Thursday, September 28, 2006

Jack Layton is Right on Afghanistan

Jack Layton is doing the tough sledding on the Afghanistan issue, and he is turning out to be right on the issue.

His call for the removal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan in February 2007 provoked vicious attacks on him from the Conservatives, from editorialists, and from vitriolic letter writers to the newspapers. There was the supercilious Peter MacKay who commented repeatedly that the only person who wants to talk to the Taliban is Jack Layton and that the NDP leader will soon be suggesting tea with Osama bin Laden. And there has been the spittle of editorial writers who charge Layton with wanting to “cut and run.”

It always takes courage to recognize that a military mission thousands of kilometers from home is the wrong one and to call for it to be ended. The phony patriots have a field day with those who tell the truth and warn the country that it is one the wrong track.

The case for the Afghanistan mission is collapsing like a house of cards. First, there was the leaked U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that the American occupation of Iraq is inspiring new recruits to terrorism on such a scale that the U.S. is worse off today than before the invasion of that country. Yesterday, portions of a leaked British intelligence report reached the same conclusion about the consequences of the Iraq mission, and went on to warn that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not going well and that their outcomes are uncertain.

Now we have the spectacle on the front pages of the papers of the Three Musketeers who met over dinner at the White House---George W. Bush, General Pervez Musharraf, and Hamid Karzai, the presidents respectively of the global empire, and his two quarrelsome allies from Pakistan and Afghanistan. It must have been a hell of a dinner, since the latter two participants refused to shake hands with each other. Following dessert it was reported that no deals had been reached.

Musharraf disdainfully dismisses Karzai as the “mayor of Kabul”, just as he has shown disdain for the sacrifice of Canadians in the war against the Taliban. (“You suffer two dead [the true number is 37], and there’s a cry and shout all around the base that there are coffins,” Musharraf told the CBC the other day.) Last week, we learned that Pakistan, formerly openly pro-Taliban, only joined the U.S. War on Terror following 9/11 after being threatened with a military assault that would drive it back to the stone-age.

Since then, all that’s happened, as daily news reports reveal, is that Musharraf has mouthed support for the war on terror while continuing to allow the Taliban to come and go across the border between his country and Afghanistan. As he seeks to distance himself from George W. Bush and his failing policies, Musharraf has no intention of provoking intense opposition to his own shaky regime by cracking down on the Afghan insurgents, who really are as much a collection of anti-westerners, tribal fighters and drug-dealers as they are the Taliban. Besides, he’s happy to keep Karzai in his box as the mayor of Kabul.

Canada doesn’t belong in this war where duplicity and double-dealing are the order of the day.

It’s tough to be the politician setting the pace on the Afghanistan issue. Jack Layton’s doing it and he deserves credit. Soon he’ll be joined by other less courageous politicians as ever more Canadians conclude that we have no business in this odious affair.



Monday, September 25, 2006

Leaked U.S. Intelligence Report: Canadians Need to Take Note

A National Intelligence Estimate, based on data from 16 U.S. spy agencies, has concluded that the U.S. led war in Iraq has worsened the threat of terror faced by the U.S. and its allies. According to elements of the report that have been leaked, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq have spawned a new generation of terrorists who are dedicated to striking out against the U.S. and the West.

According to a story in the New York Times, the intelligence report concludes that Islamic extremist cells are being established in many parts of the world. While Al Qaeda may have served as a source of inspiration for them, the cells are generating on their own the report states.

The shattering conclusions of the report tear away at whatever shreds of coherence remain to justify the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. The initial justification for the invasion----the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq---has long ago been exposed as a chimera. The new report counters the claim by George W. Bush that the Iraq mission has been a vital and necessary part of the war on global terrorism.

As Senator Edward Kennedy commented, the report “should put the final nail in the coffin for President Bush’s phony argument about the Iraq war.”

The report compounds the bad news for the Bush administration, which has been under relentless attack for the incompetent management of the Iraq War, with generals who served there charging Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with complete incompetence.

The Iraq debacle may drag on for several more years, but elements of its finale are already clear. The Americans will have to withdraw from that country following a humiliating defeat that will have weakened their hold on the petroleum rich Persian Gulf as well as dealing a blow to the global standing of the United States. It will fall to the next U.S. administration, which takes office in January 2009, whether Democratic or Republican, to work out the details of the withdrawal and to try to salvage a modicum of dignity for the United States.

Canadians should heed the developments in Iraq, because the mission in Afghanistan of which we are a part, is almost certainly headed for a similar conclusion. Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same, of course, and the justifications for the missions in the two countries have differed in important ways. Afghanistan was invaded in the autumn of 2001 because it was the home base of Osama bin Laden, from which the terror attacks of September 11 were planned and executed.

That said, Afghanistan, to the regret of the U.S. military has never been “rich in targets.” It’s a poor country, under the sway of regional war lords, and divided among tribal identities that make it an unlikely candidate for a strong central government. While terrorist bases operating in Afghanistan can be attacked, the consequence of attacks on them is that they shut down and are moved elsewhere. Al Qaeda is not, and never has been, a centralized affair like a conventional state. Slamming a heavy fist into one part of it may be emotionally satisfying but not for long. Just as when you chop a worm in half, both halves walk away, such terrorist movements don’t need central organization and they don’t need Osama bin Laden, whatever his present state of health.

Maddening as it may be, occupying Afghanistan is likely to spawn new terrorists, as we now know from an impeccable source has been happening in Iraq. Meanwhile much of Al Qaeda which wasn’t from Afghanistan in the first place----many more Al Qaeda operatives were from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan---just heads elsewhere. The Americans and their allies are as unlikely to catch most of these people as were the U.S. forces that were sent into northern Mexico in 1916 to chase Pancho Villa.



Saturday, September 23, 2006

The Holy Grail: Can the Liberals Find Redemption in Quebec?

One of the crucial goals of the federal Liberals is to win back their political legitimacy in Quebec so that some day they can again win a majority of seats there. What made the Liberals the country’s “natural governing party” was Wilfrid Laurier’s success in the election of 1896 in decisively winning Quebec over to his party. From that date until 1980, the Liberals won a majority of seats in Quebec in all but two federal elections, those of 1930 and 1958. Going forth from their Quebec bastion into the rest of the country gave the Liberals the edge for nearly a century and relegated the Conservatives to the status of the party that won office only when Canadians were fed up with the Grits.

But the era when Quebec was reliably Liberal is long gone. The Liberals have not won a majority of seats in Quebec in a federal election since 1980. Jean Chretien managed to win three successive majority victories without once winning a majority of seats in his own province. He was the only Francophone Liberal leader ever to fail to win a majority of seats in his own province. Wilfrid Laurier, Louis St. Laurent, and Pierre Trudeau all lost elections, but they won a majority of seats in Quebec every time out.

We now live in the new and unsettling political universe of three solitudes---with the Conservatives in the West, the Bloc in Quebec and the Liberals in their dual bastion of Ontario and the Atlantic Provinces. The truth is that the role of Quebec in the fortunes of the Liberal Party is very different than it was in the golden age when the Liberals could count on Quebec the way U.S. Democrats could depend on the South until the late 1960s. The Liberals can no longer win in Quebec, but a successful Liberal leader still has to convince the electorate in Ontario that he or she is sufficiently acceptable to Quebecers to hold the country together.

Naturally, the Liberals would like to return straight away to their historic domination of Quebec. That, however, involves a long and uncertain journey.

While Pierre Trudeau achieved many things, a part of his legacy is that a very substantial portion of the Quebec electorate is permanently alienated from the federal Liberals. And the divide is not simply between federalists and sovereignists. Trudeau’s variety of federalism insisted that there must be no special constitutional deal for Quebec in Confederation. No special status, no asymmetrical federalism for him. Years after leaving office, he vehemently opposed the “distinct society” clause in the Meech Lake Accord.

