Saturday, July 29, 2006

Gerard Kennedy Is Winning The Liberal Leadership Race

One of the near certainties of Canadian existence is that whoever the Liberals choose as their leader will eventually become prime minister of Canada. Edward Blake was the only federal Liberal leader never to become prime minister. Since Blake’s time, John Turner was the only leader never to win an election. That we will likely have to endure life under the leader the Liberals pick in early December makes it necessary for non-Liberals, such as me, to keep an eye on the race for the top job in the land of Grits.

With apologies to the rest of the pack, only four candidates have a real hope of winning---Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, Stephane Dion and Gerard Kennedy.

· Michael Ignatieff was dubbed the front runner in the early days of the race in large part because he attracted so much of the Liberal machine to his cause. Senator David Smith, the insider’s insider was among the first to perceive in Ignatieff a 21st century Pierre Trudeau. But as Karl Marx might have said---everything in the Liberal Party happens twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. Ignatieff’s problems are multifold---he is not, as Trudeau was, a Quebecois federalist who can save Canada from the sovereignists. On top of that, Ignatieff’s support for the American-led invasion of Iraq is an issue that will not go away. The proudest moment in the saga of modern Canadian Liberalism was when Jean Chretien announced that Canada would not join George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” According to a story in the Toronto Star, Michael Ignatieff came third in signing up new members of the party by the cutoff date of July 4 for participation in the selection of the new leader. This hard fact has cut into Ignatieff’s momentum. He cannot afford to lose momentum in a race in which his likelihood of winning is the only thing that prevents his warts from being examined under a microscope. The trouble with Ignatieff’s campaign is too much brass and not enough grass. Smoke filled rooms aren’t what they used to be.

· Bob Rae should have been a fine Liberal leader and a great prime minister. He speaks well, is highly intelligent and, for a Liberal, is progressive. His problem is his lengthy sojourn in another political party and the fact that he picked the recession plagued early 1990s to be premier of Ontario. Bad luck, and as Napoleon might have said, to become Liberal leader you need to be lucky. Bob Rae has forgotten that aspirations for the future need to fit well with one’s past record. For instance, I wouldn’t mind becoming Pope. In about ten years, I’ll even be the right age. The difficulty is that everything I’ve ever done disqualifies me from making a run for the job. A tell tale sign of the failing Rae campaign is its poor record of signing up new members, especially in Quebec.

· Stephane Dion, a thoughtful, gutsy politician, has two strikes against him. As author of the Clarity Act, he is detested by many Quebecers and cannot win the soft nationalist vote in his home province, which is key to the revival of Liberal fortunes. As a former member of the Chretien cabinet, through no fault of his own, Dion has been tarred with the brush of the Sponsorship Scandal. He can’t win.

· Gerard Kennedy is the natural next leader of the Liberal Party. Young, attractive, articulate and progressive, he has fewer negatives than his opponents and is ideally placed to appeal to the centre left voters the Liberals must win to push Stephen Harper out of power. Kennedy learned from his run for the leadership of the Ontario Liberals in the 1990s that it is often a bad idea to be the front runner. He lost to Dalton McGuinty who capitalized on an Anyone but Kennedy movement. His big negative is that he and his handlers are so determined to avoid repeating what happened to Kennedy a decade ago that they are in danger of re-fighting the last war. The consequence is that Kennedy’s campaign has been dull, with the generation of disappointingly few policy ideas so far. The real strength of the campaign is on the ground and under the radar. Kennedy’s youthful team is running the legs off the boys in the back rooms. They signed up more new members than anyone else. In September, when everyone figures out that he is the real front runner, Kennedy will have to endure a couple of months of savage scrutiny. He can handle it. His impressive job of turning Ontario’s ministry of education around after years of Tory bloodletting shows that he can deliver.

When Kennedy wins the Liberal leadership, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton will be the big losers. Harper would be well advised to upgrade his skills so he can go back to operating the Gestetner Machine at the National Citizens Coalition. Layton should relearn his socialism and get ready to present radical, attractive ideas aimed at working people---ideas neither Harper nor Kennedy can match.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

The Globe and Mail is a Rag, Etc....

Today’s lead editorial in the Globe and Mail is yet another in a series of propaganda offerings from Canada’s “national newspaper”. The editorial starts with an attack on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for his claim that Israeli forces “apparently deliberately” targeted the UN post in south Lebanon, killing four peacekeepers including one Canadian. The Globe has leapt to the conclusion, even before there has been an investigation, that “there is nothing to suggest that Israel attacked the UN men on purpose.” Maybe---but couldn’t the editorial writers wait for some hard evidence? It’s no secret that there has been bad blood between Israeli forces and the UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon for many years. And it’s passing strange that the attack occurred after the UN called in warnings to the Israelis alerting them to the danger of hitting their men.

The central point of the editorial comes in its depiction of Hezbollah as an organization whose leaders “almost revel” in the killing of innocent men, women and children, while Israel is a country that never “deliberately targets civilians.” Is this a thoughtful editorial in a respected Canadian newspaper, or a screed put out by one side in a bitter war?

There was a time when I regarded being in a place where the Globe and Mail could be delivered daily as an essential aspect of the good life. Today, in a period of war and political tension, Canadians are very badly served by their daily newspapers. The National Post, and its siblings in the Southam chain, seem to be published with Dick Cheney as the target audience. But the decline of the Globe and Mail really troubles me. So much of the paper is taken up with the offerings of those who write first and think later (maybe)---Margaret Wente, Christie Blatchford, and Marcus Gee---that you have to feel for all the trees being felled to get out their stuff. The paper has moved so far to the right that I now regard Jeffrey Simpson, who is a good, thoughtful conservative journalist, as a radical, whose column I relish daily.

The trouble is that Canadians who rely on the Globe and Mail and the other daily newspapers in English Canada for information and intelligent commentary have to sift through mountains of crap to glean the odd useful fact or insight. A few decades ago, Herbert Marcuse called this kind of thing the “repressive tolerance” of the press in the democratic world. Not a bad phrase for these terrible times.

During this time of war, and war propaganda, it’s useful to consider the role that Canada, blessed by not being in the front line, can play in the world. Before the United States was drawn into the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson gave an interview to a reporter from the New York World in which he outlined with prescience what it would mean to be draw into war: “It would mean that we should lose our heads with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong. It would mean that a majority of the people in this hemisphere would go war-mad, and quit thinking and devote their energies to destruction….Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fibre of our national life…”

Wilson’s and America’s tragedy was to be sucked into that war and the subsequent consequences were exactly as the president had warned that they would be.

Canada has a great choice to make today. We can allow ourselves to be pulled into bloody conflicts half a world away, either through direct participation in wars, or by giving up our capacity for critical thought about what is going on. The first is worse than the second, but the second is debilitating as well, and there are serious signs that we are far along this path. A country that is “neutral in fact as well as in name…impartial in thought as well as in action” again words from Woodrow Wilson on how America should relate to the war in Europe, can play a crucial role in these perilous times. Canada can strive to be a place where men and women can think about the questions that roil the world and can offer a space where those from war-torn countries can come and consider alternatives. Canada can offer its humanitarian aid and assistance to war torn lands, and Canada can send its forces to participate in genuine peace-keeping missions.

Let us not allow ourselves to be drawn into uncritical support for one side or another in the terrible ethnic and religious conflicts that are the curse of our time. A decade or maybe a century from now, after much more blood has been shed, it is likely that in the Middle East, a sovereign Israel will stand beside a sovereign Palestinian State. Neither side is capable of destroying the other. Seeing the broad outlines of the solution is easy enough. Getting there will require immense ingenuity and courage from people in many countries. At least, let us range Canadians on the side of those in the world who are trying to contribute to that positive outcome, however long it takes to achieve it.

While we are not getting much from the English language press in Canada on the Middle East crisis, the CBC offers some reporting that is useful, when the network is not hiding from its own shadow because it fears that the Harper government will privatize it if they win a majority in the next election. (With a majority Conservative government, the CBC will be privatized no matter how timorous they are.) Radio-Canada is better. The BBC newscasts on CBC TV have been excellent on the Middle East crisis---much better than their gutless reporting on Iraq. France 2, whose newscasts can be seen on TV 5, at 6.30 p.m. offers superb coverage of the Middle East.

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Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Strategic Realities in the Middle East

It is often and truthfully said that the first casualty of war is truth. A case in point is the interpretation of the Middle East crisis that Canadians are getting from much of the mainstream media and from the Harper government. The line adopted by the Harper government and fully endorsed on the editorial page of the Globe and Mail is that Israel, a peace loving sovereign state, has been attacked by Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that governs southern Lebanon and that Israel has legitimately and in “measured” fashion counteracted against this terrorist threat on its northern border. The Harper government refuses to call for an immediate ceasefire because it does not want to return to the status quo ante in which Hezbollah poses a continuing threat to Israel. Ceasefire yes, but only after Israel has obliterated Hezbollah----that is Ottawa’s line and the line of nearly all of Canada’s English language press.

This exceedingly one-sided picture excludes so much reality that it amounts to the worst sort of wartime propaganda.

A few strategic realities need to be kept in mind by Canadians to offset the simplicities being offered by Ottawa.

· Two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, have been fighting over parts of, or all of, a common territory since the creation of Israel in 1948, indeed even before that. That basic starting point is well known but is regularly left out of discussions of the Middle East question. Struggles of this kind in other parts of the world---for instance Ireland, the Balkans, and Kashmir to name a few---are extremely intractable and can continue for decades, even centuries.

· The Six Day War in 1967 dramatically altered the strategic situation in the Middle East. It left Israel occupying the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The occupied territories have been a battleground ever since. The settler movement in Israel, a powerful force in the country’s politics, has managed to established Israeli settlements whose populations now number several hundred thousand people. While Israel pulled its small settlements out of Gaza last year, the major settlements in the West Bank are quite another matter. The settlements pose an enormous stumbling block to a lasting peace with the Palestinians. Any Israeli government that decided to dismantle the major settlements would face enormous domestic resistance, possibly even civil war.

· The plight of the Palestinians has become a rallying cry for political mobilization throughout the Middle East. The question will not go away and it enflames the relationship between all the Muslim peoples of the region and the West. Even the governments of Arab states that are clients of the United States dare not criticize movements such as Hezbollah for fear of losing ground to their political opponents.

