Veiling Intolerance in Liberal Discourse

On its surface, the debate in Europe, and to a lesser extent in Canada, about Muslim women wearing the veil appears to be a relatively harmless affair. Please take off the veil, Jack Straw, the former British foreign minister, urges the few women in his constituency who wear it, when they visit his office. That will allow for a more successful conversation, and there will be another woman present.

Then British Prime Minister Tony Blair weighs in, calling the niqab a “mark of separation” which makes non-Muslims “uncomfortable”. Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi says similar things.

What is noteworthy is the spectacle of very powerful male politicians publicly criticizing a small number of women, who are hardly members of their countries’ elites, for what they choose to wear. The criticism is made palatable because it is veiled (pun intended) in liberal discourse. These leaders are inviting the women wearing the niqab to abandon this mark of separation from the rest of society. After all, we are reminded by many of those who have written on the issue, the niqab is a symbol of the repression of women in highly intolerant societies.

What could be more benign than the invitation of oppressed women to stride into liberal enlightenment through the removal of a strip of cloth?

In all dialogues of this sort, it is crucial to keep in mind the power relations among those who are doing the talking. What I see is something far from benign. A great deal of pressure is being brought to bear on a few women for reasons that extend well beyond the niqab. After all, if politicians and journalists in the West wanted to draw critical attention to groups of people wearing costumes that set them apart, that convey a message of separateness, they could point out Old Order Mennonites, Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, or maybe even the outfits worn by the Pope and the Dalai Lama.

What gives the narrative about the niqab its traction in the media is that it is the thin edge of the wedge in a critique of Muslims in general, not just those who wear the niqab. The question that is being asked, in a highly coded way to be sure, is whether Muslims constitute an alien presence in our society. Can they be relied upon to fit in as immigrants, to assimilate and become members of our society? Or will they be a dangerous, separate people, and even a source of terrorist recruits for attacks on us, with repeats of attacks like the suicide bombings in London in the summer of 2005?

As a society largely of immigrants, more or less recent, Canadians have been down this road before. In Ontario, in the 1850s and 1860s, following a wave of Irish Catholic immigrants in the wake of the Irish famine, people questioned whether the Irish would be unruly, un-British, a mass that could never adopt our ways. Would they join with the Fenian terrorists who were plotting to attack Canada (and actually did attack) in a campaign to liberate Ireland from British rule?

In the early 20th century, people wondered whether Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish migrants to Winnipeg would assimilate or would they try to plot a Bolshevik revolution, as some thought they had in the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. In recent decades, Chinese immigrants have been similarly subjected to suspicion and doubt. Were the Chinese residents of Richmond B.C., who shopped at malls where the signs were almost all in Chinese, going to become real Canadians? Or had we encountered the mass that would never be like us?

And, with tragic consequences, Europeans have been down this road before. When Russian and Polish Jews, many of them in costumes that made them appear alien to Europeans, emigrated in large numbers to Vienna, Berlin and other centres, there was an outcry against them. Much of the dialogue bore a resemblance to the present one about the niqab. Were these newcomers representatives of a primitive past that enlightened Europeans had put behind them?

Not surprisingly, some of the highly assimilated Jews in Germany and Austria found the newcomers something of an embarrassment and feared that their appearance could stoke the flames of prejudice against all Jews. We have seen a similar, and understandable, response among some Muslims in the West to the wearing of the niqab.

People have a perfect right, of course, to subject the streams of thought within particular religions to scrutiny and to critique their social implications.

When the powerful within a society begin a narrative of the kind we have seen about the niqab, however, that is not what is going on. Muslims are being set apart as the “other”. Though we may pride ourselves on our liberalism, in our civilization when people are set apart and critiqued as not really belonging in our midst, the consequences can be terrible.

(A slightly edited version of this post ran in today’s Globe and Mail.)

The American Empire: In Need of New Management

Putting aside the issue of whether an empire is a desirable form of political and social organization, there is the not inconsiderable question of whether the empire is competently run. Many of those who have made the case that the American Empire plays a positive, indeed essential, role in the international system, pose the challenge: “Would you rather live in an empire run by anyone else?”

Whatever one’s existential response to the abstract query, let me make the far from abstract case that, at present, the American Empire is being atrociously mismanaged.

The case for empire is that it takes a dominating power to preside over the global economy, to keep the peace and to ensure that the other players in the system abide by its rules and norms. The empire is supposed to be a force for stability and security. To use the jargon, the dominating power of the day---in our case the American Empire---is expected to play the part of a “status quo” power. Amongst its tasks, it is expected to keep “revisionist powers”, those countries seeking a change in the global system, in check. If a transformation must occur, such as the rise of China, the empire is supposed to manage the change so that it does not threaten the overall stability of the system.

The American Empire, under the current management of the Bush administration, is ineptly handling two huge sets of questions: geopolitical issues; and the economic management of the system.

