the better part of four decades. Weather, communications, navigation and reconnaissance satellites are increasingly essential elements in American military power.”
“….over the longer term, maintaining control of space will inevitably require the application of force both in space and from space,” the Report continued “including but not limited to anti-missile defences and defensive systems…”
Ultimately this would require, in the opinion of the authors, the establishment of a new American military service, to be called U.S. Space Forces. They reasoned that “it is almost certain that the conduct of warfare in outer space will differ as much from traditional air warfare as air warfare has from warfare at sea or on land; space warfare will demand new organizations, operational strategies, doctrines and training schemes. Thus, the argument to replace U.S. Space Command with U.S. Space Forces---a separate service under the Defence Department----is compelling. While it is conceivable that, as military space capabilities develop, a transitory ‘Space Corps’ under the Department of the Air Force might make sense, it ought to be regarded as an intermediary step, analogous to the World War II-era Army Air Corps, not to the Marine Corps, which remains a part of the Navy Department.”
The U.S. posture advocated in the Report was aimed at sustaining American global preeminence into the indefinite future. There was not a hint of any need to develop a collective leadership that included other nations or to forge an international regime to guarantee the rights of all nations. What was aimed at was the preservation and enhancement of the American Empire.
A number of those who were involved in the Project for the New American Century went on to wield power during the presidency of George W. Bush. Most notably, there was Paul Wolfowitz, who as Undersecretary of State became a key advocate of the invasion of Iraq.
Canadians who are being urged in the Senate Report to revisit the issue of missile defence should not be lulled into the idea that the ABM system would create greater global stability by guarding against potential threats from rogue states. The ABM system, as the authors of the report of the Project for the New American Century openly proclaim, is a step toward the weaponization of space whose goal is to extend the ability of the United States to intervene as it pleases in military missions all over the world. Nothing could be more destabilizing for the global future.
Monday, October 02, 2006
After Liberal Super-Weekend: It's Time to Take a Serious Look at Gerard Kennedy
Delegate selection on Liberal Super-Weekend confirmed that Michael Ignatieff will have a strong lead going into the December convention. In the range of thirty per cent of delegate support, and likely a few percentage points more than that when ex officio delegates are included in the mix, he nonetheless remains stoppable. He is no more strongly placed to become the winner than Brian Mulroney was in the 1976 Conservative leadership contest, when the little known Joe Clark emerged to defeat him. The list of front runners who didn’t make it has been a long one over the years in both federal and provincial leadership contests.
Much of the Liberal Party establishment has toiled mightily to ensure victory for Ignatieff, but they have come up short. Given the immense media coverage he has received, it is surprising that he is not closer to wrapping up this race. Ignatieff remains a divisive, polarizing figure in the Liberal Party and the country. He is best known as the champion of military intervention in zones of conflict. He supported the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and has never retracted his view that the mission was a good idea, though badly handled) and he voted with Stephen Harper to extend Canada’s mission in Afghanistan. His enthusiasm for the American Empire puts him at odds with the political culture of most Liberals and most Canadians. He is a Tony Blair in the making.
Bob Rae who came second on Super-Weekend, with a shade under twenty per cent of the vote, has emerged as one possible candidate around whom a stop-Ignatieff movement could coalesce. Rae has run a strong campaign, has been the smoothest of the performers, and has gone a long way to overcoming the negatives he faced at the beginning of the campaign. That he still has a considerable distance to go is revealed in his relatively poor showing in Ontario, where he managed only seventeen per cent of the vote, following Ignatieff with nearly twenty-eight per cent and Gerard Kennedy with nearly twenty-seven per cent. Doing less well in his own bailiwick than he did nationally is a worrying sign. In a diverse country like Canada, going into a federal election with the strong backing of your own region is seen as a crucial political attribute. And when that region is Ontario, the sine qua non for federal Liberals, Rae’s weakness stands out.
Stepane Dion, who will likely end up in fourth place when the rest of the races, including those with mail-in ballots are toted up, remains a serious contender. His strong showing in Quebec and his association with the increasingly important environmental issue, mean that he will receive a serious hearing over the next two months. His problems---a didactic, non-charismatic manner, and his authorship of the Clarity Act (highly divisive in Quebec) make him a tough sell.
Which leaves Gerard Kennedy, who turned in the performance on Super-Weekend that most surprised the media. With over sixteen and a half per cent of the vote, he will almost certainly hold on to third place. Kennedy’s very strong showing in his home province of Ontario and in Alberta (he came first with nearly twenty-eight per cent of the vote), the province where he worked for years creating a food bank, revealed his potential. Here’s a guy who did very well where he was best known and had a record to judge.