What few English Canadians realize is that Trudeau’s strict federalism is anathema to most Quebecers including not only Pequistes, but provincial Liberals as well. Liberals cast in the same mould as Trudeau have been doomed to a minority role in Quebec for the past quarter century. The great failure of Jean Chretien’s career is that he could not make retake Quebec as a Liberal bastion.

Which brings us to the Liberal leadership race. As the architect of the Clarity Act, Stephane Dion is, and will remain, relegated to a minority role in Quebec. Bob Rae is perceived as a friend of Quebec and could make inroads there as a post-Sponsorship Scandal Liberal. Michael Ignatieff, who is wrong for Quebec because of his positions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the one leadership candidate with a new idea on the Quebec question. His notion that Quebecers should embrace Quebec as their nation and Canada as their country has definite merit as a way to address the Quebec question which has been frozen in an unresolved state since the defeat of the Charlottetown Accord in 1992 and the Quebec Referendum in 1995. But then Ignatieff screws it up by musing about the potential for civil war, which drives most people back to the Bob Rae view that the constitution is too prickly to touch.

This time around, odd as it may seem, the best way forward for the Liberals is a leader from Toronto (the heart of darkness) who is not hopelessly labeled as a partisan in Quebec’s long running internal struggle. And that takes us back to Rae or Kennedy.



Thursday, September 21, 2006

Guest Blogger on Daily Canuck

My latest post can be read at the Daily Canuck. It is titled "The Split-Level Liberal Leadership Race".

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

After the Globe Poll: The Next Liberal Leader is Either Rae or Kennedy

Before you dismiss me as daft, hear me out.

The Strategic Counsel poll on who Liberal Party members want to lead their party was a flawed instrument, but it did yield some useful nuggets. Here’s why it was flawed. The Globe and Mail said that “the survey differs from other leadership polls in that it queries only Liberal Party members who will be selecting delegates next week for the party’s convention.” Actually it was a beauty contest among Liberal members, a very large proportion of whom won’t even show up to vote to choose delegates. (Thirty-seven per cent of those polled said they were not following the race at all, or not closely. Only twenty per cent said they were following it very closely.)

Going to a delegate selection meeting requires commitment, knowledge and the willingness to put in a few hours, which makes those who do it quite different from the members of the general population who vote in a federal election. Indeed, going to a delegate selection meeting often requires a connection to campaign organizers from one or more of the candidates.

The poll was much too blunt an instrument to measure how a relatively small group of people will behave.

If we can regard the poll as a beauty contest, then we should expect it to be skewed in favour of those who have received the most media coverage and those who have the highest public profiles. Michael Ignatieff has been the hands-down leader in media coverage, with Rae and Dion second and third. And that’s how the poll came out, with Ignatieff, Rae and Dion, one-two-three. In the public profile category, Ken Dryden scores high, but he has a poorly organized campaign and is not likely to go far for that reason. Interestingly, he scored as high as Gerard Kennedy in this poll.

The poll was yet another indication, although a very imprecise one, that Ignatieff is not going to win. Because he is such a polarizing figure in the Liberal Party, as a result of his views on foreign policy, he can only win if he has a commanding lead going into the convention. With a commanding lead, he could entice others to join him so they can be on the winning team.

Analysts of this race need to get their heads around the fact that Ignatieff has already failed to create the conditions he needs to win. Even if in the delegate selection process, he places first (a likely outcome), if he is stuck with less than a quarter of the delegates, he is a dead duck.

Many people have already figured out that Ignatieff will not win and that will be palpably obvious once the delegates are chosen. That moment---let’s call it the post-Ignatieff moment---will cause the dynamics of this race to change completely.

People will be forced to take a hard look at who is actually going to win and to make some tough choices.

In practice, the hard thinking will concern only three candidates: Stephane Dion, Bob Rae and Gerard Kennedy. I will deal with them in that order.

I have a lot of regard for Stephane Dion, but he is not going to win. He won’t win because he utterly lacks the charisma a leader needs. That may sound vague, but it’s very real. It has not been uncommon for Quebecers who can carry Ontario to make formidable leaders, for instance Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien. Stephane Dion cannot strike fire in Ontario and Liberals will think that through between now and early December. Everybody knows that winning Ontario is the sine qua non for federal Liberals. On top of that, Dion is a polarizing figure in his own province, which he could not carry in a general election. He’d be a gift to Gilles Duceppe and maybe even to Stephen Harper in Quebec.

What about Bob Rae? I confess I badly underestimated Rae when this contest began. He has run a formidable campaign and he is by far the most seasoned campaigner in this affair. He’d make a great Liberal leader. He was born to be one. Unfortunately, and I don’t want to be a nag about this, his long detour in the NDP (the party where I’m staying) is still one hell of an obstacle. A lot of people in the Liberal Party continue to be unwilling to embrace him as one of their own. I’ve heard that in various places across the country and I’ve encountered it myself in the surprising hostility of quite a few people toward Rae.

When I wrote about this contest earlier, I believed that Rae would never overcome his negatives. Now I’m not so sure. He could win. I still believe, though, that it is very much an uphill struggle.

Then we come to Gerard Kennedy, the natural choice for the Liberals. He’s progressive, the right age, charismatic and he’s always been a Liberal. He did a job everyone agrees was first rate as minister of education in Ontario, no easy task after the Harris-Eves years.

A lot of people believe that Kennedy has lacked weight, gravitas in this campaign. To a certain extent, that’s his own fault. He has wanted to avoid the front-runner problem that nagged him in his run for the Ontario Liberal leadership. Being low key is fine, but there can be too much of a good thing and that could sink Kennedy.

The truth is, though, that Kennedy’s “below the radar” campaign is very well organized. His is especially strong among young members of the party, who are, if anything, over-represented in the delegate-selection process. If you are between 14 and 26 and you are a Liberal, you’ve got a very good chance of being a delegate.

When the delegate selection meetings take place in just over a week, Kennedy is going to do very well. He could run second.

I’m betting that the race is going to come down to a choice between Rae and Kennedy, and that Kennedy’s natural strengths are going to become much more evident than they have been so far.

It has often been the case in Canadian leadership contests that front-runners don’t make it and that someone lower in the pack emerges to win. It certainly happened in 1976 when a little known guy named Joe Clark emerged from the pack to beat the two favourites. And the same was true when someone called Dalton McGuinty beat a front-runner by the name of Gerard Kennedy.

In The Walrus: Is the Religious Right Taking Over Stephen Harper's Government?

Canadian conservatism is riven with factions. There are neo-cons, paleo-cons, (lots of red Tories, but mostly not in Harper’s party), and there are also the theo-cons. In a stunning piece of investigative journalism, the cover story in the October issue of The Walrus, Marci McDonald shines the spotlight on the rising presence of the theo-cons in Ottawa---the personalities and institutions of the religious right, and their influence in the Harper government.

Once upon a time, Canadian conservatism was dominated by the Toryism of John A. Macdonald, with its nationalism, its belief in the use of the state to build a trans-continental Canada, and its conviction that too close a connection to the United States would mean the extinction of Canada. In the takeover of the remnants of the once great party of Macdonald by Stephen Harper and the Canadian Alliance in December 2003, a new party was constructed, and we are discovering its attributes as the months pass. Never has there been a government as tightly controlled from the top as this one, as intent as this one is to manage its message with great deliberation.

On childcare, the recent Middle East war, the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, softwood lumber and gun control, we have seen the Harper government proceed with its agenda and we have seen it react to sudden developments over which it has no control. A picture has been emerging of what the basic values of Harperism amount to.

But much of the truth about the Harper government remains in a kind of black box for most Canadians. There is much we still don’t know and much the government wants to keep us from knowing, at least for the time being.

That’s why McDonald’s article on the influence the religious right has at the very centre of the government and on what the theo-cons are preparing for us for the days following a Harper majority, is so important.