On the paramount issue of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the U.S. has bungled almost imaginably. The principal instrument to block non-nuclear states from developing nuclear arsenals is the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Along with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (abrogated by the Bush administration), this treaty is the keystone in the non-proliferation structure.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty is a two-sided affair. Non-nuclear powers have signed on to it, pledging that they will not develop a nuclear arsenal, in return for an undertaking by the nuclear powers not to use nuclear weapons against them, and a further undertaking that the nuclear powers will dismantle their stock of nuclear weapons over the long term.

Far from upholding the system that has been erected to prevent the further proliferation of nuclear weapons, the United States has undertaken repeated assaults against that system. The U.S. refuses to endorse the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on the grounds that it intends to develop new generations of nuclear weapons, fine-tuned for such purposes as bunker-busting (small weapons that can obliterate underground facilities), and may need to test nukes in the future. That intention, at least implicitly, violates the American undertaking to dismantle its own stock of nuclear weapons. In addition, the U.S. abrogation of the ABM Treaty opens the door for the U.S. to shield itself against a limited nuclear attack, thus reinforcing its capacity to undertake a nuclear first strike against states with small nuclear arsenals without having to fear effective retaliation.

Further exacerbating the situation, in his State of the Union address in January 2002, President George W. Bush concocted the term “Axis of Evil” to put the governments of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea on a “wanted list” of rogue regimes that Washington intended to confront. Just over a year later, the U.S. invaded Iraq on the grounds that it possessed weapons of mass destruction (which it did not), and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. The message to the governments of Iran and North Korea was loud and clear---Washington was prepared to back its desire for regime change with military action. Possession of nuclear weapons, while no guarantee against a U.S. assault, was the prudent course to take.

Governments in non-nuclear states have closely watched the behaviour of the U.S. vis a vis India, Pakistan, and Israel, all non-signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India and Pakistan have tested nuclear weapons. Following a period of official displeasure with India over its development of nuclear weapons, the Bush administration reached a deal with the Indian government in 2006, opening the way for the transfer of civilian nuclear material to that country, even though India remained outside the non-proliferation regime. Although Israel refuses to confirm its status as a nuclear power, it is an open secret that the country has developed a large nuclear arsenal, totaling as many as two hundred weapons. The lesson is that the United States is prepared to wink at those who escape the non-proliferation regime and will come to terms with “facts on the ground”.

While Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it claims the right to enrich uranium for what it asserts is a civilian nuclear energy program. Insisting that Teheran plans to develop nuclear weapons, the Bush administration has succeeded in pressing the UN Security Council to demand that Iran stop enriching uranium. North Korea, a signatory to the treaty, is the only country to have withdrawn from the treaty, a step it took in 2003. With its recent nuclear test, immediately condemned by the UN Security Council, Pyongyang has made the bet that it will hold a stronger hand with nukes than without them.

The Bush administration’s refusal to hold one-on-one talks with North Korea and to consider a non-aggression pact with that country in return for the dismantling of its nuclear program, has backed that paranoid regime ever further into a corner.

On nuclear weapons, the American insistence on retaining a completely free hand for itself has undermined a regime in which the U.S. was in the strongest position. Washington’s unwillingness to place any real limits on itself and its erratic behaviour toward potential nuclear states, has made the whole world, including the United States, less safe.

Meanwhile, the American position in Iraq, the “Axis of Evil” country it did invade, has become so perilous, that elites in Washington are now plotting a graceful way out of the civil-war torn country.

Matching its geo-political mismanagement has been the Bush administration’s disastrous handling of the global economic system and the position of the United States in it. There is an indissoluble link between these two aspects of the growing crisis of the American Empire.

As has been the case with earlier empires, America faces the problem of imperial overstretch. For the Americans, convincing their upper classes to submit to a level of taxation required to sustain the empire is a daunting problem. Ruling classes never submit easily to the idea of paying their way. But some have done a better job of it than others. The British ruling class, for instance, with its quasi-aristocratic background and its schooling in traditional toryism, proved more capable of taking the long view than has been the case with the Americans. The American ruling class, by contrast, has lacked the ideological and class cohesion that served the British ruling class so well. Moreover, the American ruling class has been deeply attached to the liberal idea of the small state. This idea, whose practical benefit has been low taxes for them, makes it extremely difficult for political leaders to convince the rich in America to pay enough to safeguard their position for the long term.

The segment of the American political elite that most fervently favours a higher military budget for the United States is also the wing of the American leadership that is mostly strongly opposed to high taxes. Since George W. Bush was sworn in as president in January 2001, this militarist wing of the U.S. leadership has held the reins of power, controlling not only the White House, but since the Congressional elections of 2002, both houses of Congress as well. The Bush administration carried out invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, while simultaneously pushing tax cuts through Congress, tax cuts whose benefits went disproportionately to the wealthy. As a consequence of its policies during a period of reduced economic growth, the Bush administration has saddled the United States with record high government deficits. The soaring deficits have come just a few years after the Clinton administration achieved the first balanced budget and then surplus in many years. The result is that the federal government of the United States is plunging into debt, a debt on which interest must be paid. A high proportion of the treasury bills sold to finance the U.S. debt are held by foreigners, approximately two trillion dollars of this by the central banks of Japan and China.