· The mainstream media in Canada largely insists on viewing the Middle East crisis through the prism of the American “war on terror”. Since the attacks on New York City and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has packaged its foreign policy under this rubric. The invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq were justified to the American people and the world as elements of the war on terror. Hamas and Hezbollah are depicted as terrorist organizations committed to the destruction of the state of Israel. More broadly terrorism is understood as the option chosen by those who hate the freedoms of the West and who are determined to establish theocratic regimes that exclude all but their own particular brands of Islam. The term “terror” is used to characterize acts of force that are launched by non-state actors, who resort to suicide bombings and the bombing of “soft” targets that result in large numbers of civilian casualties. The term “terror” is not used as an epithet to describe attacks carried out by state forces---aerial bombardment, artillery shelling, and tank incursions---that lead to huge civilian casualties. Even though about ninety percent of the casualties in the current fighting have been in Lebanon compared to about ten percent in Israel, the highly loaded term “terrorist” is applied only to one side in the conflict.

· The alternative to terror, according to leaders such as Tony Blair and George W. Bush, most recently promulgated by Blair in London yesterday at a press conference with the Iraqi prime minister, is democracy. Blair’s theory is that the struggle is between the regressive, primitive forces of terrorism and the modernizing forces of democracy. The terms “terrorism” and “democracy” have become slogans whose purpose is to stifle discussion and analysis both in the West and in the Middle East.

· The current struggles, on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon frontier and in Gaza were provoked by incursions into Israel and the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. In both cases, however, Israel seized on the provocations to launch major campaigns aimed at achieving strategic gains. In the south, the goal has been to undermine the Hamas government of the Palestinian Authority. In the north, the goal is to destroy the military power of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

· The United States, the supplier of both monetary aid and the purveyor of advanced weapons to Israel, has stood by and watched while Israel has carried out its assaults on both fronts. While wanting to appear concerned about civilian casualties in Gaza and in Lebanon, the Bush administration supports Israel’s strategic objective on both fronts, as does the Harper government in Canada. The visit of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Beirut yesterday can only be described as surreal. She met with the Lebanese prime minister who was recently welcomed to the White House and touted by George W. Bush as the leader of Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution. Now Lebanon lies in ruins as the U.S. does nothing more than a little hand wringing.

· The U.S. wants to see a NATO force deployed in southern Lebanon, along the Israeli border. The purpose of the force would be to take on whatever remains of Hezbollah. There is a strong possibility that in southern Lebanon, a NATO force would be resisted as an occupying army just as the NATO forces in Afghanistan are seen as outsiders by a large segment of the population.

· The United States has strategic aims in the region that go well beyond Hamas and Hezbollah. Dating back to the last days of the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War, every subsequent American administration has regarded the oil reserves of the Middle East as a strategic American concern. The goal has been, and remains, maintaining American control over the oil states of the Persian Gulf and preventing any other great power from gaining control of the oil of the region. The rising power that most concerns the Bush administration today is Iran. With Iran’s rival Iraq in a state of ungovernable chaos, Iran threatens to become the power around which other Middle Eastern states could revolve---Shia-Sunni internecine struggles notwithstanding. The struggle over Iran’s intention to process uranium, supposedly with the intention of acquiring fuel to generate nuclear power, has set off a fateful contest between Washington and Teheran. Whether Iran’s goal is to follow in the footsteps of Pakistan and India to build its own nuclear bombs, no one can say for certain. Armed with nuclear weapons, Iran would gain authority in the struggle against Israel, a state experts believe possesses as many as two hundred nuclear weapons. Both the U.S. and Israel are determined to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

· Hezbollah, which emerged in southern Lebanon in response to the Israeli incursion into that country in 1982, has political sponsors and weapons suppliers both in Syria and Iran. The current conflict could widen into a much larger war that would involve both Syria and Iran. With the Bush administration at a low ebb in public support in the United States, attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities---advocated by some neo-conservatives---would be a very difficult sell. If either Syria or Iran were to become directly involved or implicated in the present fighting, however, such a wider war could erupt in the very near future.

· Canadians, like people all over the world, have a very great interest in preventing the fighting in the Middle East from lighting the fuse of a wider war. As a member of the United Nations, Canada is committed to halting the human suffering that is occurring as soon as possible. Canada, however, is in a very different position from the United States. As the world’s leading imperial power, the U.S. is determined to maintain is position of hegemony in the Middle East. As a country that now imports over fifty per cent of its oil, the U.S. has become highly dependent on sources of petroleum from this dangerous part of the world. Canada, on the other hand, is not a world power and has no imperial stakes on the line in the Middle East. Moreover, Canada is capable of meeting its own petroleum needs from domestic sources, although NAFTA rules force us presently to continue exporting oil to the U.S. even in the event of a shortage of supplies from offshore.

· Canada would do well to consider the conflict in the Middle East from the perspective of a North American middle power. Canadians have a very great interest in halting a conflict which has put tens of thousands of Canadians in the line of fire in Lebanon. As a country widely respected around the world for its commitment to fairness and to peacekeeping, Canada may be able to play a role along with other countries in calling for sanity, an immediate ceasefire, and the provision of humanitarian aid to those who are in need. Canada should not line up unequivocally on one side or the other in the Middle East. We are witnessing a conflict that historical precedent sadly informs us is likely to flare for a long time to come. Canada should do what it can to contain the conflict and to aid in finding interim and long-term solutions. For a start, we need a dialogue that is drained, to the extent possible, of inflammatory and simplistic rhetoric, and partial truths.

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Friday, July 21, 2006

CALL FOR AN IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE

While Jack Layton and Bill Graham, among others, have made useful statements critical of the one-side position adopted by the Harper government in the Middle East crisis, much more needs to be done, and quickly.

A human catastrophe is in the making in Lebanon. Defenceless people are being massacred and driven from their shattered homes. A country, painfully rebuilt in the aftermath of its civil war, is having its infrastructure smashed, and its water and electric power systems, pulverized. In addition to the plight of the people of Lebanon, there is our special responsibility---to safeguard the tens of thousands of Canadians who remain in that country. Unless the fighting is halted, more Canadians, including some who are cut off from any way to reach an evacuation port, are bound to be among the future victims.

In his militarist posturing, Stephen Harper has utterly forgotten that the number one task of the Canadian government internationally is to ensure the safety of Canadians. Never in the history of our country have so many Canadians been exposed to merciless aerial bombardment. With thousands of Canadians directly in the line of fire, Ottawa needs to lend its weight to those in the world who are insisting on a ceasefire.

Members and supporters of the three opposition parties who hold a majority of seats in parliament should demand that their parties call on Ottawa to lead the fight in the United Nations for an immediate ceasefire---a ceasefire that would end the bombing of Lebanon and the rocket attacks on Israeli towns and cities. New Democrats, Liberals and Bloquistes should call for parliament to be convened at once to debate the Middle East crisis and the plight of Canadians in Lebanon. Stephen Harper does not have a majority and should not be allowed to act as though he does.

In particular, the candidates for the leadership of the Liberal Party need to speak plainly and forcefully now. If they claim to offer the country an alternative, progressive leadership, let them show the quality of that leadership when it counts.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

STEPHEN HARPER'S FOREIGN POLICY

Against the backdrop of flames and devastation in the Middle East, the Harper government has adopted a foreign policy that is sharply at odds with Canadian practice over the past four decades.

On board the Canadian Forces plane taking him to Europe for the G 8 summit, Stephen Harper stated that Israel’s military assault in Lebanon in response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers was “measured”. What was new was the unequivocal backing of Israel adopted by Ottawa. Indeed, at the time he made the statement, Harper’s support for Israel was more open ended than the positions taken by any of the other G 8 leaders. Even the Americans, unlike Harper, urged the Israeli’s to exercise restraint.

For the past four decades, since the American war in Vietnam, while Canada has remained a member of NATO and NORAD, this country has pursued a foreign policy distinct from that of Washington. Not only did Canada resist American pressure to send troops to Vietnam, it stayed out of the American led invasion of Iraq in 2003. In addition, Canada led the fight for the adoption of the international treaty against the use of land mines, which the U.S. failed to sign, and signed on to the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto environmental accord, which the U.S. also opposed.

Following the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, Canada positioned itself more closely to the European members of the western alliance than to the U.S. and Britain. While Ottawa did not lead the coalition of countries in opposition to the Bush administration’s Iraq adventure, it broadly followed the line set down by France and Germany. The decision of the Martin government to stay out of Washington’s Anti-Ballistic Missile Defence system strengthened Canada’s relative foreign policy autonomy.

During his few months in office, Stephen Harper has energetically aligned Canada with the Anglo “Gang of Three”, the U.S., Britain, and Australia, making it effectively a “Gang of Four”.

Since his first day in office, Stephen Harper has contemptuously dropped Ottawa’s stance of the past forty years. Against a weak and divided parliamentary opposition, he pushed for and won approval for a two year extension of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan. While it was the Liberals who first got us into Afghanistan, Harper has made the mission a muscular extension of his pro-American militarism. Along with the fifteen billion dollar injection of new funds into the Canadian military, the emphasis is no longer on peacekeeping, but on what is euphemistically called peace making, or more bluntly on war making. Now in the Middle East, Harper has dropped the more even handed policies of Canada of the past. While Paul Martin shifted Canada’s stance closer to that of Israel and Washington, Harper has completed the shift in no uncertain terms.

None of this should come as any surprise. Long before becoming prime minister, Stephen Harper signaled where he stood on foreign policy and made it plain that at the centre of his thinking was the need for a much tighter alliance with Washington. Shortly after winning the leadership of the Canadian Alliance, in his maiden speech in the House of Commons as Leader of the Opposition on May 28, 2002, Harper made the case for an Alliance motion that charged the Liberal government with failure in its management of relations with the U.S. Harper’s thesis was that the Chretien government had been insufficiently staunch in its support for the positions adopted by the U.S. administration.

Harper accused Chretien of “open meddling in U.S. domestic politics prior to the 2000 presidential election when the Prime Minister stated his preference with regard to the outcome of that election.” He quoted the comments of the former political counselor at the U.S. embassy, David Jones, who said in January 2001 that Chretien exhibits “a tin ear for foreign affairs, especially those involving the United States.” Harper’s conclusion: “It is no secret that this poisoned the relationship between the government and the new American administration.”