Those who thought that Stephen Harper was merely a market neo-con who wants to dismantle the social state in Canada, are in for a shock. He’s all that, of course, but there’s much more. McDonald discusses Harper’s theological outlook. The prime minister prefers the company of men of the cloth who loathe the right to abortion, and who believe that there is moral degradation everywhere in our secular society. More important than his own outlook, which is his private business as long as it does not impinge on public policy, is the rapid growth of a muscular theo-con presence in Ottawa. Well funded institutes, such as the Institute of Marriage and Family (with an operating budget of $500,000), are springing up around town, ready to dispense their wisdom to policy makers.

The vital question is how much influence the theo-cons would have with a Harper majority government. How far would such political-religious forces push us toward the dismantling of public institutions in favour of faith based initiatives?

McDonald’s article is so good, such an example of a journalism that shows us through the facts rather than telling us through editorializing, that I have no hesitation in suggesting that you break out the $5.95 you’ll need to read it.

Monday, September 18, 2006

In Response to Rae's Challenge, Ignatieff Won't Come Clean

In the Liberal leadership debate in Vancouver on the weekend, Bob Rae posed a very clear challenge to Michael Ignatieff. And once again, Ignatieff used weasel words to duck it.

Rae to Ignatieff: “George Bush made the wrong decision on Iraq. Jean Chretien made the right decision. I have not yet heard you say that Mr. Bush made the wrong decision. The issue is: do you stand with George Bush on the issue of Iraq, or do you not?”

Ignatieff to Rae: “George Bush has made every mistake in Iraq, and then some. I visited the Kurds in 1992 and saw what was going on there. Fifteen years ago, I decided to stand with the Kurdish people and I’ve stood with them ever since. I don’t stand with George Bush. I stand with the independence and freedom of the Kurdish and Shia people.”

What Michael Ignatieff will not do, has repeatedly refused to do, is to say that the American led invasion of Iraq was wrong, and that the world is a more dangerous place today because it took place. This is no small matter, no issue of semantics. It cuts to the very core of Ignatieff’s world view.

Ignatieff is the man who wrote that “it is at least ironic that liberal believers… 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.” And: “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.” And: “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.” And finally: “The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.”

Canadians have lived in the shadow of empire for four centuries---first a French Empire, then British and now American. We don’t want a prime minister who doesn’t get it---Canadians do not want to live under the sway of an empire. That’s why so many Canadians are offended by the way Stephen Harper revels in supporting the American global mission.

The quotes above make it clear that Michael Ignatieff has also espoused the idea that the American Empire is a force for good in the world. He won’t directly and honestly respond to the challenge posed by Bob Rae. He insists on leaving the door open by saying that Bush has made every mistake in the book. What he never says is that the mission is wrong, that the American Empire will never liberate the people of the world, no matter what tactics it employs.

If Ignatieff wants to declare that his erstwhile enthusiasm for empire has been misplaced his opponents should give him room to do so. It takes a large person to change his mind and move on. Ignatieff would win respect and a second look from many people if he took this step. Or, if he still believes in the basic purpose of the American mission in Iraq, if not its execution, let him say that in forthright terms.

No more ambiguity. No more weasel words.

Friday, September 15, 2006

It's the Guns, Stupid: On the Right-Wing Ideology that Opposes Gun Control

Since the horrific assault on Dawson College in Montreal on Wednesday, there has been a great deal of public discussion about what causes certain young men to become deranged mass killers. Every time there is a school massacre, in Canada or the United States, the same narrative follows. We hear from psychologists, psychiatrists, cultural analysts and others on whether it is possible in advance of a mass shooting to spot the danger signs. Which one of the lonely, quiet, marginalized, social misfits who have fantasies about wiping out those who oppress them, whether they be the members of the school football team or successful young women, is pathological.

The problem is that the profiles of the eventual killers---Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the killers at Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado in 1999, or Kimveer Gill, the shooter at Dawson College---fit too many young men to be of much use. Yes, it’s a good idea for secondary schools, colleges and universities to establish programs to keep an eye on the misfits, to try to counter the social exclusion that drives some of them to the edge. Some unhappy young men can be coaxed back into a healthy life this way. It ought to be tried.

The trouble is that this method of anticipating who the killers will be is a crap shoot and it always will be. Next month, next year or five years from now, we’ll go through the same tortured agony in the aftermath of a mass shooting at another school. Perhaps the shooter or shooters will be students at the school, or perhaps not. We’ll review the warning signs in the behaviour of the killer that should have been obvious, but about which nothing was done. This kind of after-the-fact analysis may make gripping television, but it will do little or nothing to prevent the next mass shooting.

There is one way to get at the problem that is also not perfect, but will net much better results. Serious gun control. Unlike cars, which are also lethal weapons but have other uses, there are few worth while uses for guns. Hunting is, at best, an atavistic pastime, no longer necessary to feed the family. Target shooting is entertaining, but a state of the art video game can simulate it. Besides a shooter can take up billiards or golf or some other activity where the object is to put something into the right holes.

According to the Globe and Mail, 367,000 restricted firearms are legally in the hands of Canadians, who have been allowed to acquire them for use at gun-clubs. Kimveer Gill had one of those guns, a Beretta CX4 Storm, a semi-automatic, which is great for slaughtering people in a crowded room.

We need a law that would mandate the confiscation of every one of those restricted weapons. Let those shooters get a life doing something else. The price exacted from the rest of us is too high.

Meanwhile, the Harper government plans to dismantle the gun registry, which was put in place as a result of the 1989 Montreal massacre of fourteen women by another deranged loner, Marc Lepine. Even though it will be politically more difficult to go ahead in the wake of the Dawson College tragedy, this bone-headed government will persevere. Stephen Harper is no Mr. Dithers.

Those who want to dismantle the gun registry will argue that the Dawson school catastrophe was not halted by the gun registry. Therefore, it is useless and should be scrapped. All the tired rhetoric about guns not being responsible for how they are used will be heard once again.

Sensible people will respond to the recent tragedy by saying that we need the Gun Registry and much more.

Surely, we have a right to be gravely suspicious of supposedly responsible people who balk at the idea of registering their long guns. Long guns kill. So why do the shooters of the nation insist that to register their guns strikes at their basic freedom?

There is a reason for this and it’s a sick one. The Canadian gun culture is a watered-down version of the gun culture in the United States. In the U.S., the National Rifle Association and millions of gun owners cling to their right to own guns, a right which is protected in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

American gun advocates have an interpretation of history from ancient to contemporary times whose moral is that an armed citizenry is a free citizenry. Writing in Gun World Magazine, a gun advocate by the name of David Kopel laments that "the depressing historical ignorance of most Americans" is a major reason the Second Amendment is under so much attack from those who want to expand the power of the state.”

He tells the story of the Roman Republic, a virtuous historical model to the Founders of the American republic, because in Rome before Julius Caesar the citizens were armed and therefore, were able to resist tyranny. What allowed Caesar "the murderer of the Roman republic" to overthrow this exemplary system was his creation of a standing army. Kopel draws the moral: "As the Roman standing army secured the vast Roman Empire against barbarian incursions, the people of the Empire, having lost their martial valour, lost their capacity for self-government." Then came the inevitable denouement, the "degenerate Roman people" were overrun by the barbarians, the latter made up of German tribesman who were armed and manly, and who restored a spirit of freedom as they destroyed decrepit Rome.

In typical gun culture fashion, Kopel draws the lesson for contemporary Americans: "The ownership of firearms by modern Americans is important not just for practical reasons (such as protecting homes from criminal invaders) but for moral ones. A homeowner who never has to use his gun for self-defence still possesses something his unarmed next-door neighbour does not: he has made the decision that he, personally, will take responsibility for defending his family. The armed homeowner's self-reliance has powerful moral consequences, as does the disarmed neighbour's decision that his family's safety will depend exclusively on the government, and not on himself."

The fierce battle over guns and gun control in the U.S. is not some arcane controversy over the meaning of an eighteenth century text. It is a struggle between different elements of contemporary American society.