The position of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency is becoming ever more precarious. The Euro has been in the wings for years as a potential alternative reserve currency and even though the economic performance of the leading Euro countries has been sluggish, the countries of the Euro zone have a rock solid current account performance. For countries highly dependent on selling raw materials, particularly crude oil and natural gas, the temptation to dominate their sales in Euros rather than in depreciating dollars has been growing ever stronger. If the U.S. dollar was to lose its position as global reserve currency, either partially or generally, it would hit the American economy with price shocks in the broad area of primary products, most importantly petroleum. In addition, the freedom of the U.S. to run a continuous current account deficit would be sharply curtailed if the Euro were to seriously challenge the dollar as a reserve currency. This is because major central banks and corporations would be bound to shift their holdings to a considerable extent from dollars to Euros, a development that would accelerate the downward pressure on the American dollar and would force a sharp hike in U.S. interest rates to prevent a flight of foreign capital from U.S. securities.

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

Both the geopolitical and the economic aspects of the crisis of the American Empire are forcing a basic reconsideration of global strategy onto the American political agenda.

Everywhere one looks, the United States faces a series of interrelated problems. While the American Empire is by no means in imminent peril of collapse, it could be forced to pull back from some of its more exposed positions in particular in the Middle East. In the process, some influential voices in the U.S. will opt for moving over to a more multilateral strategy, bringing other major powers into its confidence, so that the burdens of empire can be shared with the Western Europeans, the Japanese and others. Accepting the restraints that would accompany multilateralism would be no easy thing for the American leadership, certainly the neo-conservative leadership that has been at the helm under George W. Bush. For the neo-conservatives, sharing power with the Europeans and the Japanese has been anathema, a sure way to blunt the effectiveness of American power in sensitive regions of the world. Despite their rapidly waning credibility, the neo-conservatives can be expected to insist on staying the course in the Middle East and Central Asia as well as in East Asia. To win they will have to count on molding a more martial culture in the United States, one in which both the elites and the people are willing to accept the long-term burdens of empire.

The challenges that now confront the American Empire are similar to the problems faced by previous empires---problems of imperial overstretch and of the challenge of fashioning legitimacy for their rule. What makes it especially difficult for the American political leadership to cope with these challenges is the extent to which the norms of American political culture confuse the issues and make it difficult to confront them directly. It is no easy thing to plan for the long-term viability of an empire in a political culture in which the very existence of the empire needs to be constantly denied, at least in public discourse.

Atrocious management has pushed the American Empire into a major crisis less than two decades after the expiration of its Soviet rival. It is almost unimaginable that the fruits of victory in the Cold War could have been so rapidly squandered.

Kennedy's Road to Victory

Changing the take of the nation’s mulish pundits on the Liberal leadership contest is a time-consuming process. This slow witted beast---it is one beast inhabiting many bodies---forgets nothing and learns little. The sages decided long ago that there were three serious candidates in this race: Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, and Stephane Dion. Gerard Kennedy---possibly because he looks so much younger than most of the nation’s aging pundits (I’m 64 and am allowed to say this)---was written off as a promising youth, at best a “king-maker”, whose real shot at the job would be next time.

Facts are inconvenient, but they’re worth mentioning. The latest update of the delegate totals from Super Weekend, with 458 of 471 meetings reporting, put Kennedy solidly in third place with 817 delegates to Dion’s 770 delegates. Given two things---Dion’s far from consensual approach to fellow candidates at the recent leadership debate in Toronto, and the fact that Kennedy can likely pick up more second ballot support than Dion from the delegates of the bottom four candidates---Kennedy will almost certainly be on the ballot after Dion expires.

What about Ignatieff and Rae?

Ignatieff has had a terrible week. On whether the Israeli attack on Qana was a war-crime, he has vacillated so absurdly that he looks more like a candidate for a position on a university senate than for the leadership of a political party. Today, in the Globe and Mail, he is trying to convince us (in a column by Lawrence Martin) that he really does not want to “live in an American imperial world.” But stay tuned, there could be an update next week. Ignatieff is a smart guy, he doesn’t have the set of smarts it takes to be a political leader, unless Hamlet’s old job as Prince of Denmark comes open.

Liberals are fast figuring out that Ignatieff is not the man to lead them back to office. With only 29 per cent of the delegates so far, and with little potential for growth after the first ballot, his campaign is mired. He will likely not win.

Bob Rae has a very good shot. Despite the problem with some of his B.C. delegates, he has been looking ever more prime ministerial. Polls show him running well in a contest against Stephen Harper, whose fortunes appear dire. Being relentlessly right-wing may have spared him the label of “Mr. Dithers” but it is quickly convincing Canadians that they don’t want him.