Harper then broadened his attack on the Chretien government, beyond trade issues, to attack it for its entire foreign policy stance vis a vis the United States. “Downright hostility to the United States, anti-Americanism, has come to characterize other dimensions of Canadian policy,” he declared. “In 1996-97 Canada aggressively pushed forward with the treaty to ban landmines without giving due consideration to U.S. concerns about the potential implications for its security forces in South Korea. What did we end up with? We ended up with a ban on landmines that few major landmine producers or users have signed,” Harper charged. Having dismissed an anti-landmines treaty signed by most of the nations of the world in Ottawa, Harper went on to tow the Bush administration’s line on the development of an anti-ballistic missile defence system. “Most recently we have been inclined to offer knee-jerk resistance to the United States on national missile defence despite the fact that Canada is confronted by the same threats from rogue nations equipped with ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction as is the United States.” Harper’s litany of complaints against the Chretien government ended with this nod to those who allege that Canada’s refugee system makes it vulnerable to terrorists: “The government has not adequately addressed the matter of security in the context of continental security. Because of the unreformed nature of our refugee determination system, we continue to be subject to unique internal security and continental security dangers.”

Having dismissed Jean Chretien as a leader who was always anti-free trade, Harper commended Brian Mulroney for having “understood a fundamental truth. He understood that mature and intelligent Canadian leaders must share the following perspective: the United States is our closest neighbour, our best ally, our biggest customer and our most consistent friend.”

Harper concluded with his own peroration, his set of principles for dealing with the United States. “Not only does the United States have this special relationship to us, it is the world leader when it comes to freedom and democracy…..If the United States prospers, we prosper. If the United States hurts or is angry, we will be hurt. If it is ever broadly attacked, we will surely be destroyed.”

Here was a theory of Canadian-American relations that allowed for no differentiation between the interests of the United States and those of Canada. If there were problems in the relationship, it was because Canadian leaders had been insufficiently devoted to supporting the United States on all essential matters of continental and global policy.

Since taking office, Harper has not only beefed up the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, he has signed on to a broader role for NORAD which will mean that elements of the Canadian Forces will often end up under the command of Americans in the land and sea defence of North America, as well as in the traditional aerospace operations of the alliance.

No one should have any doubt about where Stephen Harper will lead this country should the Conservatives win a majority in the next election. Not only will he remain a proud member of the Gang of Four, he will undertake initiatives to pursue Deep Integration with the United States in a host of economic areas. This neo-conservative will not be satisfied until the military alliance stands side by side with a customs union, a fortress North America approach to security, and if conditions allow, the adoption of a common North American currency.

In the meantime, Harper will take tactical steps to humanize his image as he did today when he announced that he would fly in his Canadian Forces plane from Paris to Cyprus to pick up a hundred or more Canadians who have been evacuated from Lebanon. He made it clear, though, that this did not signal a more even handed view of the conflict in the Middle East or that he was responding to his critics.

Whatever tactics they decide on, and however contradictory those may be, progressive Canadians should heed the writing on the wall and determine that their highest priority should be to deny this man and his party the unfettered rule they would gain with the election of a majority Conservative government in the next election.

The Trouble With Ignatieff

As he seeks to convince us that he should be our next prime minister, the trouble with Michael Ignatieff, is not the decades he spent outside Canada. Canadians have consistently thought highly of their fellow citizens who go abroad, win laurels and return to play a role in this country.

The trouble with Ignatieff, a pro-imperialist who is socially progressive, is that his outlook on the world is hardly likely to foster political unity among Canadians who are opposed to Stephen Harper, presumably the goal of the Liberals in selecting a new leader.

Ignatieff is a self proclaimed, muscular crusader who is committed to the idea that there is an American Empire and that it has a vital role to play as the last, best hope of people who live in some of the world’s so-called “failed states.” On the American Empire, he has written that “it is an empire…without consciousness of itself as such. But that does not make it any less of an empire, that is, an attempt to permanently order the world of states and markets according to its national interests.” More controversially, in 2003 he declared himself in favour of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. Three months before the American assault, Ignatieff wrote in the New York Times Magazine that “the case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.” In his book Empire Lite, also before the invasion, he wrote that “the Iraqi opposition will never overcome tyranny without an American and British military victory, followed by a long occupation.”

When the U.S. and the “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq, the Liberal government of Jean Chretien kept Canada out of the war on the grounds that the invasion did not have the backing of the United Nations. Canada took the position adopted by many American allies in Europe and in other parts of the world that the Bush administration’s doctrine that the United States had the right to invade states it saw as posing a threat to it undermined international law and the system of state sovereignty that has been the theoretical foundation of the global system for over three centuries. In that vitally important debate, Michael Ignatieff was on the side of unilateralism.

Ignatieff’s pro-imperial utterances and his support for the invasion of Iraq have placed him in a very select company, alongside the intellectual hardliners whose signature is their relish for “realism” and their enthusiasm for the use of force. The others on this terrain such as Robert Kagan, William Kristol and Robert Kaplan are dependable neo-conservative stalwarts. This makes Ignatieff that distinct oddity, a liberal who travels with a flock of American eagles.

Coming to the side of George W. Bush when most of humanity was moving in the opposite direction has made Ignatieff a new neo-conservative. This is not as strange as one might imagine. Several decades ago, it was liberals who believed in America’s global mission, who made the journey across the political spectrum to become the original neo-conservatives.

As things have gone wrong for the U.S. in Iraq, splits have developed in the neo-conservative movement. In his recent book, America at the Crossroads, Francis Fukuyama broke with his erstwhile neo-conservative political allies with a fierce denunciation of American foreign policy. He asserted that the Bush administration’s doctrine, on which the invasion of Iraq was based, blurred the crucial distinction between pre-emptive war----the invasion of a country about to launch an assault of its own---and preventive war---the invasion of a country that could constitute a threat at some point in the future (the Iraq case). Fukuyama argued that with its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration “announced an open-ended doctrine of regime change and preventive war; and it implicitly asserted a principle of American exceptionalism in its self-proclaimed benevolent ordering of the world.”

While Michael Ignatieff is far from happy with how the American intervention in Iraq worked out, he has nowhere said that it was wrong in the first place. He has castigated the Bush administration for “stretching the evidence” on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he has not repudiated the logic that led him to support the invasion in the first place.

For Canadians, as citizens of a middle power living next door to the world’s only superpower, these questions are of fundamental importance. Canadians have always understood that the well-being of this country rests on multilateralism and the strengthening of international law. When powerful states take unilateral action, outside the boundaries of international law, they make the world a more dangerous place, not a safer one. There are cases where states need to come together under U.N. auspices to intervene in countries such as Rwanda to take collective action against genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But, such cases should not be confused with that of Iraq whose invasion was neither sanctioned by the U.N., nor justified on the grounds that it was needed to avert a human catastrophe.

While Michael Ignatieff has said that he does not now favour sending Canadian troops to Iraq, the question remains whether he would have joined George W. Bush’s coalition of the willing in 2003 had he been the leader of the Canadian government at the time. Based on everything he has written and said before and since the invasion, there is every reason to believe he would have made that choice. He is now a fervent supporter of the two year extension of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, a decision of the Canadian government about which a very large number of Canadians are uneasy.

When he launched his leadership campaign, Michael Ignatieff said he believed the Liberal Party should lean to the left politically. Given his pro-imperial views, Ignatieff could end up being a very divisive figure among progressive Canadians, in the way Tony Blair has become exactly that---a millstone around the neck of the centre-left in Britain. Now the most unpopular leader of the Labour Party since the Second World War, Blair has opened the way for what has seemed unthinkable, the return of the lack-lustre Conservatives to office in the next British general election.

Ignatieff was recruited by Liberal insiders who believed that he would be a second Pierre Trudeau. Instead, because his foreign policy views are offensive to so many people in exactly the part of the political spectrum that is crucial to any hope of Liberal success, his choice as Liberal leader could ensure the victory of Stephen Harper in the next election.

Michael Ignatieff and Warrior Intellectuals

Timothy Brennan’s article exposes the vanities of the new breed of warrior intellectuals who have signed on to the 21st century imperial project. Whatever their intellectual and ideological origins, and they are various, Michael Ignatieff, Niall Ferguson, Robert Kaplan and Thomas Friedman, among others, are self-proclaimed guardians of civilization against the onslaught of the new barbarians. What unites these thinkers is more their tone of studied hardness than any intellectual consistency. In their approaches to the challenges of failed states, terrorism, and Islamic jihadism, they have contempt for those they see as soft liberals who hope for a world in which tolerance, the rule of law, greater social equality and peace might be sought without the power of empire to sustain them.

When he is asked tough questions about why he supported the American-led invasion of Iraq, Michael Ignatieff quickly mentions that he has been shot at. Apparently this arresting fact is among his qualifications to lead provincial Canadians who understand little of the real world. The fact that most Canadians were right that the invasion of Iraq would make the world a less safe place and that he was wrong doesn’t come into it. It’s matter of tone, of pose.

It’s much the same when Niall Ferguson dares to challenge political correctness by quoting Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” approvingly. How better to shock us into realizing that despite the blots on its record, such as the massacre of hundreds of civilians by British troops at Amritsar in India in 1919, the British Empire was a good thing on the whole. His message is that the world needs America to take up where the British Raj left off.

Robert Kaplan, in a characteristic phrase, declares that “Machiavelli says, good men bent on doing good must know how to be bad.” The realists love pithy, epigrammatic phrases that highlight their toughness.

Not all has been going well for these thinkers, however. The debacle in Iraq has been prompting some to leave their ranks. With his recent book, America at the Crossroads, Francis Fukuyama, whose The End of History and the Last Man, proclaimed that the American way of life would become that of the whole world, has abandoned the cause. He has written that the invasion of Iraq was a foolish error that America could ill afford and has announced his departure from the ranks of the neo-conservatives. Lately too, as a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party, Ignatieff has tried to put his pithy past behind him.

Rather than converging for underlying intellectual reasons, I believe these thinkers adopted a common muscular tone when it was opportune for them to do so. Now that the winds are less favourable for empire, these thinkers are likely to be blown to quite disparate destinations.

Canada Should Pull Its Troops Out of Afghanistan

Canada should pull its troops out of Afghanistan. The West’s mission there is no less a “march of folly”, to use historian Barbara Tuchman’s phrase about the U.S. war in Vietnam, than was the Soviet attempt to impose a regime in Afghanistan with its invasion in 1979. The Soviet invasion was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Empire. Sixty years earlier, in 1919, the British decided that their own imperial effort to dominate Afghanistan was doomed and they recognized Afghan independence and withdrew to the other side of the Khyber Pass.