The gun lobby, whose most powerful organisation is the National Rifle Association, speaks for a highly defined constituency, overwhelmingly made up of white male gun owners and their sympathisers, who hue to a sharply right-wing political outlook. The lobby defends the right of citizens to own and carry semiautomatic weapons and armour-piercing bullets. It opposes the extension to gun shows of the Brady Bill, which requires a three-day background check on gun purchasers before they get possession of their weapons. And it opposes any background check requirement for the sale of weapons by gun collectors who are not gun dealers.

Charlton Heston, until 2003 the president of the NRA, lent his status as a famous personality to the pro gun position. After all, not every lobby has a guy who starred as Moses on the big screen as its spokesperson. He buys into the gun lobby's in-your-face right-wing ideology and has been criticised for displaying an exclusionary outlook where gays and ethnic minorities are concerned. Heston is the pretty face for a lobby whose less famous exponents adhere to a culture, which is narrow, macho, sexist, homophobic, and virulently anti-liberal.

In this neck of the American political woods, right-wing Republican politicians are the standard bearers. One, who represents the right wing of his party is Bob Barr, a member of the House of Representatives, who was one of the House managers in the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. In the spring of 1999, after the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, Barr was a point man in the gun lobby's effort to prevent the outrage of the American people from being translated into new gun control legislation. In television appearances, he made the case for freedom for gun buyers, insisting that a three-day waiting period for the purchase of a gun should not apply to gun shows because it could adversely affect the shows, which usually last only two days.

You get an idea about Barr's politics from the fact that in June 1998, he turned up as a speaker at a meeting of the Council of Conservative Citizens in Charleston, South Carolina. The Council is a white supremacist group which is opposed to marriage between people of different races and which wants to ban non-white immigration. Some of its members favour the deportation of all non-European Americans to third world countries. The Council was expelled from the Conservative Political Action Conference, because as David Keene, the head of CPAC told the Washington Post, "they are racists."

In 1995, in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in which Timothy McVeigh (executed in 2001), a right-wing former marine, killed 168 people in the Murrah federal building, I drove to northern Michigan to get a close look at the Michigan Militia, a shadowy organization of right-wing extremists who carry guns to prepare themselves for the day when they may have to take on the U.S. government in a second American Revolution. What follows is an edited excerpt of that trip from my book Stalking the Elephant: My Discovery of America, published by Penguin Books in 2000:


I am on the road early in the morning, heading north on the Interstate. My destination is the tiny hamlet of Alanson, located just below the point where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet. About twenty miles from Alanson, I am overtaken and passed by five shiny black Chryslers, roaring down the highway in tandem and doing about ninety miles an hour. What is this, the FBI, I wonder? Are they heading for the same place I am?

When I pull off the Interstate, I stop to check a detailed map I bought of this region of northern Michigan. Every hamlet and crossroads is marked on it. I work out exactly where Olson's house is and I head there. I figure I should take a look at the house before I telephone. Maybe I still have those shiny black Chryslers in the back of my mind.

The ranch style house with a shed at the side is right next to a crossroads in open country. It looks reassuringly quiet. Anyway it's not in the middle of a forest.

I drive to a gas station about a mile away and I call the house of Norm Olson, founder of the Michigan Militia. The voice on the line tells me to come right over.

As I pull up in the driveway in front of the single storey dwelling, I notice that the curtains are pulled tight in all the windows. On the shed beside the house, which doubles as a gun shop, there is a sign on the door that reads: "Closed until further notice." I knock on the front door and a tall man wearing olive fatigues and boots and a militia cap emblazoned with the slogan "Enough is Enough" pulls the door open and welcomes me inside. It is Norm Olson, the preacher and gun dealer who founded the Michigan Militia. Olson who is in his late forties is tall and fit looking. He has big hands and big ears.

He guides me to the round kitchen table and offers me coffee. I accept and pour lightener and sugar into the black pool in the cup. Just then a slight blond man, younger looking than Olson enters the room. He is nattily dressed in a fashionable dark suit. He forms an odd contrast with big Olson in his fatigues. I am introduced to Ray Southwell, a real estate agent who was a co-founder of the Michigan Militia.

Olson is the man in charge here. He asks me what I want to know. What did you think of Clinton's all-out attack on the militias at Michigan State yesterday, I ask? This question gets Olson charged up. It is clear from the first word that Olson has contempt for the president. He describes him as a mere puppet. He says he believes the real strings are being pulled by evil figures in "a field of power" which surrounds Clinton. The picture that emerges is of a shadowy super-cabal that is actually running the United States.

Olson is a good storyteller. As befits the leader of a secretive band of men, Olson has mastered the art of monologues, which range from the sentimental to the ruthless, from historical ramblings to warnings of civil war. He starts one of his monologues softly, speaking scarcely above a whisper. The pace quickens and the voice rises until at the climax, the effect is harsh, physical. And while he tells you a story, he looks you right in the eye. It's hard to keep your eyes focused on Olson as he speaks. You feel the urge to drop your glance submissively, something I refused to do.

It was Olson who had the political imagination to capitalise on the deep alienation of his cronies and men like them. Along with 27 others, Olson founded the Michigan Militia in April 1994. Since then, the militia's state-wide membership has mushroomed to 12,000 and similar militias have been formed in many other states.

"Why the guns and the camouflage?" Olson asks rhetorically. "Because we wanted to get people's attention. We could have gone out with placards in three piece suits and no one would have noticed."

The high point of the conversation is about the bombing at Oklahoma City. Olson is in a rage on the subject. He insists that Timothy McVeigh, the former soldier, who has been charged with the bombing (and since convicted and sentenced to death), would never have killed women and children. McVeigh attended a couple of meetings of the Michigan Militia and Olson is well aware that a lot is on the line for the shadowy men in uniform who portray themselves as patriots, true defenders of the U.S. Constitution.

Olson, his voice rising in anger, rejects the very idea that a soldier "trained to fight other soldiers" could be guilty of the bombing. It is a conceit of the members of the private armies that call themselves militias that comrades-in-arms are the only ones who can provide the United States with leadership in its hour of peril.

Olson sees the Michigan Militia as the direct descendant of the militias of the American Revolution. He reminds me that when the British army ordered the colonial militia to put down their weapons at Lexington Common in 1775, the colonials refused.

"No one knows who fired the first shot, the shot heard round the world," he says, and quips "maybe it was the CIA." Then he makes his point: "We hope a second shot will not be necessary."

This allusion to the potential for a civil war in the United States is the central myth that sustains the militias.

Olson has resigned as commander-in-chief of the Michigan Militia because of the fallout from his widely publicised insistence that an international conspiracy was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing. But he remains the charismatic inspiration behind the Michigan Militia.

In a country where conspiratorial and violent bands of men have often sprung up in the South, the militias have a distinctly northern feel about them. These are white men, often Vietnam War veterans, who feel pushed aside in the strange new world of information technology and cultural heterogeneity.

In their attacks on NAFTA, GATT, the G-7, the Trilateral Commission and the White House, the militias have exhibited an undeniable populist flair.

At their core though, despite their rhetoric about being the defenders of the U.S. Constitution, they are deeply anti-democratic. Their faith is in their military training and weapons, leaders like Olson, and an interpretation of American history which, they insist, gives them the right to use force, if necessary, to resist an alien government.

The militias are a marginal force, certainly. But the terrifying simplicity of their vision is a feature of an American societal psychosis, which is anything but marginal.

How sinister, and yet absurd, to encounter men whose only conceivable purpose for assembling weapons and undertaking military training is to use force, if necessary, against their own government.



Back to the present: the political idea that underlies the American gun culture is that the only way to sustain a free society is to ensure the right of people to own and carry guns freely. Any abridgement of that freedom will lead eventually to the confiscation of guns and the choking off of liberty by an all powerful state. Allowing the state to assemble a list of gun owners (a gun registry) poses a deadly threat to freedom. Some day, the state will come and snuff out freedom when they take the guns away.

This ideological hand-me-down from the American Revolution has come to Canada in a diluted form. But there is no doubt that it is the wellspring of thought from which the opposition to Canada’s Gun Registry derives. Today, the carriers of that ideology, the members of the Harper government, are in power.