Rae can go on to victory on the strength of delegates joining him after their candidates drop. But can Rae get to the last ballot, where I believe he would beat Ignatieff?

That depends on Kennedy and it is becoming the crucial calculation on which the whole thing depends. Kennedy’s message about party renewal and a new way of doing politics is getting through---not to the pundits, but to the delegates, and especially to younger delegates. If he can convince the supporters of Dryden, Volpe, (less likely Brison), and Hall Findlay to join him and can knock off Dion, his moment is at hand. A strong campaign between now and the convention can convince the Dion supporters that they ought to throw their support behind this candidate who has done so well in English Canada.

If he makes it to the last ballot, Kennedy will beat Ignatieff.

One piece of advice for Kennedy: He should cut his hair to make it look more like Don Newman’s. That’ll help the media mules to see him in a new light.

The Vacant Mind of Margaret Wente

Someone had to do it. Not surprisingly, it was Margaret Wente who threw down the challenge to the women who wear the veil---the full shroud with only a slit left for the eyes.

Wente sees a growing number of Muslim women in this attire, and whenever she sees them she gets “a chill.”

“The trouble with the veil is not simply that it makes conversation difficult,” she writes. “It is that it stands for a set of behaviors and beliefs that are fundamentally incompatible with those of a liberal democracy. Take off your veils ladies. I beg you,” exhorts Wente.

In true Orwellian fashion, it is the vacant-minded views of Margaret Wente that are, in fact, fundamentally incompatible with those of a liberal democracy.

What makes Wente’s column a classic is that it has been written countless times in Canada over the last one hundred and fifty years.

Wente writes that while in “tolerant, conflict-averse Canada, it’s almost taboo” to ask whether the veil-wearers or the rest of us should adapt, in Europe today “there is a growing sentiment that immigrants should be more like ‘us’---if not in dress, then certainly in values---and a spreading unease that some Muslims and the mainstream may not be able to co-exist.”

What Wente has done is to depict Muslims as “the other,” as a mass or collectivity that is robbed of individuality. I’ve grown more sensitive to this because I’ve been on the road on a book tour with Haroon Siddiqui, the distinguished Toronto Star columnist who has written a book titled Being Muslim. Siddiqui makes that point that in our society today, Muslims are subjected to a psychic internment. When a Christian does something---smokes dope, exposes midriff, massacres students at an exurban high school---he or she is judged as an individual. By contrast, when a Muslim does something, a Muslim anywhere in the world---all Muslims are asked to pronounce on it, as though they are all somehow implicated, say in a suicide bombing or some other act of terrorism.

Out of this reduction of Muslims to the status of “the other” arises Wente’s query. Are these people going to fit in as immigrants? Can we assimilate them?

It’s a very old story. In Ontario, in the 1850s, following a wave of Irish Catholic immigrants in the wake of the Irish famine, people questioned whether the Irish would be unruly, un-British, a mass that could never adopt our ways. Would they join with the Fenian terrorists who were plotting to attack Canada (and actually did attack) in a campaign to liberate Ireland from British rule?

In the early 20^th century, people wondered whether Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish migrants to Winnipeg would assimilate or would they try to plot a Bolshevik revolution, as some thought they had in the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. In recent decades, Chinese immigrants have been similarly subjected to suspicion and doubt. Were the Chinese residents of Richmond B.C., who shopped at malls where the signs were almost all in Chinese, going to become real Canadians? Or had we encountered the mass that would never be like us?

During my years teaching at York University, I’ve learned not to judge people by their appearance, or their dress. The Orthodox Jewish student with the big black hat---who looked like my rabbi grandfather in Montreal in the 1930s---insisted on spelling the name of the deity, G_d. But his essay was no less worthy in its analysis of Canadian society that that of the kid with the pierced tongue and eyebrows, who was always reading James Joyce.

The same has been true of the hundreds of Muslim students I have taught, with the veil, without the veil, with the shroud, without the shroud. They participated in class and in the papers they wrote, as individuals.

Bigots used to brag that they could always pick out the Jews from a series of photographs. When put to the test, it turned out that they couldn’t. I defy anyone to read the essays of my students---with the names removed---and to figure out their religion, ethnicity or gender.

It’s easy these days to pick at the Muslims in our midst and to increase their feeling of psychic internment. Margaret Wente has a perfect right to peddle her brand of breezy, seemingly frank and guileless horse-crap. Why the Globe and Mail chooses to sacrifice so many hectares of forest to that end is another question.

Stephen Harper: Man of Ideas

Canada’s prime minister is a man of firm views. He never dithers.