In our day, the United States is involved in an unwinnable struggle for hegemony in Iraq, Afganistan, and much of the rest of the Middle East and Central Asia, from which Canada should stand aside.

In Afghanistan, Canadian forces are not engaged in peacekeeping. They are involved on one side in a civil war. While Canadians have been rightly proud of this country’s decision to stay out of Iraq, they have paid insufficient attention to the fact that the former Liberal government drew us ever more deeply into Afghanistan. The mission now entrusted to Canadian and other coalition troops in southern Afghanistan, under the command of Canadian Brigadier-General David Fraser, is no less a war mission than the campaigns being fought by the British and the Americans in Iraq.

When President George W. Bush paid a surprise visit to Kabul this week, he spoke, as always, of his determination to prosecute the war on terror. The so-called war on terror is really a struggle in which the United States and its allies are attempting to impose their hegemony on a large part of the world. (The rejoinder that the Americans had to invade Afghanistan to retaliate against the attacks of September 11, 2001 is a non-starter. They had as much reason to invade Saudi Arabia from which much of the financing of the attacks and most of the hijackers came.) In the process, the values that are most dear to us, democracy, human rights, equality for women, freedom of speech and the right to publish our thoughts are being preached in a contest that has little to do with any of these. In many regions of the world, democracy, freedom and human rights are seen as cynical slogans, Orwellian double-speak, mouthed by those who want oil and other natural resources, and the strategic pathways, such as Afghanistan, that lead to these resources.

In 1900, Mark Twain wrote a warning about phony humanitarianism that rings true today. “I said to myself,” wrote Twain about the American intervention in the Philippines a century ago “here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.”

“But I have thought some more, since then…and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem”

“And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

If Canada and the other western powers pull out of Afghanistan, what will be the consequences for that country? The struggle involving the government in Kabul, the remnants of the Taliban and regional warlords will continue. At the end of the civil war, the regime that emerges is unlikely to look much look a democracy that practices human rights. It could even be a fascistic theocracy. On the other hand, the presence of western powers, perceived in this region of the world as the forces of imperialism, will never succeed in imposing a western-style system in the country. For centuries, the Afghans have shown an ornery tendency to throw out foreign invaders. And when, years from now, the people of the West decide to pull out of Afghanistan, withdrawal at that late date could leave an even more battered country and an even more tyrannical regime in its wake.

In the 19th century, the Europeans thought it was only natural that their empires should rule much of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. In the 21st century, the Americans have not yet learned that this is folly, although recent public opinion polls in the U.S. suggest that the truth is dawning on them.

Not least, Canadians should pull their troops out of Afghanistan for an old-fashioned, even politically incorrect, reason. It is not in our interest to put our young men and women in harm’s way in a struggle that will not be won.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

The Threat of a Wider War

While it’s far from inevitable, it is not unlikely that the United States, possibly in tandem with Israel, will launch a military strike against Iran in the next few months. Washington and Tehran have been trading threats and counter threats in an escalation that could end in war. Last week, the Bush White House issued its National Security Strategy report for 2006 which included the stark warning that the United States “may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran.” The words from Washington are ominously similar in tone and content to the language that preceded the invasion of Iraq three years ago. In a recent speech, Vice President Dick Cheney spoke of “meaningful consequences” if Iran did not back down from its insistence that it has the right to pursue a uranium enrichment program, which Tehran claims is for peaceful purposes only. The White House report stated that the U.S. “will continue to take all necessary measures to protect our national and economic security against the adverse effects” of the “bad conduct” of the Iranian government.

What makes the crisis especially worrying is that both regimes, the Bush administration and the Iranian government, are desperate in their own ways. In a recent poll, only 44 per cent of Americans approved of the president’s handling of terrorism and homeland security with only 36 per cent positive about his overall performance. With midterm elections approaching in the autumn, Republicans have been abandoning the administration on issues such as whether a firm based in the United Arab Emirates should be allowed to manage American ports. Most Americans now fear that Iraq is sinking into civil war and that the American mission there has become a quagmire.

For some neo-conservative strategists in Washington, a way out of the dilemma could be to widen the war by launching an assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and perhaps more importantly, on the scientists and technicians who are crucial to the country’s nuclear ambitions. With all its attendant risks, an aerial and missile attack on targets in Iran, with no land invasion, could eliminate any potential nuclear threat from that quarter and could stop the flow of aid to insurgents in Iraq that the Pentagon alleges has been coming from Iran. In the best case scenario, the assault could strengthen internal dissent in Iran, triggering the fall of its regime. Such a wider war, some believe, could win back domestic support for George W. Bush and prevent his second term from becoming a shambles.

At least as desperate is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran who was elected last June from a restricted list of candidates, purged of opponents of the policies of the Islamic Republic. The Tehran government has faced increasing dissent from vocal critics and the rising impatience of the Iranian people. To firm up his base of support, the president has adopted a strategy of inflaming nationalist passions against what he depicts as the American threat to limit Iran’s right to pursue its own nuclear strategy. Pouring kerosene on the flames, he has described the Nazi holocaust of European Jewry as a “myth” and has declared that Israel should “be wiped off the face of the earth.” Iran has ominously threatened the United States with “harm and pain” if the U.S. tries to punish Iran through sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council.



Pointing out that both sides are moving toward a “point of no return”, an editorial in the New York Times concluded that U.S. efforts to get the Iran nuclear issue referred to the United Nations Security Council has “unnecessarily upped the ante.”

If European, Russian and Chinese efforts to defuse the crisis fail and the United States attacks Iran, there will be armed combat in distinct but interconnected theatres stretching from Iraq, through Iran and Afghanistan into the border regions of Pakistan. In its own way, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be subsumed within this wider struggle.

Though this has been underreported in Canada, political analysts and governments around the world are weighing the likelihood and consequences of such a wider war. The German publication Der Spiegel has reported that the Americans have been holding talks with allies in the Middle East to prepare the ground for a possible military strike against Iran. In the event of a much more extensive conflict, Canada’s mission in southern Afghanistan would be ensnared within it.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s clichés about how Canadians do not “cut and run” and do not choose to sit “in the bleachers” do not serve us well in such a perilous hour. Now is the time to consider how Canada can help slow the rush to a wider war and whether it is in our national interest to involve ourselves in it should it erupt.

Paul Martin's Legacy

As Paul Martin exits 24 Sussex Drive, he remains for Canadians a complex and contradictory character. And in that he personifies the Liberal Party, and even the country itself.

Capitalist to the core, an entrepreneur, and a believer in the virtues of the market and of free trade, Paul Martin was one of the few successful businessmen ever to reach the prime minister’s office. In 1973, he became president of Canada Steamship Lines and in 1981 he bought the company from Power Corporation’s Paul Desmarais. That risky venture made him a very wealthy man. While CSL’s headquarters remained in Montreal, its decision to expand its international operations and to fly foreign flags over many of its vessels prompted repeated accusations that the company was avoiding Canadian taxes and was paying workers much lower wages than those received by its employees in Canada.

Along with Jean Chretien, whom he royally disliked, Martin achieved power following the federal election of 1993 when he was appointed finance minister. He will be remembered as the man who cut federal social spending to the bone in a complete repudiation of the famous Red Book, the platform on which the Liberals won office. In his 1995 budget, Martin slashed social spending relative to the size of the economy to levels lower than any seen since 1951. Critics believe those cuts gravely undermined the nation’s public health care system and opened the door to the rapid growth of the private delivery of health services.

There was, however, another side to Paul Martin. He was a genuine, although cautious reformer, in the manner of that most durable of Liberal leaders, William Lyon Mackenzie King. His fiscal toughness, he would argue, turned Canada’s economy around, replacing federal deficits with surpluses. As prime minister---under pressure from the NDP, to be sure---Martin reversed the cuts to federal social spending he had made as finance minister. In September 2004, his momentous health care deal with the provinces put billions of dollars in federal funds back into the system. On the eve of the election campaign, he negotiated an historic agreement with aboriginal leaders and first ministers that pledged the spending of billions of dollars on aboriginal development in the years to come. During the election campaign, Martin announced a far reaching public, not for profit, child care program. (With Stephen Harper in office, the aboriginal program could be scrapped and the child care program is a dead duck.)

In a poem about Mackenzie King, mid twentieth century political thinker F.R. Scott captured the essence of Liberal oscillation between cautious conservatism and occasional radicalism in words that could have been written about Paul Martin: “He never let his on the one hand know what his on the other hand was doing.”

What makes Canada unusual in the advanced world is that a centre party has been its dominant political force for many decades. The norm in other countries is for powerful parties on the left and right to overshadow the centre. Because it is a two headed monster that faces both left and right, the Liberal Party is loathed by its opponents for what they see as its lack of principles. A centre party is rarely an innovator. The Liberal Party has often eaten the lunch of its foes----taking ideas for social programs from the NDP, and serving up tax cuts to keep the political right at bay.

When he was sworn in as prime minister in December 2003, Paul Martin seemed set for a long stay in power. His accession to the highest office, however, came only after a lengthy struggle waged by Martin and his followers within the Liberal Party to unseat Jean Chretien, a battle born of hubris and idealism. Determined to clean up the Liberal Party in Quebec, Martin cancelled the Sponsorship Program on his first day in office. In response to the tabling of Auditor General Sheila Fraser’s devastating report in February 2004, Martin established a commission of inquiry under John H. Gomery, a judge of the Quebec Superior Court, to investigate the mismanagement of the program.

Behind closed doors, members of the Chretien wing of the Liberal Party condemned the calling of the Gomery inquiry as a catastrophic blunder. Jean Chretien, they said, would have shrugged the whole thing off and gotten away with it. But having acknowledged the seriousness of the scandal, Martin was pummeled for it through two election campaigns by all three opposition leaders who refused to concede that he might have been acting out of a genuine determination to clean things up.

Rarely eloquent, Martin nonetheless showed real passion for Canada, and in that he was unique among the federal party leaders. He rejected the idea that Canada should participate in George W. Bush’s missile defence scheme. Martin’s frequent warnings about the dangers of American domination of Canada were airily dismissed by his opponents who saw in them the flailing of a desperate man. What they did not credit is that he had discovered on the job what previous prime ministers had learned---that it is very difficult for Canada to survive as an independent nation on the doorstep of a superpower.