Canadians have no need for hand-me-downs from the American gun culture. The American Revolution and the Second Amendment are not our founding myths and they have no place in our society. We ought to deal with the threat posed by allowing deadly weapons to fall into the hands of the potentially deranged without reference to a rancid ideology that has nothing to do with our history.

More gun control not less is what Canada needs.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Canadian Troops are being Sacrificed in the Dirty Afghan War

Last night in Ottawa, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a pep talk on the need for Canadians to learn the lessons of 9/11 and to carry on the struggle in Afghanistan. “As the events of September 11 so clearly illustrate, the horrors of the world will not go away if we turn a blind eye to them, no matter how far off they may be,” he said.

“And these horrors cannot be stopped unless some among us are willing to accept enormous sacrifice and risk to themselves.”

What really gets me about this rally round the flag stuff and the call on young Canadians to sacrifice themselves is that the war in Afghanistan is a dirty war and our government knows it.

Members of the Harper government know full well that Taliban fighters can pull back across the border into neighbouring Pakistan whenever the heat is too great for them in Afghanistan. And they know that top Taliban leaders are among the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who are refugees in Pakistan in cities like Quetta not far from the border. They know as well despite public assurances from Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff that he is our ally in the war on terror, that Pakistan does bugger all to stop the Taliban from moving back and forth across the border. In Pakistan, the Taliban hide and rearm for the next round.

Of course, we can expect members of the Bush administration to call on Musharaff to step up his efforts to stop the incursions into Afghanistan. But the Americans have much bigger fish to fry in Pakistan. They want to keep this key nuclear power on board as an American ally and do not want it to fall into the hands of Muslim fundamentalists. They are willing to turn a blind eye to the fact that Musharaff plays games with the Taliban, does not want a strong Afghanistan and cannot really control elements of his own security forces in the border region.

If this dirty war has to grind on for years to come, that’s OK with Washington as long as the number of American casualties is kept to an acceptable level. That’s where we come in. Having a couple of thousand Canadians in dangerous, front line missions against the Taliban takes the heat off the Americans. In the United States, Canadian casualties don’t cause political problems. Indeed, they are barely visible.

Meanwhile, the rest of NATO is ignoring pleas for reinforcements in Afghanistan. Most Europeans want no part of this miserable conflict.

As long as Canadians are willing to ante up our troops to fight in southern Afghanistan, the higher ups who run the strategy of the West will be happy to have them there. In both world wars, British generals didn’t mind sacrificing Canadians, Australians and other colonials. It’s no different today.

That’s why it’s so grating to hear Stephen Harper talk about sacrifice.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

On the Fifth Anniversary of 9/11: The American Empire is in Crisis

On that Tuesday morning, five years ago when hijacked aircraft slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC, it was immediately proclaimed that this was “the day that changed the world.”

Five years after that terrible day, it is evident what has really changed the world was not the terror attacks themselves, but the doctrine adopted by the Bush administration to prosecute the so-called War on Terror. Half a decade and two wars after September 11, what comes into view is a multi-facetted crisis of the American Empire, a crisis rooted in fierce ideological debates and in hard material realities.

After September 11, it became plain even to those who had been dazzled by the prospect of the perpetual domination of markets, during the short-lived era of the “borderless world” and the “end of history”, that neither the state nor borders were withering away. First to feel the change---the canary in the mine shaft---was the utopian and youthful anti-globalization movement. Paradoxically, it was snuffed out when utopian liberal capitalism receded before the looming presence of the surveillance state and a world of perpetual war.

Utopianism was succeeded by the thinking of hard-headed realists who became the champions of the American Empire in a time of testing. An important intellectual in this group was Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian who was 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. In late 2005, Ignatieff gave up this post and returned to Canada where he won a seat in Parliament in the 2006 federal general election. Several months after the defeat of the Liberal government in that election, he launched his campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Party.

In his analysis of the structure of global power, Ignatieff recognized the existence of an American Empire:

“It is an empire lite,” he wrote “hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risks of daily policing. It is an imperialism led by a people who remember that their country secured its independence by revolt against an empire, and who have often thought of their country as the friend of anti-imperial struggles everywhere. It is an empire, in other words, 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.”

“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.”

Ignatieff’s thesis was that the world was beset by the problems of failed states, the wreckage of the process of de-colonization of earlier empires in the 1950s and 1960s. Failed states, he argued, are preyed upon by barbarians, analogous to the barbarians who tore at the perimeters of the Roman Empire. As a consequence of modern technology, the barbarians are able to strike out at the imperial heartland as they did in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. 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 led back to health. This process he called nation-building. Thus, for Ignatieff, imperialism, for a time at least, was essential.

“Those who want America to remain a republic rather than become an empire imagine rightly,” Ignatieff wrote in the months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, “but they have not factored in what tyranny or chaos can do to vital American interests. The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.”

His work had the feel of the European imperialism of the belle époque about it. His was a “civilizing mission” and one could picture him at the Congress of Berlin in 1885, planning the division of the world with Otto von Bismarck and the other statesmen of the day. Ignatieff was very much a liberal imperialist, a believer in the idea that imperial America, for its own selfish reasons to be sure, could help lead peoples out of oppression and chaos. 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 lend their endorsement to the imperial wars of George W. Bush.

As time passed, however, and the missions, particularly the one in Iraq, bogged down into a morass in which a sustained insurgency and growing conflict within Iraqi society, made U.S. success appear highly unlikely, some staunchly conservative personalities proclaimed that they were no longer on board. Prominent conservatives abandoned both their support for the Bush administration and even more significantly, their adherence to neo-conservatism itself.

In the early months of 2006, Francis Fukuyama, author of the utopian conservative testament, The End of History and the Last Man, published a manifesto in which he announced that he was no longer a neo-conservative. As he rehearsed in the preface of his new book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, he had “long regarded” himself “as a neo-conservative”, believing he shared “a common worldview with many other neo-conservatives---including friends and acquaintances who served in the administration of George W. Bush.” He had worked on two occasions for Paul Wolfowitz. Earlier he had been a student of Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, himself a student of Leo Strauss, the intellectual godfather of neo-conservatism. Fukuyama had also attended graduate school with William Kristol and had frequently contributed to The National Interest and The Public Interest, two periodicals founded by William’s father, Irving Kristol. He had written as well for Commentary Magazine, the flagship neo-conservative periodical, founded by Norman Podhoretz. Listing his relationships makes it clear that Fukuyama had been a neo-conservative with a rare pedigree.

In his analysis, Fukuyama eviscerated the tenets of the neo-conservative American foreign policy pursued by the administration of George W. Bush. He harshly critiqued the National Security Strategy issued by the White House in September 2002, arguing that in making the case for pre-emptive war in the new age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, the administration had fatally blurred the distinction between pre-emptive war and preventive war. While he was prepared to contemplate pre-emptive war on those rare occasions when the United States was clearly threatened with an imminent attack, he had an altogether different view of preventive wars, in which the U.S. invaded a country to halt its capacity to mount a threat at some point in the future.

“The problem with the NSS doctrine,” according to Fukuyama “was that in order to justify stretching the definition of preemption to include preventive war against nonimminent threats, the administration needed to be right about the dangers facing the United States. As it turned out, it overestimated the threat from Iraq specifically, and from nuclear terrorism more generally….”

“The actual experience of the Iraq war ought to demonstrate that the distinction between preemptive and preventive war remains a significant one. We have not abruptly moved into a world in which rogue states routinely pass WMD to terrorists; such a world may yet emerge, but acting as if it were here now forces us into some extremely costly choices. Even under post-September 11 conditions, preventive war remains far more difficult to justify prudentially and morally than preventive war and ought properly to be used in a far more restricted number of cases.”

The White House endorsement of the concept of preventive war, in Fukuyama’s view, struck at the heart of the integrity of state sovereignty, the system that has been in place, at least in theory, since the Treaty of Westphalia brought the Thirty Years War to a conclusion in 1648. It was the overt challenge to the concept of state sovereignty that deeply alienated European allies, Fukuyama concluded.