Where does he get his ideas? Does he pluck them from the air? Consider ten of his initiatives since he took office:

· Ditching the Kyoto Accord and replacing it with a “made in Canada” environmental approach that does nothing to reduce green house gases.
· Deep-sixing the national child care program, launched late in the life of the Martin government, in favour of a system of “choice” for parents.
· Extending Canada’s Afghanistan mission for two years, increasing military spending, and signaling that Canada will seek to expand its global influence through war-making, not peace-keeping.
· Dumping the historic aboriginal accord achieved in the autumn of 2005, thus denying first-nations billions of dollars in development capital.
· Unveiling “three strikes and you’re out” legislation to tie the hands of judges and to make it easier to lock up offenders throw the key away and make prison expansion a growth industry in Canada.
· Abandoning the gun registry in favour of the idea that guns don’t kill people, people do, and that after they have offended they will be harshly dealt with.
· Cutting the funding for women’s groups to lobby for greater gender equality.
· Dropping the funding of literacy programs from federal spending.
· Considering legislation to allow public servants to refuse to solemnize same-sex marriages, as well as legislation to protect groups who promulgate the view that biblical passages justify the killing of homosexuals.
· Strongly endorsing Israel’s “measured” military assault on Lebanon and branding those who point to atrocities committed in that assault as “anti-Israel”.

It looks like an application for membership in the Republican Party.

On Appeasement and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Two charges are regularly made against those who advocate the withdrawal of western armies from Iraq and Afghanistan. The first, that they are craven because they would “cut and run” is nothing more than the usual excess of testosterone displayed by those who think that any brawl they get into must end with the annihilation of their opponents. The second charge is that those who would withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan are appeasers following in the footsteps of Neville Chamberlain at Munich.

The second accusation is more serious because it raises the question of what we can learn from history to prepare us to deal with the dilemmas of the present.

The story of the appeasers of the 1930s teaches us complex lessons about the uses and misuses of history. The appeasers in Britain and France, like Chamberlain and (in a more complicated way) Edouard Daladier, were strong anti-Communists. While not pro-Hitler, they, and many of their backers, were not averse to the prospect of Nazi Germany marching east against Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The appeasers who sold out Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938 were mostly on the political right. But it was more complicated than that. Right across the political spectrum in Britain and France, there was an intense aversion to war, the lesson of the First World War and the mechanized slaughter of millions in the trenches in France. Communists and some others on the left held the powerful conviction that Hitler and the fascists had to be stopped, if necessary by force. (The Communists were to face their own moment of bitter anguish in August 1939 when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that opened the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The Communists, also schooled in the lessons of history, accepted Stalin’s line that the war between the western powers and Nazi Germany in September 1939 was an inter-imperialist war, like the First World War, and that, therefore, the working class should stay out of it.)

There is a further wrinkle and it is of considerable importance. Much of the line later adopted by the right-wing appeasers in the 1930s, especially in Britain, was originally developed by liberals in the period immediately following World War I. After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote a highly influential book titled The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In it, Keynes denounced the treaty for its ruinously harsh treatment of Germany and for its imposition of reparations on the Germans (on the specious grounds that they were uniquely responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914.) He argued that peace and prosperity would only return to Europe through the more generous treatment of the defeated enemy.

Adding to the case developed by Keynes was the work of the historians in the 1920s, in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere that concluded that Britain, France and Russia shared responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War. The consequence was the rise of the so-called “lost generation” in the post-war years, whose cultural icons, like Ernest Hemingway, no longer believed in glory, war, patriotism and all the other slogans that had led humankind into the terrible world war.

Liberals wanted a better deal for the Germans and for a while during the mid 1920s it looked like Germany could be brought back into a peaceful European system. Other political forces were on the rise, however. The fascists took power in Italy. In Germany, the small Nazi movement became adept at playing on the evils of the Treaty of Versailles, the war guilt clause, and the payment of reparations (ironically, Germany ended up paying almost no reparations). Hitler used the case the liberals had constructed about the mistreatment of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles to keep the western powers off balance during his crucial first years in power. Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to reoccupy the Rhineland militarily, he argued, it was German territory wasn’t it? Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to build an air force and a large navy like the other powers? Why shouldn’t Germany be allowed to absorb Austria in the Anchluss of 1938? After all, the Austrians were German speakers and they wanted to join Germany.

And on it went. Hitler and the appeasers made use of arguments devised by liberals in the very different conditions of the early post-war period. Hitler did it to guilt the West into inaction against him. The appeasers did it to excuse their ambivalence about how to deal with the Nazis in the context of the threat of Bolshevism.

If appeasement in the 1930s was the product of complex narratives, the lessons right-wingers drew from appeasement were much simpler in the era following the Second World War. The Cold Warriors of the post-war world used Chamberlain and Munich as symbols of sell out. The lesson they insisted on was that if you want peace you must prepare for war. Only a strong, well-armed, nuclear West could face down the Soviets, they maintained. In Vietnam, all these arguments were used. If the United States did not “stay the course”, if it chose to “cut and run”, the dominoes would fall, and Communism would march on to victory in country after country. If we didn’t fight them in Asia, we would have to fight them on our own doorstep.