The media ought not to be so surprised by Kennedy’s strong showing. Where the hell have they been? With the exception of a perceptive piece in the Globe and Mail by Michael Posner, they have done a shoddy job covering the Kennedy candidacy. For months, columnists and television analysts, have talked of the Big Three candidates, Ignatieff, Rae, and Dion. Kennedy, whose under-the-radar campaign, with its strong cohort of youthful organizers, has been repeatedly under-estimated. The national media has egg on its face.
The time has come for the punditry to take a fresh look at Kennedy. He’s the right age, has turned in a stellar performance as Ontario’s education minister, and has plenty of charismatic firepower. His strong showing on Super-Weekend did not come out of thin air.
Kennedy’s weakness in Quebec is not the consequence of an unwillingness to reach out to that province as he now must do. It is the result of having virtually no organization there. When you factor in his shut out in Quebec in looking at his national numbers, Kennedy is right alongside Ignatieff as the choice of Liberals in English Canada.
Unlike Ignatieff, who divides Liberals, Kennedy represents the outlook with which Liberals are most comfortable. He is a progressive who can assemble the coalition of voters on the centre-left that alone can challenge Harper in the next election.
It’s time to stop underestimating his candidacy.
Much of the Liberal Party establishment has toiled mightily to ensure victory for Ignatieff, but they have come up short. Given the immense media coverage he has received, it is surprising that he is not closer to wrapping up this race. Ignatieff remains a divisive, polarizing figure in the Liberal Party and the country. He is best known as the champion of military intervention in zones of conflict. He supported the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and has never retracted his view that the mission was a good idea, though badly handled) and he voted with Stephen Harper to extend Canada’s mission in Afghanistan. His enthusiasm for the American Empire puts him at odds with the political culture of most Liberals and most Canadians. He is a Tony Blair in the making.
Bob Rae who came second on Super-Weekend, with a shade under twenty per cent of the vote, has emerged as one possible candidate around whom a stop-Ignatieff movement could coalesce. Rae has run a strong campaign, has been the smoothest of the performers, and has gone a long way to overcoming the negatives he faced at the beginning of the campaign. That he still has a considerable distance to go is revealed in his relatively poor showing in Ontario, where he managed only seventeen per cent of the vote, following Ignatieff with nearly twenty-eight per cent and Gerard Kennedy with nearly twenty-seven per cent. Doing less well in his own bailiwick than he did nationally is a worrying sign. In a diverse country like Canada, going into a federal election with the strong backing of your own region is seen as a crucial political attribute. And when that region is Ontario, the sine qua non for federal Liberals, Rae’s weakness stands out.
Stepane Dion, who will likely end up in fourth place when the rest of the races, including those with mail-in ballots are toted up, remains a serious contender. His strong showing in Quebec and his association with the increasingly important environmental issue, mean that he will receive a serious hearing over the next two months. His problems---a didactic, non-charismatic manner, and his authorship of the Clarity Act (highly divisive in Quebec) make him a tough sell.
Which leaves Gerard Kennedy, who turned in the performance on Super-Weekend that most surprised the media. With over sixteen and a half per cent of the vote, he will almost certainly hold on to third place. Kennedy’s very strong showing in his home province of Ontario and in Alberta (he came first with nearly twenty-eight per cent of the vote), the province where he worked for years creating a food bank, revealed his potential. Here’s a guy who did very well where he was best known and had a record to judge.
The media ought not to be so surprised by Kennedy’s strong showing. Where the hell have they been? With the exception of a perceptive piece in the Globe and Mail by Michael Posner, they have done a shoddy job covering the Kennedy candidacy. For months, columnists and television analysts, have talked of the Big Three candidates, Ignatieff, Rae, and Dion. Kennedy, whose under-the-radar campaign, with its strong cohort of youthful organizers, has been repeatedly under-estimated. The national media has egg on its face.
The time has come for the punditry to take a fresh look at Kennedy. He’s the right age, has turned in a stellar performance as Ontario’s education minister, and has plenty of charismatic firepower. His strong showing on Super-Weekend did not come out of thin air.
Kennedy’s weakness in Quebec is not the consequence of an unwillingness to reach out to that province as he now must do. It is the result of having virtually no organization there. When you factor in his shut out in Quebec in looking at his national numbers, Kennedy is right alongside Ignatieff as the choice of Liberals in English Canada.
Unlike Ignatieff, who divides Liberals, Kennedy represents the outlook with which Liberals are most comfortable. He is a progressive who can assemble the coalition of voters on the centre-left that alone can challenge Harper in the next election.
It’s time to stop underestimating his candidacy.
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