From the standpoint of the Europeans and many others, the American insistence on the right to launch pre-emptive and preventive rested on the notion of “American exceptionalism”, Fukuyama wrote. “Many countries face terrorist threats,” he pointed out “and might be inclined to deal with them through preemptive intervention or the overturning of regimes deemed to harbour terrorists. Russia, China, and India all fall into this category, yet if any of them announced a general strategy of preemptive/preventive war as a means of dealing with terrorism, the United States would doubtless be the first country to object. The fact that the United States granted itself a right that it would deny other countries is based, in the NSS, on an implicit judgment that the United States is different from other countries and can be trusted to use its military power justly and wisely in ways that other powers could not.”

Fukuyama’s break with the neo-conservatives did not mean that he had ceased to support the basic fact of the American Empire. What he was calling into question was the extreme lengths to which neo-conservatives were prepared to go to shore up the perimeters of the empire in dangerous and strategically crucial regions of the world, in particular the Middle East. Fukuyama’s problem with the behaviour of his erstwhile collaborators was strategic not principled. From the standpoint of the well being of the United States in the world, he was arguing, it was highly unwise to use arguments that could only be justified on the ground that the United States was an unusually moral power, with a unique role to play in safeguarding the healthy functioning of the global system. The degree of unilateralism revealed in the NSS statement and in the Iraq War had driven too many states and their peoples into taking hostile attitudes toward the United States. This was dangerous, in Fukuyama’s view, and a strategy could be found that would safeguard American interests in the world, without engendering such vast antagonism. The argument was about how to run the empire, not whether there ought to be one.

In addition to provoking sharp debates among the supporters of the American Empire such as Ignatieff and Fukuyama, what the terror attacks of September 11 did was to bring on a time of difficult adjustment more quickly than it would otherwise have come. Three decisions taken by the Bush administration plunged the American Empire into crisis. The first decision was the enormous tax cut, whose major beneficiaries were the affluent and the rich. The second and third decisions were the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which were central to the huge increase in American military spending that accompanied them. The policies of the Bush administration embroiled the United States in an interlocking, dual crisis that was geo-political and economic in scope. The geo-political crisis turned on whether the United States could continue to maintain its supremacy in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf. The invasion of Iraq was a highly risky attempt to tighten the American grip on the petroleum rich lands around the Gulf. If successful, the Bush administration would be rewarded with solid strategic gains, and along the way, with the enrichment of key corporate backers of the Bush White House.

In a sanitized Iraq, remade in the socio-economic image of the United States, the U.S. would establish permanent military bases and would push rival contenders for Iraqi oil such as France and Russia aside in favour of Anglo-American oil interests. From Iraq, the Americans could keep a wary eye on Saudi Arabia, the country with the greatest oil reserves in the region and a country in which jihadist Islamic ideology had gained a strong position, thereby posing a constant threat to the Saudi regime. Not unimportant in the scheme of things were the venal interests of corporations such as Halliburton, with which Bush loyalists, most notably Vice President Dick Cheney had intimate ties.

These bounties were there for the plucking, provided of course, things went well for the “coalition of the willing” in Iraq. As it happened, things went disastrously, so much so that a regional gambit ended up bringing on a crisis for the American Empire that was global in scope. The initial defeat of Saddam Hussein’s armed forces came quickly with Baghdad falling into American hands following a lightning drive of the U.S. military northwards. George W. Bush danced his jig of victory on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier. Then the real fighting began. Month after month, the insurgency against the occupation gained strength in Iraq. As the Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite political leaders who were prepared to work with the Americans and their allies frequently quarreled with each other, those who had chosen the road of armed resistance broadened their alliance and grew ever more effective.

An early casualty of the prolonged fighting was the kind of U.S. military that had been so painstakingly reconstructed in the decades following the Vietnam debacle. It was a volunteer force, equipped with dazzling technology, both in its armaments and logistics, and the doctrine of the force was that it could fight and win two major wars simultaneously in different parts of the world. What the morass in Iraq revealed, however, was that the volunteer force was too thin on the ground to prevail in a lengthy occupation without the call up of a large number of reserve units. The stresses of mobilizing reservists who had never expected to serve in a shooting war and of keeping units in Iraq for long periods contributed to flagging morale, and sagging support for the war in the United States. In the early months of 2006, retired American generals and military critics were not only calling for the resignation of U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, they were demanding a rethink of American military doctrine. What had appeared to be the most solid of the pillars on which the American Empire stood---its military---had shown itself to be much weaker than anyone had thought.

Because empires rely on the impression that they are invulnerable, any sign of weakness in the ability of an empire to cope with armed resistance is enormously damaging to the empire far beyond the region immediately affected. One consequence of the Iraq shambles for the U.S. has been to embolden potential foes of the United States in other parts of the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. The Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance, much troubled with its own domestic concerns, learned the lesson from Iraq that the United States would have a much more difficult time invading Iran than anyone had previously calculated. The result was that the Teheran regime felt it could take substantial risks in pushing ahead its program of uranium enrichment. For the Bush administration, facing declining support at home and growing doubts about its ability to cope abroad, Iran’s challenge meant that Washington would have to consider another risky military adventure---the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Empires cannot allow themselves to look weak and when they do they sometimes take risks that can make them look even weaker.

Absent the Iraq debacle, the Bush administration could have afforded to deal with the Iranian nuclear challenge through the mobilization of the other major powers and by bringing various kinds of economic and political pressures to bear on Teheran. After Iraq, the issue became a naked test of American power. And the whole world, not least the American people, was watching.

The Iraq miscalculation prompted many governments in different regions of the world to take actions that could be regarded as “soft” rejections of American power. In Latin America, the consequence was to reinforce the tendency of the region’s left of centre governments to shift away from support for the American-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas. In Western Europe, the tendency among political elites in virtually all countries was to see American global policy as reckless and to seek ways to counterbalance the initiatives of the Bush administration. In Asia, the momentum of many countries drawing closer to China, for commercial reasons, was accelerated.

America’s growing problems in the Middle East were directly related to the emergence of a crisis with respect to the economic position of the United States in the world. In the early months of 2006, a number of key economic indicators of American economic performance had become warning signs that a basic realignment could be in the offing. The American current account, perennially in deficit, was plumbing new lows. As the most basic indicator of the American commercial relationship with the rest of the world, the U.S. current account revealed that both in terms of trade in goods and in terms of capital flows, the United States was in a sharply negative position. Americans were importing far more goods than they were exporting, to the tune of about 500 billion dollars a year, with China replacing Japan as the country with the largest trade surplus with the United States. On the other side of the current account ledger, the story was one of growing American indebtedness to the rest of the world. Far from being the net creditor country that the U.S. had been before 1986, the United States was now, by a long margin, the world’s leading debtor nation, in debt to the tune of roughly two trillion dollars to the rest of the world.

The plunge of the United States into the position of serious net debtor was a sign of the weakening position of the U.S. as the overseer of the global economic system. The other major area of malaise in the U.S. economic performance was the deficit of the federal government and American military spending which was running at about 500 billion dollars a year. Economic forecasts and the plans of the Bush administration made it clear that the U.S. was likely to run a very sizeable deficit over the medium term future.

With the price of crude oil nudging seventy dollars a barrel in the spring of 2006, and threatening to go sharply higher as a consequence of the American showdown with Iran, the U.S. dollar was falling dramatically against other major currencies. Not only was the high price of petroleum threatening to push the world into recession, the U.S. dollar’s position as the global reserve currency was becoming ever more precarious. The Euro has been in the wings for years as a potential alternative reserve currency and even though the economic performance of the leading Euro countries have been sluggish, the countries of the Euro zone have a rock solid current account performance. For countries highly dependent on selling raw materials, particularly crude oil and natural gas, the temptation to dominate their sales in Euros rather than in depreciating dollars has been growing ever stronger. If the U.S. dollar was to lose its position as global reserve currency, either partially or generally, it would hit the American economy with price shocks in the broad area of primary products, most importantly petroleum. In addition, the freedom of the U.S. to run a continuous current account deficit would be sharply curtailed if the Euro were to seriously challenge the dollar as a reserve currency. This is because major central banks and corporations would be bound to shift their holdings to a considerable extent from dollars to Euros, a development that would accelerate the downward pressure on the American dollar and would force a sharp hike in U.S. interest rates to prevent a flight of foreign capital from U.S. securities.