The supposed lessons of appeasement and Munich taught the Americans how to do exactly the wrong thing. By the time Lyndon Johnson geared up for a major American troop build up in Vietnam in 1964, the Communist world was already bitterly divided between its two giants, the Soviet Union and China. They hated each other so much that they fought border wars against each other. And North Vietnam was a Soviet ally, highly suspicious of China, and soon fought a border war against the Chinese. The theory, on which the Vietnam War was premised, that the West was up against a unified Communist menace, was a crock. But anyone who insisted on saying that was accused of being an appeaser, a Neville Chamberlain. With the victory of North Vietnam in 1975, the dominoes did not fall. Communism did not march to victory. Indeed, fourteen years later, the Soviet Empire fell flat on its face and Vietnam soon became a favourite place for the U.S. to invest capital.

Today, we are again the recipients of lessons supposedly drawn from the experience of appeasement and Munich.

The real lesson of Munich, if there was one, was that you had to stand up against the imminent threat of a rising imperial power that had made it plain that its goal was conquest in Europe and beyond. Furthermore, that imperial power was an industrial giant that had rearmed and had created the world’s most advanced air force and mechanized army. If the West didn’t rearm and didn’t stand up to Hitler, all of Europe would end up in Hitler’s hands (as for a while most of it did).

Today, the West is engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and there is the potential for war against Iran. Those who insist that the two wars that are underway must be fought to victory claim that anything less will enliven the world-wide forces of Islamic jihad to set out to undertake ever more deadly assaults against the West. And if we do not use force if necessary to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, then the Hitler-like president of that country will plot assaults against the West. If we do not stop them on the borders of Pakistan and in the Persian Gulf, the argument goes, we will face them on our own turf.

Really. Increasingly, the evidence reveals that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are radicalizing tens of thousands of young men in the Middle East and Central Asia to hate the West and to take up arms against Europeans and North Americans. In addition, the evidence shows that neither country is making progress toward peace, prosperity, human rights and democracy as a result of the presence of western armies. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are sinking into civil wars. In both cases, the presence of western armies is seen by much of the population of the two countries, as an alien invasion. The oldest instinct in the world, the desire of people to be free of foreign invaders, is at work in kindling the insurrections in both countries. And resentment against the western occupations and the death toll that goes with them is being fanned far and wide across large parts of the Islamic world.

Let’s remember a few salient facts. The United States spends as much on its military as almost all the other nations in the world combined. The West is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Israel has its own nuclear weapons, with an arsenal estimated to include two hundred nuclear missiles. The idea that the West and its close allies face the prospect of invasion and defeat at the hands of would-be Hitlers is preposterous. It is a Big Lie, a lie being used to silence people in the United States, Canada and Europe who are coming to the conclusion that these wars are doing nothing to increase our security, and everything to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people in the zones of conflict.

It’s time for some genuinely fresh thinking about the utility of empire and war. To do that thinking we need to rid ourselves of ludicrous historical distortions that can only get in the way.

Harper's Wager: Casualties for Global Influence

“The mounting Canadian death toll in Afghanistan is the price of leadership that comes with playing a significant role in global affairs”: Stephen Harper.

Note the statement. And think about the mind set of the Canadian leader who made it.

The statement is crass and vulgar. It is utilitarian in its willingness to trade blood for influence. It measures the worth of Canada and Canadians in quantitative terms---more casualties, more influence.

The statement sweeps to one side the moral worth of the Canada that has achieved greatness and respect throughout the world as a nation that values human life and embraces diversity. It dismisses the Canada that has lent its energies to peacekeeping.

Power grows out of the barrel of a gun this prime minister believes.

Above all, his statement betrays how envious Stephen Harper is of the big guys in Washington. In awe of military power, how tiny he must feel next to those whose hundreds of bases encircle the globe and whose naval task forces can sail into any sea and blast any country off the face of the earth.

And yet, the empire that presides over all that weaponry and death dealing power is stumbling in the Middle East, in Latin America, in the rise of its indebtedness, and even in the trust and respect the American people have for its leaders.

Canada has not survived and flourished over all the decades it has lived next door to the United States because of its military might. It has flourished because of the society we have constructed, with all its limitations, and the values we cherish.

The ability to deal death is only one form of power. The creative power to establish a better society, country and world far surpasses it.

Keep Harper’s statement in the back of your mind. And when the next election is called, it will be reason enough to show this prime minister the door.

The Senate Report: The Truth About Missile Defence

The Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence has issued a report calling on Canada to sign-on to the U.S. missile defence program. “The Liberal Government declined last year,” said the report. “The current government should definitely not decline.”

Once again Canadians are being invited to opt for inclusion in an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system which would place us at the table where the decisions are made but would give Canada no decision-making power over the use or non-use of the system. That would be left in the hands of the Americans. A place at the table, so we can watch the Americans make decisions, is the notion of sovereignty that the report is trying to sell to Canadians. Along with this, Canadians are being fed the usual bromides about the proposed ABM system being purely defensive and not involving the weaponization of space.