Martin’s tragedy was that he took office as a Liberal leader from Quebec who hoped to win the hearts of Quebecers in a way that Jean Chretien never could. Instead, ensnared in the sponsorship scandal, Martin presided over a precipitous decline in federalist fortunes in Quebec.

The election campaign that sealed Paul Martin’s fate was conducted with all the dignity and decorum of a bare fisted brawl in a hockey arena. But even though Martin was continually bloodied by his three major opponents and by a howling pack of journalists, he did not complain. Although he left the rink battered and bruised, he did so with considerable grace.

How will he be remembered? Unlike most politicians, Martin is a good listener, with a voracious appetite for new ideas and perspectives on the world. An energetic and youthful man for his years, he will find useful outlets for his passions. As time passes, it may be realized that he grew while in office and gained a wider and deeper understanding of this complex country and its people. He may even be regarded with some affection especially as people rethink the unfairness of the shabby treatment he received at the hands of political opponents and the media.

Harper's Not For Turning

A popular theory that has emerged during this election campaign is that Stephen Harper has moderated and that the former head of the National Citizen’s Coalition is no longer the hard-line conservative he once was. Some analysts have speculated that he could even end up like former Ontario Premier Bill Davis in office, a mellow, centrist who would not rock the Canadian boat.

People who make such comments are whistling past the graveyard. In recent decades, both in Canada and abroad, neo-conservatives have not moderated when they have taken office. If anything, they have become more hard-line. The records of a quartet of conservatives eloquently illustrate the point:

· In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was the first of the major neo-conservatives to come to power in a U.K. election that opened the door to what came to be called the Thatcher Revolution. Within a year of her victory, her harsh monetary policies plunged Britain into a severe recession. Many industrial jobs lost during the Thatcher years were never regained. The Thatcher government privatized telephone and electric power utilities and water distribution companies at low prices that were so advantageous to investors that former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan accused her of “selling the family silver.” During her decade in office, as under the other neo-conservative regimes of the quartet, the income gap between the affluent and the rest of the population widened appreciably. “The lady’s not for turning”, it was said of Margaret Thatcher who became known as the Iron Lady, a tribute to her refusal to compromise.

· The year after Thatcher’s victory in Britain, Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House, with a pledge that he would restore America to its former glory. The key elements of his program were tax cuts and a steep increase in military spending. Reagan’s policies drove the U.S. government to massive deficits. By the time he had been president for five years, the United States had become a net debtor nation----America owed more to foreigners than foreigners owed to Americans, for the first time since 1919. Reagan’s legacy, like Thatcher’s, was the loss of millions of jobs in the industrial heartland of the United States, jobs that were later replaced by what were nicknamed “McJobs”, low paying positions in the service sector of the economy. Genial though the Gipper was, he also believed in staying the course.

· Mike Harris rode the Common Sense Revolution to power in Ontario in 1995. During the election campaign that year, Harris pledged deep tax cuts, and promised to pay for them through steep reductions in all government programs, except for those in the areas of health care, classroom education and law enforcement. Upon assuming office, he cut the payments to those on welfare---the most hard up people in the province. He delivered on his income tax cuts, handsomely rewarding the highest income earners with savings of thousands of dollars a year. By the time his successor Ernie Eves was defeated in the election of 2003, the Conservatives had downloaded responsibilities to municipalities that couldn’t afford them and had left the educational system in a shambles. Whenever he was asked if he would moderate his programs, Mike Harris always answered that Ontarians voted for what they got.

· In his youth, the playboy son of a well-positioned father, George W. Bush seemed to have little on his mind when he ran for president in 2000. He promised lower taxes and won applause at rallies when he talked of restoring the military greatness of America. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 gave Bush a mission and brought out the latent ideologue in him. Since that date, America has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and in his second inaugural address last January, Bush made this bombastic pledge: “America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof.” Under Bush, America’s military is mired in a war it seems unable to win, and the United States is plunging ever more into debt to the rest of the world. At home, George W. Bush has created a surveillance state in which the government spies on the people, and has made court appointments that could imperil the right of women to abortions.

Is it fair to anticipate that Stephen Harper is cut from the same cloth as the members of the quartet and that he has not moderated or “evolved” to use his own word? The signs that the Conservative leader is an ideologue with a strongly right-wing agenda are readily at hand, his recent outburst about the courts and the civil service, being only the latest example. In power, Harper will reopen the debate about Canada signing on to U.S. missile defence and is likely to cancel Canada’s commitment to the Kyoto environmental accord. He refuses to commit himself to honoring the far-reaching aboriginal development program agreed to by first ministers last autumn. He will not throw Ottawa’s weight behind the establishment of publicly funded, not for profit, childcare across the country. And, as he said on day one of the election campaign, he plans to reopen the issue of same-sex marriage.

Perhaps the best clue that Harper has not moderated comes from his commitment to resolve the so-called fiscal imbalance in Canada. In plain English that means that a Harper government would sharply reduce Ottawa’s role in setting the nation’s socio-economic agenda. That pledge, one of Harper’s top five priorities, could well become his mantra as he slashes government programs in the days to come.

Mulroney's Children

Disillusioned by politics, politicians and the continuous talk of scandal, Canadians could end up voting in record low numbers on January 23. Despite the low expectations, this is looking to be an historic federal election----the election in which “Mulroney’s children” take charge of the Canadian state.

The victory of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives in the 1988 federal election was the last hurrah of the old system of three national parties in Canada---the PCs, Liberals and New Democrats. In the election which followed in 1993, two new parties spawned from the old Mulroney coalition---the Bloc Quebecois, winning 54 seats and the Reform Party, with 52 seats, charged into parliament, changing the shape of Canadian politics forever. Reform and its successors, the Canadian Alliance and the Conservative Party of Canada (formed through a merger with what was left of the PCs in 2003) grew out of the political culture of Alberta, quickly establishing a strong base throughout western Canada. The Bloc Quebecois brought the Quebec sovereignists to Ottawa as a major force under the leadership of Lucien Bouchard, former deputy Prime Minister in the government of Brian Mulroney.

Reform, disillusioned with Brian Mulroney and his obsession with Quebec, and the BQ, furious at the failure of the Meech Lake Constitutional Accord in 1990, were Mulroney’s children----born on the wrong side of the blanket, to be sure.

Because of the size of the Liberal majority in 1993----they won 177 seats---it seemed on the surface that Canada would go on as before. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Only Ontario’s massive attachment to the federal Liberals in the elections of 1993, 1997, 2000, and to a lesser extent in 2004, kept that illusion alive. The federal Liberals clamped the lid on Mulroney’s children, but Quebec nationalism and Alberta regionalism, the two most decentralist political forces in the country, were not to be denied indefinitely.

While the regional fires burned, the Liberals and the NDP, the remaining champions of what can be called the traditional “Canadian system”, carried on as before, promoting a federalism in which Ottawa would play a key role in shaping the nation’s socio-economic agenda. It was the political fallout from the sponsorship scandal, of course, that disabled the Liberal Party, the great bulwark of the Canadian system.

The forces of decentralization seem poised to take complete charge of the Canadian state on January 23, with the Conservatives set to sweep English Canada and the BQ about to increase its dominance in Quebec. While the Conservatives and the Bloc have very different political cultures and values, what unites them is their desire to dramatically lessen the role of Ottawa. When Stephen Harper puts correcting the “fiscal imbalance” on his list of top priorities, he is doing much more than holding out an olive branch to soft nationalists in Quebec. He is being true to the essential culture of his own political movement.

People who assume that a parliament dominated by the Conservatives and the Bloc, with Stephen Harper as prime minister, cannot not last long, imagine wrongly. While a showdown between Harper and Gilles Duceppe will come sooner or later, shifting tax points to the provinces and reducing the role of Ottawa in setting national standards for social policies, creates a common agenda that can take them far as de facto allies.

Meanwhile, the Liberals and New Democrats---with important differences between them to be sure---contend against each other in a struggle that is dooming both. The Liberals do this by treating social democratic voters as a spigot to be turned on at election time, and turned off when the Grits are safely in power.

The NDP, which played a crucial role in picking the timing of the election and shaping the central issue as the scandals of the Liberals----even asking the RCMP to investigate Ralph Goodale and the Finance Department---helped Stephen Harper on his way. Fearful of being crowded out of the campaign, the NDP strategy was to continually attack the Liberals, while scarcely mentioning Harper at all. That way, it was hoped, the Liberals would be blocked from winning over soft NDP voters in the last days of the campaign.

What both Paul Martin and Jack Layton did not anticipate was how thoroughly Stephen Harper had learned the lessons of 2004. Moderating his image, he is on the verge of an historic breakthrough in Ontario. And the NDP has helped de-fang him.

The strategies of the Liberals and the NDP lie in tatters as Mulroney’s children stand ready to inherit the kingdom. For those who those who have believed passionately in the Canada in which Ottawa plays a strong role in shaping the social policies of the nation, these are dispiriting days indeed.

While not taking anything away from efforts to save what can be saved between now and election day, it is clear that the parties that favour the Canadian system will have to be rebuilt from the ground up after January 23.

This Is a National Crisis

(This article was originally written in 2005)

The leaders of all three opposition parties insist that what Canadians face is a crisis of the Liberal Party, not a national crisis. Formally, they are right. The sordid spectacle at the Gomery Inquiry has exposed deep corruption at the heart of the regime of former Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

The problem is that the imminent demise of the Liberal party and government will trigger a fundamental national crisis that has been implicit in the structure of Canadian politics since 1993. Since the federal election of that year, Canadian political parties have been divided into two essential groups. First, there are the parties of what we can call the “Canadian system”, the Liberals and the NDP. These parties broadly support the present division of powers between Ottawa and the provinces and, with some important disagreements, the present role of government with respect to social programs, higher education, and the environment. They even agree, more than they like to admit, on foreign policy. Then, there are the parties of radical decentralization, the Conservative Party of Canada (much more the descendant of the Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance than of the old PCs) and the Bloc Quebecois.

An immediate federal election, with Canadians fixated on the Sponsorship Scandal, is almost certain to put the federal government and Canadian politics squarely in the hands of the two parties of radical decentralization.