While other major countries would have a strong interest in managing such a transition from dollar to Euro as responsibly as possible, the risk of a severe crisis could not be ruled out. Not since the end of the First World War has the world seen a transition of the kind that could be in the offing. Moreover, the world economy is enormously more global in its functioning than it was eight or nine decades ago, with capital and currency transfers from market to market dwarfing those made in the days when the pound was floundering and the dollar was taking its place.

Rethinking the American Middle Eastern position is bound to be accompanied by efforts to make the American Empire sustainable economically. This raises the thorny and inter-related questions of the size of the U.S. defence budget and the problem of the American government’s burgeoning debt.

Cutting the defence budget of the United States cannot easily be done as long as the Americans occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. Over the longer term, cutting defence spending is an option that segments of the American political leadership are likely to consider, but not until the current hot phase of operations in the Middle East has been concluded. Whatever the United States does about the defence budget, the overall budget deficit is a broader problem which cannot indefinitely be allowed to remain unresolved. Previous empires, the Roman and the French, foundered on an inability to finance their operations. While Bill Clinton managed during the 1990s, through the imposition of a tax increase, to pull Washington’s finances into the black, it will be exceedingly difficult for the United States to summon the political will to repeat that exercise. Failure to deal with the government deficit can only mean more borrowing by the United States, much of it from foreigners. That borrowing will add to the problems of the American dollar and to the growing indebtedness of the United States to foreigners.

Everywhere one looks, the United States faces a series of interrelated problems. While the American Empire is by no means in imminent peril of collapse, it could be forced to pull back from some of its more exposed positions in world trouble spots, in particular the Middle East. In the process, it is likely that the United States will have to consider moving over to a more multilateral strategy, bringing other major powers into its confidence, so that the burdens of empire can be shared with the Western Europeans, the Japanese and others. Accepting the restraints that would accompany multilateralism would be no easy thing for the American leadership, certainly the neo-conservative leadership that has been at the helm under George W. Bush. For the neo-conservatives, sharing power with the Europeans and the Japanese has been anathema, a sure way to blunt the effectiveness of American power in sensitive regions of the world.

The challenges that now confront the American Empire are similar to the problems faced by previous empires---problems of imperial overstretch and of the challenge of fashioning legitimacy for their rule. What makes it especially difficult for the American political leadership to cope with these challenges is the extent to which the norms of American political culture confuse the issues and make it difficult to confront them directly. Only the occasional ideological outrider such as the maverick neo-conservative Charles Krauthammer has the temerity to say that the U.S. should stop shying away from the word empire, and then adds for good measure that “we could use a colonial office in the state department.” It is no easy thing to plan for the long-term viability of an empire in a political culture in which the very existence of the empire needs to be constantly denied, at least in public discourse.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

The Long Goodbye of Tony Blair

In the manner of Margaret Thatcher and Jean Chretien, Tony Blair is being driven from office by rivals, parliamentarians, militants and supporters within his own political party.

It’s hard to recapture the mood of that spring day in 1997, when Blair led the Labour Party to power in the United Kingdom. The people of Britain were in a mood for basic change after eighteen years under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. They had had enough of the new capitalism, with its ravaged public services, privatizations of crown assets that enriched a new layer of the bourgeoisie and the ever widening divide in wealth and power between the Home Counties and the rest of the country.

The new prime minister was youthful, loquacious, and even eloquent when he wasn’t too loquacious. He came to power at one of those rare moments when a prime minister can steer his country in a novel and more progressive direction, counting on the goodwill of a large majority of the population.

The issue that had driven Margaret Thatcher from office in 1990 had been Britain’s relationship with the New Europe. Thatcher had fought the movement toward European economic and political union with every fiber of her being. She detested the idea of Britain being submerged in a European federation. For her, the English Channel was wider than the Atlantic. Her heart and her hopes were invested in the relationship with the Americans, particularly in her close ties to Ronald Reagan and his successor George Bush, the Elder.

When Blair moved into 10 Downing Street, the British were still ambivalent about the European Union and the fast approaching moment when the Euro would be launched to replace national currencies. His ambition was to make Britain the lynchpin in a renewed North Atlantic alliance between Europe and America. He decided initially to keep Britain out of the new Euro zone, but he wanted to align Britain with France and Germany as one of the central engines of the EU.

When the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were followed by George W. Bush’s War on Terror, Blair allied himself very closely with the occupant of the White House, winning praise from the president as America’s closest friend. To doubters, Blair explained that it was dangerous to leave America on its own to pursue its world policy. By lining up with the U.S. on Afghanistan and most crucially in planning the invasion of Iraq, he believed he could hold America and Europe together.

Instead, Blair and the British ended up as the junior partners in an American imperial enterprise, while the much reviled “Old Europe” of France and Germany opposed the invasion of Iraq. Blair’s conceit that in return for support for the U.S. in Iraq, he could convince the Americans to sign on to the Kyoto Accord and to adopt a less one-sided pro-Israel position in the Middle East, was misplaced. He delivered himself body and soul to Bush’s imperial crusade and got nothing in return. Bush didn’t mind hosting Blair at his Texas ranch and mentioning him in high flown orations on Capitol Hill, but that was the limit. Blair ended up as the Cheshire Cat, a grin and nothing more.

After reported shouted matches yesterday with his likely successor Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown at Number 10, Blair announced today that he will depart as party leader and prime minister within a year. Having led his party to three majority electoral victories all that is left to Blair is the hope that he can complete a full decade in office. The Conservative Party now leads Labour in the polls and polls depict Blair as the most unpopular British prime minister since the Second World War.

What destroyed Blair was a double barreled conceit---that he was strong enough to manage the U.S.-European relationship; and that he could humanize the new American imperial mission to bring “freedom” to the Middle East. As the war in Iraq has dragged on, Blair’s verbose insistence that the Anglo-American mission there has been opening the way for the democracy, the rule of law and human rights has made him appear ever more ridiculous. He has become a man of many words, believed by few.

Since 2003, Blair has been able to sustain himself in office by playing on the British memory of empire, on the idea that Britain should play a large role in the world and that side by side with America it can punch above its weight. In his second inaugural address in 2005, George W. Bush declared that “America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants therof.” With diminishing success, Blair has peddled this missionary line in Britain.

The words are increasingly hollow. But they still pack a punch. Canadians are being urged now to stay the course in Afghanistan for exactly the same vainglorious reasons. There, as in Iraq, the lesson is being slowly learned that western armies are perceived as outsiders, not liberators, and that their very presence provokes insurgency.


Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Layton and Kennedy Have Transformed the Afghanistan Debate

NDP leader Jack Layton, and to a lesser extent Liberal leadership candidate Gerard Kennedy have transformed the debate about Canada’s mission in Afghanistan. On the eve of the federal NDP convention in Quebec, Layton has come out squarely in favour of an end to the Canadian presence in Afghanistan. Stating that this is “not the right mission for Canada”, Layton has called for the whole of the Canadian contingent to be pulled out of the Kandahar region by February 2007. Meanwhile Gerard Kennedy has written that the Harper government’s current strategy for Afghanistan is “a long term losing one.” He said that the Harper government “has failed to answer the fundamental question of whether we’re building a civil society in Afghanistan alongside the Afghan people or essentially occupying a troublesome part of the world.”