What Canadians need to know is that the American proponents of the ABM system regard the program as crucial to increasing the offensive power of the United States against potential foes and see it explicitly as a step toward the weaponization of space.

The evidence for this comes in a report issued in 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, written by a group of neo-conservative heavy weights who have played a key role in defining the military policies of the Bush administration. I don’t know why the Canadian advocates of ABM never face up to the very clear things this report put on the public record.

Established in 1997, the Project for the New American Century included Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz----who were “concerned with the decline in the strength of America’s defences, and in the problems this would create for the exercise of American leadership around the globe…”

In its September 2000 report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century,” the authors stated that the U.S. military needed to be rebuilt around four key missions:

· the defence of the American homeland;
· the capacity to fight and decisively win, major theatre wars simultaneously;
· the performance the “constabulary” duties that arise out of the need to shape the security environment in critical regions;
· the transformation of the U.S. armed forces to exploit what the authors call the “revolution in military affairs.”

The Report’s unilateralism was unapologetic. On nuclear weapons, the authors excoriated the Clinton administration for its support for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which had been ratified by one hundred and fifty states. While the Clinton administration’s effort to ratify the treaty, was voted down by the U.S. Senate, the Clinton White House pledged that the U.S. would behave as though it was a party to the treaty and would not test nuclear weapons. In the long term, as far as the authors of the Report were concerned, this was not a tenable strategy. “If the United States is to have a nuclear deterrent that is both effective and safe,” the Report reads “it will need to test.” (The administration of George W. Bush has repudiated the CTBT.)

The authors of the Report envisaged a defence posture in which the U.S. military’s missions would range beyond the defence of America to the capacity to win wars far from U.S. shores and to be able to act as global policeman in laying down the law in unstable and strategically important parts of the world. That this was a blueprint for an empire rather than a nation state was made clear in the recommendation that a key task for the U.S. forces must be to control “the new ‘international commons’ of space and ‘cyberspace,’ and pave the way for the creation of a new military service----U.S. Space Forces---with the mission of space control.” The “weaponization of space”, routinely condemned by Canadian policy makers as potentially triggering a new and dangerous arms race, was thought highly desirable by this group of American thinkers.

That the authors of the Report were thinking in offensive, not defensive, terms about the mission of the U.S. military was made clear in the way they formulated their support for the development and deployment of a missile defence system for the United States. At first glance it would appear that the primary goal of missile defence would be to protect the United States against a nuclear attack by a rogue state. That, however, was not uppermost in the thinking of the authors. “Without it [missile defence],” the Report reasoned “weak states operating small arsenals of crude ballistic missiles, armed with basic nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction, will be in a strong position to deter the United States from using conventional force, no matter the technological or other advantages we may enjoy. Even if such enemies are merely able to threaten American allies rather than the United States homeland itself, America’s ability to project power will be deeply compromised.”

The authors, in language exceedingly frank on this subject, championed U.S. missile defence as a way to prevent small countries from deterring the U.S. from imposing its will by launching a conventional military assault on them. Seen this way, missile defence was a tool for maintaining and extending the sway of the American Empire. Military strategists have always warned against simplistic distinctions between offensive and defensive weapons systems. Apparently a defensive weapons system, missile defence was understood by the authors of the Report as key to maintaining America’s offensive capability vis a vis, not only small and truculent states, but even a looming giant such as China.

With an eye on the long-term future, the Report seized on the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that had been made possible by technological transformation and the need for the U.S. military to ride the wave of advance this promised. The authors linked the creation of a U.S. global system of missile defence to the larger goal of establishing American control of space and cyberspace. The Report called for the construction of a system of global missile defences. “A network against limited strikes, capable of protecting the United States, its allies and forward-deployed forces, must be constructed,” it stated. “This must be a layered system of land, sea, air and space-based components.”

Indeed, the weaponization of space, or the further weaponization of space as they conceived it was a crucial notion of these planners, who saw this as essential if American global preeminence was to be sustained. “No system of missile defences can be fully effective without placing sensors and weapons in space,” the Report stated. “Although this would appear to be creating a potential new theatre of warfare, in fact space has been militarized for the better part of four decades. Weather, communications, navigation and reconnaissance satellites are increasingly essential elements in American military power.”

“….over the longer term, maintaining control of space will inevitably require the application of force both in space and from space,” the Report continued “including but not limited to anti-missile defences and defensive systems…”

Ultimately this would require, in the opinion of the authors, the establishment of a new American military service, to be called U.S. Space Forces. They reasoned that “it is almost certain that the conduct of warfare in outer space will differ as much from traditional air warfare as air warfare has from warfare at sea or on land; space warfare will demand new organizations, operational strategies, doctrines and training schemes. Thus, the argument to replace U.S. Space Command with U.S. Space Forces---a separate service under the Defence Department----is compelling. While it is conceivable that, as military space capabilities develop, a transitory ‘Space Corps’ under the Department of the Air Force might make sense, it ought to be regarded as an intermediary step, analogous to the World War II-era Army Air Corps, not to the Marine Corps, which remains a part of the Navy Department.”