Despite its effort to moderate its image, Stephen Harper and his party are committed to a dramatic reduction of the role of Ottawa in Confederation. Their pledge to implement massive tax cuts and a major increase in defence spending can only be managed through a steep reduction of federal spending on health care, social transfers, higher education and culture. The Conservatives would certainly allow the provinces to open the door to a much larger role for the private sector in the delivery of health care. They would halt any move toward a publicly operated national child care system. They would end Canada’s commitment to the Kyoto Accord. They would sign on to George W. Bush’s missile defence initiative and would take Canada down the road to continental integration on immigration and refugee policy. They would support the conversion of NAFTA to a customs union, and would favour an energy and resources deal with Washington that would designate Canadian resources as continental resources. Fully aware that Canadians don’t favour this agenda, Stephen Harper is seizing the opportunity presented by the Liberal Party’s scandal to attain power.

For his part, Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe is the Jekyll and Hyde of Canadian politics. Most days Duceppe is a Doctor Jekyll who wants a clean political system and progressive policies for the country. That is until a crisis arises that will provide him with winning conditions in his crusade to lead Quebec out of Confederation. The demise of the Liberals will take Duceppe a long way toward his goal. After sweeping almost all Quebec ridings in the upcoming federal election, Duceppe can replace the unpopular Bernard Landry as Parti Quebecois leader. From there, his sights would be set on wresting power in the next Quebec election from the even more unpopular Jean Charest. In the persona of Mr. Hyde, Duceppe would then launch a sovereignty referendum while Stephen Harper, his current collaborator in sacking the Liberals, is prime minister. While many Quebeckers would resist the siren call of separation, Duceppe’s case would be dramatically strengthened by the presence in Ottawa of a neo-conservative government with whom Quebeckers would have little sympathy.

Meanwhile, the parties of what I called the “Canadian system” are in disarray.

The Liberals are suffering the death of a thousand cuts, cuts being inflicted as much by Liberals themselves as by their adversaries. It falls to Paul Martin, a decent and honest, though not particularly progressive, political leader to staunch the wounds and save the great party of the Canadian centre. Whether he can turn the situation to his favour in the present mood of national disgust will depend on how clear he can be in presenting an agenda for the long-term renewal of the role Ottawa plays in the lives of Canadians. At best, it’s a long shot.

Jack Layton, in the current imbroglio, is a deer caught in the headlights. The NDP is torn between the desire to join with the other two opposition parties in milking the scandal and a desire to force concessions from Paul Martin to turn the minority parliament in a more progressive direction. The long-term NDP dream has always been to replace the Liberals so that New Democrats can become one of the country’s two viable governing parties, along with the Conservatives. While the scandal provides New Democrats with the hope that they can win over disgusted Liberal voters, it also threatens to bring to office a leader who rejects everything the NDP holds dear. Jack Layton says repeatedly that Canadians should vote for what they want rather than against what they fear. He wants Canadians to focus on the benefits of electing more New Democrats and not to worry about the threat posed by the parties of radical decentralization.

Canadians have every right to be disgusted by the spectacle that has emerged from the Gomery Inquiry. They would be very shortsighted, however, to believe that this crisis is only about a corrupt governing party that has been in power for too long. Those who want to sustain the “Canadian system” need to find their voices, and their political imagination, before it is too late.

America's New Civil War

(This article was originally written in 2005)

'America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world and to all the inhabitants thereof.'

-President George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 2005.

'For sixty years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.'

-Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State, American University, Cairo, Egypt, June 20, 2005.

This was the summer when global realities---mass murder in London and popular mobilization for Africa---intruded on Canadian introspection. It is scarcely believable that not so many weeks ago, we were all focused on the political drama in Ottawa. As Canadians looked inward, casting doubt that we could afford a robust foreign aid budget when our at-home health care, educational, and anti-poverty needs are so great, our elephantine neighbour to the south was looking outward, or at least outward and inward at the same time. It has no choice, which is why, these days, it would be easier to be a Canadian than an American, were it not for the growing imperative of solving the time-honoured Canadian dilemma of what to do with American appetites…for oil, water, and for winning the “war against terrorism.”

The difference between President Bush’s “proclamation” and U.S. Secretary of State Rice’s admission of failure and announcement of a “different course” is more one of degree than of kind. Both hit Jeffersonian nerves, but neither answers the troubling question: does the world, or the Middle East, want the particular brand of liberty or democracy that the United States is proclaiming or supporting? In his Second Inaugural Address, President Bush harkened back four short years, and the tragedy and brutality of 9/11 seemed to be his operational well-spring. Five months later, with the war in Iraq on-going, Condoleezza Rice, perhaps reflecting a now more sober administration, took a longer view. Of course, it must be said, that after the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, 1945 and the few world-altering years that followed, saw the emergence of global political internationalism in the form of the United Nations. The idea was that by gathering nation states around the table, and by forcing compromises upon them, the UN would create stability in an insecure world and would thereby keep imperialism at bay. So, why is it then that a single nation, the United States, has taken it upon itself to be both the world’s super-cop and freedom’s patron saint?

In my travels since 9/11, I have found Americans divided in their views in ways that reflect the differences between so-called red (Republican) states and blue (Democratic) states, but not necessarily in the ways people would assume. In the blue states, I have encountered plenty of liberals who excoriate George W. Bush every chance they get. But they also express concerns about the risks of terror attacks on their cities in a way that Canadians never would. And in the red states, while I find fewer people with nasty things to say about the president, I have met people with serious doubts about the war in Iraq and where it will lead. A tour guide operator in Lafayette, Louisiana, joked with me last winter about the way Parisians look down their noses at the way French is spoken in Cajun country. “I tell them, get over it,” she says “you’re not in Paris. Anyway the Parisians are not coming so much right now because they’re mad at us about the war.” Then she sighs and says she thinks it’s “the wrong war.” It’s not so much a political comment as a statement of weary resignation. There are plenty of bumper stickers and signs in windows urging people to “Support Our Troops” in south Louisiana. But the war feels like something to be endured, like bad weather, not something for which there is passionate support.

As cheerleaders and detractors now agree, the United States has assumed this global role, and, in so doing, has become an empire, the greatest since Rome. Like all empires it is compelled to act when threatened; like all empires, its work is forever incomplete, and it has fostered enemies and challengers. But as debate swirls about whether the American Empire serves the broad interests of humanity, many at home are wondering if it is even sustainable. The two debates are intertwined, and for the United States blinking is not an option. All are watching, including Osama bin Laden, who is surely enjoying the cost of American lives and the cost to the U.S. treasury that the on-going insurgency in Iraq is causing. He is also no doubt enjoying the disquiet in the heart of the Republic, America’s new civil war, a battle not over the Jeffersonian notion that freedom is a natural birthright desired by all, but a battle over whether the U.S. should shoulder the costs of exporting this birthright.

At the height of the Cold War, when there was a visible enemy seemingly just as determined as America to export its own doctrine of truth, U.S. federal tax revenue fluctuated between 17 and 20 per cent of America’s Gross Domestic Product, and few disputed the need to vanquish the “evil empire” by outspending it on military initiatives. But with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the “end of history,” and peace and security settling in through the relatively inexpensive selling of democracy to the world’s “failed states,” one might have expected lower taxes. Right or wrong, it didn’t work out that way. During the Clinton presidencies, and during the much vaunted age of globalization, U.S. taxes increased, reaching a high of 21 per cent of GDP by the time President George W. Bush took office.

When Bush entered the White House he took aim at profligate spending (by the Democrats) and overseas gambling. Having already indicated that he would be a stay-at-home president, in June 2001, the U.S. Congress authorized Bush’s tax cut, valued at $1.35 trillion over the coming decade. That tax cut has led to a sharp drop in federal tax revenue, from 21 per cent to 16 per cent of GDP. This might be considered the good news side of the story. However, in 2000, there was a budget surplus of $236 billion, and the total debt stood at $5.7 trillion; by 2004, the surplus had morphed into a $520 billion deficit, and the debt had grown to an unmanageable $7.4 trillion. What happened?

The answer, according to an increasing number of Americans – sixty per cent, say the polls, now believe that the Iraq War, the second one, has been an unwinnable misadventure – lies in defence spending and homeland security costs. Since the end of the Cold War, American defence spending has followed two distinct trends. For the period 1991 to 2001, it remained relatively constant, fluctuating between $265 billion and $304 billion, and annually representing roughly 16 per cent of overall federal spending. Since 2001, both in terms of total dollars and as a percentage of federal allocations, spending on defence has risen by approximately $50 billion a year, and the total defence expenditures for 2005 will likely top $500 billion, or over twenty per cent of overall federal spending.

The spreading of Jeffersonian ideals and values, and the notion that the American Constitution has universal applications, has always been more a liberal than a conservative boast, and under this patina President Clinton seemed to enjoy his globetrotting. Today, as an on-going response to 9/11 it has flipped over to the Republican side, but as a consequence of overseas extravagance, President Bush’s empire is in serious disrepair at its very centre, and in his travels he is just as likely to meet foreign central bankers who have their grip on America’s fiscal lifeline, as he is celebrants of the cause of liberty. Japan and China hold over one trillion dollars in U.S. government securities, and foreigners in general hold close to four trillion dollars worth of U.S. financial assets. At the same time, having lost more than a third of its value against the Euro since 2001, and with the Chinese Yuan attracting new buyers, the U.S. dollar is failing and its position as the world’s reserve currency is in peril.

Serious observers recognize that American current accounts and government deficits are not sustainable. Unable, in fact, to pay for their wars and for maintaining their global military establishment, many affluent Americans are living in denial as the U.S. plunges ever further into debt. And on the horizon new clouds are forming. The U.S. gained a reprieve of sorts with the failure of the European Union to consolidate around core principles, but if China and India’s growth continues to out-pace all others, the time will come when their internal markets are robust enough not to be beholden to overseas buyers. At that point, and if either of these two nations have imperial aspirations, the shrewdest step possible would be to foreclose on American debts and bankrupt their imperial competitor.