Both Layton and Kennedy have taken courageous positions, which point in the same direction although Layton has gone further than Kennedy. They deserve vocal public support. A very large number of Canadians have already made up their minds that this is the wrong mission for Canada, that what we are doing in central Asia is intervening in a civil war and shoring up one part of an American war front that now stretches through Iraq to the borders of Pakistan. With the Iranian government standing firm in its decision to proceed with the enrichment of uranium despite the recent resolution of the UN Security Council calling on Iran to call a halt, and with George W. Bush touring the U.S. warning that he will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, there is a very real danger that the current conflagration may soon widen. It is clear that a sizeable wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. favours military action---in the form of aerial strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities---if Teheran does not do a humiliating about face.

The stands taken by Layton and Kennedy prepare the way for two critical debates this autumn, one in parliament, the other in the Liberal Party on the eve of its leadership convention. If Layton goes into the fall session of the House with the strong endorsement of his party, as I believe he will, he will be well placed to demand the basic debate on Afghanistan that this country has never really had. Given the shift in opinion in Quebec against the Harper government in response to the Conservative position on the war in Lebanon, Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois are bound to be much more militant in their opposition to the unpopular Afghanistan adventure. The BQ’s timidity following the election of the Harper government has ended, with the Bloc no longer fearful of an early federal election. Now it will be Harper who will have to play for time.

The position taken by Gerard Kennedy will bring on a showdown with Michael Ignatieff, not only over Afghanistan, but over the role of Canada in the American global mission. As long as none of the Liberal leadership candidates was prepared to challenge Ignatieff’s pro-imperial position directly, the debate was being sidestepped. Now it will be front and centre. Its outcome will determine what kind of Liberal Party will take the field following the December convention in Montreal.

Meanwhile, the Harper government and much of the media will launch a concerted assault on Layton and Kennedy for supposedly failing to support the troops while the war is raging. It will be ugly, phony and emotional. The deaths of young Canadians will be used to insist that the mission must continue with the inevitable cost of yet more deaths. The goal will be to isolate Layton and Kennedy from mainstream opinion.

I’m betting on Layton and Kennedy to gain in popular support. Progressives need to do more than sit back and watch, however. The time to speak up is now.

Friday, September 01, 2006

The Invention of Michael Ignatieff

I mean no disrespect to Michael Ignatieff, the person, in asserting that Michael Ignatieff, the political phenomenon, is an invention. He is a synthetic creation, a deus ex machina. With the demise of Paul Martin, and the decisions of Frank McKenna, Brian Tobin and others to take a pass on a leadership run, members of the Liberal Party establishment found themselves without a natural candidate. The Liberal Party was in danger of falling into the hands of those the establishment did not fully trust.

Attractive, articulate, only a little long in the tooth, and with a reputation the establishment could relate to---because it was garnered abroad--- Ignatieff, the outsider, was their solution. Best of all, he was reminiscent of Pierre Trudeau, at least on first glance. Soon the suave academic was being described in hushed tones as “the new Trudeau”, a phrase I have heard frequently during my summer travels to various parts of the country.

On closer examination, the conceit that the Liberal establishment has struck gold with a new Trudeau falls to pieces. Pierre Trudeau, like Michael Ignatieff, was recruited by the federal Liberal leadership at a time when the party had been wracked by scandals in Quebec. If the Liberals were to succeed in fighting off the new Quebec nationalism in the era of the Quiet Revolution, they needed new blood. Of the Three Wise Men imported to Ottawa by Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau quickly emerged as the star (the others were Jean Marchand and Gerard Pelletier). Not only did he outshine, Union Nationale Premier Daniel Johnson in a live encounter at a federal-provincial first ministers’ conference, he had written powerful, trenchant attacks on the doctrine of the new nationalists. Whatever one thinks about Trudeau’s articulate denunciation of the nationalists---I have my misgivings---the clarity of his thinking made him the ideal point man around whom to construct a defence of federalism at a critical time. In the encounter with Rene Levesque, Pierre Trudeau’s defence of federalism went far beyond a cost-benefit analysis to prove that Quebecers were better off in Canada. Trudeau articulated a vision of a great country that could encompass multiple identities without succumbing to the poison of the exclusive nationalism of any of them. The patriation of the constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms encapsulate that vision.

Trudeau was a Quebecer who could take on the nationalists on their home turf and win the allegiance of a sizeable proportion of francophones in so doing. In the great battles with Levesque, he emerged the victor.

Michael Ignatieff, on the other hand, is a liberal intellectual whose chief claim to fame is that he was swept off his feet in support of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He lent his reputation as a believer in human rights to a muscular crusade in the Muslim world in which the West would defeat the barbarians and save civilization. His pro-imperial musings in books, and in articles in prestigious publications such as the New York Times, won him fame as an oddity. What was a liberal like him doing in the ranks of neo-conservatives? He became notorious in the intellectual company of people like Christopher Hitchens, another liberal who was won over to the invasion of Iraq.

Once again the Liberal Party desperately needs to rebuild in Quebec, to establish legitimacy for itself in the aftermath of Jean Chretien’s reign, when baubles for insiders took the place of the brain power of the Trudeau era. If Michael Ignatieff is the new Trudeau, presumably he is the man to take on the job of reconstructing federalism and winning a new generation of Quebecers to the cause of Canada.

Ignatieff, though, is an Anglophone MP from Toronto. Not famous for his defence of a well reasoned federalism as Trudeau was, he is best known for espousing views that are highly offensive to many, if not most, Quebecers. For more than a century, Quebecers have developed a political culture which is overtly anti-militarist. Nothing appeals less to Quebecers than military crusades in the company of the great Anglo-Saxon powers on the far side of the world. Quebecers expressed their displeasure with such crusades during the South African War, the conscription crises of the first and second World Wars, and in their opposition to conscription during the Cold War. They played an outsize role in keeping Canada out of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The last kind of leader who will win a new hearing for federalism in Quebec is an English Canadian who wants to reinforce our ties with the crusaders in Washington and London.

If Ignatieff, when scrutinized, is not the man to renew the ties between Anglophone and Francophone Canada, how well suited would he be to the more mundane task of winning power for the Liberals in the next election?

Here, as well, he’s all wrong for the job. To win the votes to turn out Stephen Harper, the Liberals need to look left not right. They are not going to cut into Stephen Harper’s hold on the right-wing vote in Canada. The Conservative Party is the natural home of those who support the embattled empire of George W. Bush and his failing expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Liberals need a leader who can appeal to social democrats, environmentalists and soft-nationalists in Quebec. The NDP, the Greens and the Bloc would take dead aim at the pro-imperial stance of a Liberal Party led by Ignatieff and they would be very effective.

As we enter the critical autumn months that lead to the Liberal convention in Montreal, the establishment is continuing its effort to convince Liberals that Ignatieff is the man for our time. Clearly, the people who run Maclean’s Magazine and the Globe and Mail would rather see the author of Empire Lite as leader of the Grits than one of the more progressive candidates like Gerard Kennedy, Bob Rae or Stephane Dion. The Maclean’s cover story and the seven page extravaganza in last weekend’s Globe speak for themselves. (I am a huge admirer of Michael Valpy, whose story on Ignatieff was far from being a puff piece. This is a case, however, where the medium was the message. The spread was so huge, and so unbalanced in terms of the prospect of any such similar treatment for the other candidates, that the point was made by the firepower of so many column inches. Who else but a very great man could merit so much?)

The little episode in which Michael Ignatieff told the Toronto Star that he might not run for parliament in the next election if he does not win the leadership did a lot to prick the balloon of the monster coverage in Maclean’s and the Globe. Revealed for us was the real man, not the invention. What we saw was a rather fastidious fellow who might be happier going back to Harvard if he can’t get the top job in our sub Arctic homeland.

To some extent, all political leaders are inventions, creations of their handlers. The Ignatieff case has taken this to the point of absurdity. One almost expects a George Bernard Shaw to conjure up a Professor Higgins who can transform the fussy academic into a man of the people, in a reverse Pygmalion.

It won’t work. The real question is whether the synthetic Ignatieff will be rejected by Liberal delegates, or by Canadians in a general election.