The U.S. posture advocated in the Report was aimed at sustaining American global preeminence into the indefinite future. There was not a hint of any need to develop a collective leadership that included other nations or to forge an international regime to guarantee the rights of all nations. What was aimed at was the preservation and enhancement of the American Empire.

A number of those who were involved in the Project for the New American Century went on to wield power during the presidency of George W. Bush. Most notably, there was Paul Wolfowitz, who as Undersecretary of State became a key advocate of the invasion of Iraq.

Canadians who are being urged in the Senate Report to revisit the issue of missile defence should not be lulled into the idea that the ABM system would create greater global stability by guarding against potential threats from rogue states. The ABM system, as the authors of the report of the Project for the New American Century openly proclaim, is a step toward the weaponization of space whose goal is to extend the ability of the United States to intervene as it pleases in military missions all over the world. Nothing could be more destabilizing for the global future.

After Liberal Super-Weekend: It's Time to Take a Serious Look at Gerard Kennedy

Delegate selection on Liberal Super-Weekend confirmed that Michael Ignatieff will have a strong lead going into the December convention. In the range of thirty per cent of delegate support, and likely a few percentage points more than that when ex officio delegates are included in the mix, he nonetheless remains stoppable. He is no more strongly placed to become the winner than Brian Mulroney was in the 1976 Conservative leadership contest, when the little known Joe Clark emerged to defeat him. The list of front runners who didn’t make it has been a long one over the years in both federal and provincial leadership contests.

Much of the Liberal Party establishment has toiled mightily to ensure victory for Ignatieff, but they have come up short. Given the immense media coverage he has received, it is surprising that he is not closer to wrapping up this race. Ignatieff remains a divisive, polarizing figure in the Liberal Party and the country. He is best known as the champion of military intervention in zones of conflict. He supported the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and has never retracted his view that the mission was a good idea, though badly handled) and he voted with Stephen Harper to extend Canada’s mission in Afghanistan. His enthusiasm for the American Empire puts him at odds with the political culture of most Liberals and most Canadians. He is a Tony Blair in the making.

Bob Rae who came second on Super-Weekend, with a shade under twenty per cent of the vote, has emerged as one possible candidate around whom a stop-Ignatieff movement could coalesce. Rae has run a strong campaign, has been the smoothest of the performers, and has gone a long way to overcoming the negatives he faced at the beginning of the campaign. That he still has a considerable distance to go is revealed in his relatively poor showing in Ontario, where he managed only seventeen per cent of the vote, following Ignatieff with nearly twenty-eight per cent and Gerard Kennedy with nearly twenty-seven per cent. Doing less well in his own bailiwick than he did nationally is a worrying sign. In a diverse country like Canada, going into a federal election with the strong backing of your own region is seen as a crucial political attribute. And when that region is Ontario, the sine qua non for federal Liberals, Rae’s weakness stands out.

Stepane Dion, who will likely end up in fourth place when the rest of the races, including those with mail-in ballots are toted up, remains a serious contender. His strong showing in Quebec and his association with the increasingly important environmental issue, mean that he will receive a serious hearing over the next two months. His problems---a didactic, non-charismatic manner, and his authorship of the Clarity Act (highly divisive in Quebec) make him a tough sell.

Which leaves Gerard Kennedy, who turned in the performance on Super-Weekend that most surprised the media. With over sixteen and a half per cent of the vote, he will almost certainly hold on to third place. Kennedy’s very strong showing in his home province of Ontario and in Alberta (he came first with nearly twenty-eight per cent of the vote), the province where he worked for years creating a food bank, revealed his potential. Here’s a guy who did very well where he was best known and had a record to judge.

The media ought not to be so surprised by Kennedy’s strong showing. Where the hell have they been? With the exception of a perceptive piece in the Globe and Mail by Michael Posner, they have done a shoddy job covering the Kennedy candidacy. For months, columnists and television analysts, have talked of the Big Three candidates, Ignatieff, Rae, and Dion. Kennedy, whose under-the-radar campaign, with its strong cohort of youthful organizers, has been repeatedly under-estimated. The national media has egg on its face.

The time has come for the punditry to take a fresh look at Kennedy. He’s the right age, has turned in a stellar performance as Ontario’s education minister, and has plenty of charismatic firepower. His strong showing on Super-Weekend did not come out of thin air.

Kennedy’s weakness in Quebec is not the consequence of an unwillingness to reach out to that province as he now must do. It is the result of having virtually no organization there. When you factor in his shut out in Quebec in looking at his national numbers, Kennedy is right alongside Ignatieff as the choice of Liberals in English Canada.

Unlike Ignatieff, who divides Liberals, Kennedy represents the outlook with which Liberals are most comfortable. He is a progressive who can assemble the coalition of voters on the centre-left that alone can challenge Harper in the next election.

It’s time to stop underestimating his candidacy.