The cracks in America’s imperial armour, however, are more of the moment. Despite President Bush’s late June address to the nation (appropriately from Fort Bragg, North Carolina), where he pledged to “stay the course” in Iraq, June represented the fifth consecutive month in which the U.S. Army missed its recruitment quota. With nearly 2,000 American soldiers having come home in body bags, and Iraqi replacements unready in numbers, not even lucrative sign-up inducements seem to be helping the U.S. volunteer army. New millions have been spent on recruitment drives, but in America’s heartland the idea of sacrificing your body for the slippery notion of selling democracy in the streets of Mosul and the deserts of Iraq, is simply not compelling enough. Increasingly at odds with itself and its core values, a distrustful America is now asking if this quagmire is responsible for everything from the drive to privatize social security to the questionable appointment of a unilateralist, John Bolton, as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

As is the case with all empires, those at the helm of the American Empire must ask the crucial question: what imperial frontiers can be sustained at a cost that is not prohibitive. The Romans decided that most Scots and Germans were not worth the outlay in blood and treasure needed to control them. In the United States, almost all serious shades of political opinion remain committed to the continuance of the American empire, but are openly divided on strategy and tactics. Multilateralists are prepared to limit the extent of the empire, and understand the need to use soft as well as hard power to achieve their goals, to cajole as well as to conquer. While under close scrutiny at the moment, unilateralists, the neoconservatives who are now in power and who believe that the stick is mightier than the carrot, might dare again to thrust the empire into exorbitantly costly conflicts on the frontiers.

While the bounties of empire are many, so too are the costs. No empire can be long sustained without a ruling class that is prepared to bear its burden. The British upper classes were willing to pay the price in the eighteenth century during their struggle against France. They paid high taxes, won, and kept their heads. The French aristocrats refused to pay, their state collapsed, and they went to the guillotine during the French Revolution. The Roman Empire also collapsed because its upper classes turned their noses up at taxes. For the British rulers there was a happy ending after Waterloo in 1815. With their enemy vanquished, they enjoyed a century of low taxation and cheap empire. Do the American upper classes, with their pronounced taste for immediate gratification, have the stomach for a protracted struggle in the Middle East, to say nothing of the coming confrontation with China?

If the first great question concerns the durability of the American empire, the second concerns its utility. A great boast of the Anglo-Americans at the end of the twentieth century was that their victories over fascism and communism had rid the world of the vicious utopianisms that had been the most dangerous feature of the century. But the collapse of the Soviet Union and its eastern European empire fifteen years ago left the US in a quandary: justified for four decades as containing communism and protecting the free world, what to do in the 1990s with its own global military footprint? Frenzied investment followed the apparent triumph of liberal democracy – to some, the capitalist equivalent of the Marxist notion that with communism the state would wither away – and the playing field was, quite suddenly, global in scope. But while U.S. reformers looked forward to scaling down costly, and now unnecessary, military instillations, for others the long battle over communism confirmed that “might is right,” and preparations had to be made for a “new American century.” Keeping military bases intact served the interests (and the level of confidence) of multinational corporations, but U.S. imperial dominion still required an overarching concept. It came in the form of the indispensable nation theory. A favourite concept of former U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, the indispensable nation theory was serviceable enough during that transitional time, the so-called era of globalization, before more robust ideas to justify American hegemony became necessary with the terror attacks on New York City and Washington DC, in the new age of blood and iron.

And they have appeared. Like an imperial star ship, the Bush administration’s doctrine that the United States has the right to pre-emptive intervention anywhere against perceived threats, now looms over the planet. While so much ink is spilled on Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others supposedly contemptuous of democracy, the star ship is equally surrounded and supported by a different halo, the shining ephemera of a new liberal justification of American empire that plays the role in our world that Christian missionaries played in the days of the old imperialism. These missionary imperialists have performed a great service for the Bush administration, making its policies palatable to many who would not otherwise regard them as legitimate.

A luminary among those who support present and possibly future interventions by the United States and its allies is Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian Carr Professor of Human Rights Practice and Director of the Carr Centre of Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and now potential successor to Paul Martin as Liberal party leader. “It is at least ironic that liberal believers….,” Ignatieff notes in Empire Lite, “someone like me, for example---can end up supporting the creation of a new humanitarian empire, a new form of colonial tutelage for the peoples of Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan.” But before you are offended by the imperial label, he cautions, you should consider that “it is an empire lite, hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risks of daily policing…but that does not make it any less of an empire, that is, an attempt to permanently order the world of states and markets according to its national interests.”

In a similar vein, Ignatieff further writes that “we are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science….a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known.”

Without an empire, proclaim today’s pro-imperial enthusiasts, there can be no peace, stability and economic development. Without empire, there would be no power that could intervene where states have failed, to deal with human catastrophes and to make possible functioning states, where market economies, democracy and the rule of law can take root. Required is a superpower, superior to all others, to ensure that the global system functions. The alternative to empire is chaos, and liberals like Ignatieff appear to have conceded the American Republican point that the United Nations has either had its day in the sun, was dysfunctional from the beginning, or is incapable of remedy and too cumbersome for a just-in-time world.

The missionary position has been adopted by a very specific species of intellectuals---liberal ideologists who were won over to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Such thinkers have been stirred to passion by the drive to remake the Middle East according to American values. What they find attractive about George W. Bush is not his conservatism, but his utopian liberalism. In a narrative the emperor Hadrian would have understood, the new liberal imperialists warn that the civilized world is threatened by barbarians who lash out at it for a variety of reasons. Exploiting the situation in “failed states”, where human catastrophes brought on by civil war, natural disaster, disease, genocide and religious persecution have destroyed the possibility of viable states, the enemies of civilization take root. In the world’s string of failed states, which can be likened to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter where planets failed to form, drug smugglers, traffickers in human chattels and terrorists have set up shop. From these safe havens, they lash out at the rest of the world. Most dangerous in our age of instant communications and weapons of mass destruction are the terrorists, with al Qaeda the generic name for terrorists committed to Islamic fundamentalism, who have the capacity strike the first world as fiercely or more fiercely than they did on September 11.

In Longitudes and Attitudes, prolific author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, states it frankly: “How the World of Order deals with the World of Disorder is the key question of the day.” And Friedman is clear that the forces of civilization, led by the United States, must strike at the sanctuaries of the barbarians, just as the Romans did in their time, to make the world safe.

The world is beset by the problems of failed states, Ignatieff equally asserts, citing as one principal cause the wreckage of the process of de-colonization of earlier empires in the 1950s and 1960s. Faced with the barbarians, the imperial centre has no choice but to hit back, using force where necessary, not only to protect itself against attacks, but also to occupy failed states so that they can be nurtured back to health. This process he calls nation-building. Thus, for Ignatieff, imperialism, for a time at least, is the essential handmaiden for the construction of nation states in zones of barbarism.

“The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike,” Ignatieff wrote in the New York Times Magazine in January 2003, noting that critics “have not factored in what tyranny or chaos can do to vital American interests.” Overlooking the point that it might just be the interests (oil, geo-strategic positioning, etc.) that is driving the agenda, Ignatieff’s work has the feel of the belle époque about it. His is a “civilizing mission, and the addition of such thinkers to the ranks of those who supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has widened the political spectrum of those willing to endorse the imperial wars of George W. Bush, and, perhaps unwittingly, given credence to the religiosity of the new American mission.

There seems a paradox here. Following his own logic and historical analysis – the wreckage left by earlier empires, and the fact that empire always produces resistance – it cannot be, for Ignatieff, that empire as such is necessary. If the goal is peace, security, and freedom can this not only be achieved through some form of political internationalism (albeit, like democracy itself, messy) where there is no direct imposition of values from one state to another?

The acclaimed Scottish historian Niall Ferguson goes much further than Ignatieff in presenting the case for empires, insisting, for instance, that the British Empire, despite its warts, was a boon for humankind and that the American Empire is needed to play that role in the 21st century. With brutal honesty, Ferguson writes in Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, “The obvious [lesson the United States can learn from the British experience of empire] is that the most successful economy in the world---as Britain was for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries---can do a very great deal to impose its preferred values on less technologically advanced societies….No doubt it is true that, in theory, open international markets would have been preferable to imperialism; but in practice global free trade was not and is not naturally occurring. The British Empire enforced it.”

The case for the American Empire rests on a singular conceit that dates back to the American Revolution, the presumption of American exceptionalism, that the United States can intervene in the world, while remaining a force for good. American exceptionalism is the chauvinist twin of American democracy. While American democracy has made an immense contribution to the world, American exceptionalism has coloured the way Americans analyse the use their nation makes of its global power. Since even before 1776, Americans have pictured their society as a “city on a hill”, which must either be preserved against outside contamination or from which Americans, armed with truths held to be “self-evident,” must sally forth to save the rest of humanity. A noteworthy example of American exceptionalism is to be found in an acclaimed history of American foreign policy by historian Walter Russell Mead. In his book Special Providence---an exceptionalist title is there ever was one---he is both frank and disingenuous in his discussion of how Americans project power in the world: “The United States over its history has consistently summoned the will and the means to compel its enemies to yield to its demands. Attacks on civilian targets and the infliction of heavy casualties on enemy civilians have consistently played a vital part in American war strategies.”

To make the world safe for American power and to safeguard the corporate and personal property of Americans and to ensure access to strategic resources, the United States has undertaken hundreds of interventions abroad, involving full scale wars, undeclared wars, punitive military expeditions, illegal support for the pro-American side in civil wars, the training and funding of death squads, support for plots to overthrow democratic governments, and illicit interventions in democratic countries to sway the results of national elections. Millions have died as a result of these American interventions. A short list of countries scarred by American operations includes: Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Grenada, the Philippines, Greece, Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Congo, Jamaica, and Iraq, and last and not least, the intervention in the Italian elections in 1948.

Humanitarian motives in American interventions have been hard to find, much more served up to satisfy liberals at home, than to launch free societies abroad. A final case made by the empire enthusiasts of our time is that only the military power of an empire will suffice to bring humanitarian relief where it is most needed, and Ignatieff impresses with his dissection of the problems of people in places such as Bosnia, Kosova and Afghanistan. But his invitation for us to join him in backing the new imperialism places more weight on our enthusiasm for his liberalism than it can bear. To rely on the American empire to serve the interests of humanity is to look in the wrong place, and Ignatieff himself sees the essential problem when he writes that “it is entirely unsurprising that America and Europe invest in these zones of danger for motives that include just as much callow self-interest as high humanitarian resolve.”

That the United States uses its power to promote stability and order is true. On that we can agree with Ignatieff and the other empire enthusiasts. More to the point, the United States uses its power to promote its version of order, which more often than not is highly destabilizing.

And the American Empire poses a deadly threat to American democracy just as the British Empire once attenuated British democracy by sustaining aristocratic power long into the age of democracy. The appointment, as Attorney General, of Alberto Gonzales, architect of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and of the burgeoning U.S. Gulag across the world, shows how empire strikes back at the vitals of America itself. The potent interests, military, corporate, political, that gain their sway in America as a consequence of empire are the enemies of democracy at home. Perhaps America will be more successful than Rome was in fending off the threats to a republic, that have been generated by the rise of an empire, but that is no sure thing. The struggle for democracy and the rule of law takes place not only in failed states but in the imperial states themselves.

Across the world, as Ignatieff reminds us, we observe a plethora of human catastrophes, and a great dilemma faces those who want to find ways for the international community to intervene in cases where states that theoretically exercise sovereignty in crisis torn regions cannot or will not act, or where indeed, the state itself may be a major source of the oppression. But must the world rely on empire to address humanitarian crises? Is it possible in a world dominated by an empire, and its potential challengers, to find ways to address humanitarian catastrophes that are not bound to end up simply opening the way for the achievement of imperial aims? In the 21st century, is humanitarian intervention nothing more than the equivalent of missionary efforts in the 19th and early 20th centuries that provide a fig leaf for imperial aggression? Must we face the hard truth that humanitarian interventions cannot be conceived in good faith until empires have been reconciled with nation states and international law? And will this predicament become worse as the American Empire faces increasing challenges from China and other actors over the next twenty or thirty years?

If the American Empire is not the answer, two other possibilities remain: reform of the global system from above; or transformation of the system from below. Should reform from above, to which we will return, prove a failure, as well it may, that leaves transformation from below as the road ahead. Uncertain, uneven, and explosive, upheaval from below will erupt in those cases where poverty, exploitation and authoritarianism, as well as ethnic and religious oppression, can be effectively countered by force. Where and when such volcanic eruptions may occur in Latin America, and parts of Africa and Asia, the one certainty is that the consequences will not be those that warm the hearts of liberal democrats, with their preference for pluralism, the rule of law, civil liberties and fair elections. But where liberals have made themselves the allies of global corporations and obscene income and wealth inequality, the pale light of their abstract quest for justice will scarcely bring warmth to those who suffer. Liberals could well end as sponsors of justice the way medieval churchmen were sponsors of charity.

What then of reform from above?

The United Nations was founded on a vision that transcended the idea of state sovereignty on behalf of a more embracing conception of humanity. But the vision and the structure did not mesh. From the beginning, the UN has been hobbled by the unwillingness of the most powerful global actors to transfer effective power to it so as to make it more of a supranational authority and less of an intergovernmental organization. The five permanent members of the Security Council (P5), armed with vetoes, have always been, and remain today, jealous of the clout this gives them. Efforts at transforming the UN have been undertaken many times in the past, but they have always foundered on the contradiction between vision and structure. Topping this off, the United States, once a strong backer of the UN, now is unwilling to submit to any international regime or regulation that Washington sees as threatening its retention of full sovereignty.

One could conclude that that is the end of the matter.

In a world where empire and imperial rivalries remain all too potent, it is with humanitarian initiatives that the first real steps toward supranationalism in the global system are most likely to be taken. It is at least hopeful that initiatives to reform the UN to enable it to be much more effective in delivering humanitarian aid are being seriously pursued in a number of places including official Ottawa. If the great powers can be convinced to pool sovereignty at all, it will be in the area of humanitarian aid, an arena which from their point of view is much like the cleaning of the stables---necessary, but hardly glamorous. It should not be forgotten that the European Union---present crisis notwithstanding---began with a decidedly unglamorous free trade deal in coal and steel. Pooling of sovereignty in one area, as the EU experience shows, can “spill over” into other areas over time.

Let us explore one, admittedly utopian, possible way forward.

As potential actors for the provision of humanitarian assistance, hope lies with a number of countries that are relatively wealthy, but that lack the capacity, military and economic, to vie for global power. What is needed is a system for undertaking humanitarian interventions that is as insulated as possible from imperial power rivalries. Of course, perfection in this regard is unattainable. Let’s concede, at once, some of the limitations. Humanitarian interventions are not possible in regions that are directly controlled by great imperial states (for example, Tibet, or Panama or Colombia.) And they are not likely to be possible in zones in which rival imperial powers are in active contention with each other.

In other cases, however, it could be possible to launch a system, under the auspices of the United Nations, in which the notion of the Responsibility to Protect can be acted on in clearly defined cases of humanitarian catastrophe. Second tier countries, while often closely tied to imperial powers---as Canada is to the U.S.---also have their own interests and aspirations which include a desire not to be completely subsumed within the weltanschauung of the world power. It is worth investigating the proposition that an international role for such countries as purveyors of humanitarian interventions, acting through UN mandates under the rubric of the “Responsibility to Protect” could be established. For such countries to invest their treasure and their manpower in these missions would carve out a significant global role for them. Further, it would, in many cases at least, remove the taint of imperial aggression from such interventions.

No one ought to contend that such missions would much reduce the spheres of imperial power in the world. Indeed, such a role for second tier states would deal with situations the U.S. and the other imperial powers would rather avoid. This point is crucial, because it means that a space could be found for action that does not imply a direct confrontation with the power of the United States and its major competitors.

What countries could fall under the heading of second tier countries that could be recruited to play such a role? The criteria for inclusion could be rather broad. First, there ought to be a crucial restriction. The list should not include powers that possess nuclear weapons. Obvious candidates for the list would include Canada, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain, Australia and New Zealand. Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea and South Africa could qualify. More controversial would be Germany and Japan.

What could emerge from this sort of initiative could be a new layer of power directed at alleviating humanitarian crises. This international mission could reduce human suffering, and arguably, could contribute to a safer world. Or, perhaps this is all a pipedream, a utopian vision whose time will never come.

Even if such an initiative were to bear fruit, it would not of course, provide insurance against the perils of inter-imperial rivalry, primarily between the United States and China, but also including other major actors such as Europe, India, Japan, and Brazil.

Finally, what perspective should Canadians have on the American Empire and on the urgent need to find ways to deliver humanitarian intervention when and where it is needed?

While perhaps now at a low ebb, in the last two or three years, there has been a debate about Canada’s place in the world. The case has been made in books, speeches and editorials that Canada has lost its once seminal position as a middle-power. In his recent book, While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World, Andrew Cohen, argues that for the past two generations Canada has attempted to live off its once stellar reputation, but is in fact ignored by most of the world. Often, the not-so-hidden purpose of such laments is to convince Canadians that we ought to gear up our military in order to participate in American military missions, such as the one in Iraq, and to be responsible global citizens.

Enter Paul Martin, whose government has now finally completed its interminable review of Canadian foreign policy. Two decisions, highly popular with Canadians, have opened up elbow room for Canada in the arena of international relations. The first was the Chrétien government’s decision in 2003 to stay out of the Iraq war. The second was the Martin government’s recent determination that Canada would not participate in the Bush administration’s national missile defence program. While the Liberals have mapped out no new global strategy for Canada, they have at least created the space in which one could operate.

Yet Canadians are being urged by powerful actors, such as former Deputy Prime Minister John Manley, and the president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, Thomas D'Aquino, to link up, even more than we have, economically, socially and militarily with the American Empire. Their goal, as always, is the continentalism that is being driven by business lobbies in all three NAFTA countries.

Quite a different role in the world for Canada is possible, however, but it too would require a stronger Canadian military. In an age of empire, Canadians are being urged by many, in ways quite reminiscent of the pro-British imperial fervour in English Canada a century ago, to link up economically, socially and militarily with the American Empire. Canadians, who have never lived without the shadow of empire upon them at any time during the past four centuries, will not live without the shadow of the American Empire anytime soon. But they do, nonetheless, have a basic choice to make. The virtue of the pro-imperial faction in Canada is that its adherents have mapped out a clear position for themselves, albeit one to which we take strong exception. That much cannot be said for much of the liberal and social democratic left in Canada.

What the left, broadly defined, has not faced up to, is that a moderate degree of foreign policy independence from the American Empire will cost Canada a great deal of treasure. There are two important reasons for Canada to significantly increase the capabilities of its armed forces. The first is that Canada needs a larger force and a major upgrade of aircraft and naval vessels to adequately patrol Canadian territory, particularly in the Arctic where the U.S. actively disputes Canadian sovereignty over Arctic waters. The second is that Canada’s capacity to participate in UN sponsored peace keeping and humanitarian missions in the world requires a much enhanced military. The ability to act independently costs money as both the Swedes and Swiss, two neutral countries, have long understood. Progressive Canadians have every right to insist that the international table we wish to sit at should not be a piece of furniture in an imperial palace. But sitting at a table with other self-respecting nations will cost us more than we have hitherto been prepared to pay.

Canada can survive the age of the American Empire as it has survived the imperial ages that came before it. But, given the pro-imperial enthusiasm among the powerful in our midst, this will be no easy task. Imagine how much worse off we would have been had the pro-imperial federationists a century ago won the day and tied Canadians to membership in an Imperial Parliament sitting in London.

One of the great Canadian talents has been that of leaving sinking imperial ships at the right moment, although in truth it has really been a matter more of luck than of talent. Canada’s departures from the French and British empires were admirably timed. The drive for North American union has lost energy and along with that, whatever legitimacy it ever had. Last winter’s meeting in Texas of the three amigos---Paul Martin, George W. Bush, and Vicente Fox---was a tired affair. Asia is beckoning and Canada’s resources are now being sought by a rising China, as well as by India and Japan. While Canada should not sign on to the new empire in the east, it can use the rise of Asia to find more room for maneuver, as it once did in the days when it sought advantage by balancing between a rising America and a stumbling Britain.

The idea that empire is a part of the solution to the problems of our age is a chimera. The best of the western tradition has always held that a universal state must be a tyranny and that any major step in the direction of a universal state can only place us on the road to tyranny. Even the barriers placed in the way of the realization of the universal state by relatively modest powers such as Canada are highly important as humanity struggles to come to terms with its fundamental problems and to move beyond empire. It is often tempting to believe that the world’s most pressing tribulations could be addressed if only a superpower would step up and send its forces to Rwanda or Sudan when a human catastrophe is in the making. But imperial powers act when it is in their interest to act. And the interests of empires and those of humanity do not often overlap. The search for solutions leads elsewhere. The first step in that search is to have done with illusions.