In newscasts this week, Canadians were treated to footage of Prime Minister Stephen Harper visiting the front in Afghanistan. We saw him stride up a hill at Ma’sum Ghar in full military gear and then watched him look out over the landscape through binoculars.
“I have a doctorate in history,” Colonel Mike Cessford, the deputy commander of the Canadian contingent in Kandahar told reporters. “No sitting prime minister, in my opinion,” he continued “has been closer to combat operations than this prime minister today.”
All day long the CBC and other media outlets trumpeted the story that Harper had done something never done before by a Canadian prime minister. Underlining the danger for the prime minister, CTV’s South Asia Bureau Chief Steve Chao reported that: “Occasionally, Ma’sum Ghar still gets rocketed---an interpreter lost his life there last week during a rocket attack---despite this, Prime Minister Harper said he felt he needed to go down there personally to see the front lines.”
The problem with the claim that Harper was the first sitting prime minister to visit the front in wartime is that it is untrue.
In July 1917, at the height of the First World War, Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden sailed to England, at a time when German submarines were taking a heavy toll of allied ships in the North Atlantic. Borden then crossed to France where he visited wounded Canadian and British soldiers in hospital. Following visits to several Canadian units, Sir Robert “visited the trenches” according to The Official Story of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, written by Sir Max Aitken, M.P.
The section of the front visited by Prime Minister Borden was the scene of intense fighting in the summer of 1917.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Friday, May 11, 2007
Tony Blair: Ten Wasted Years
Ten years ago, when the youthful, loquacious, personable Tony Blair led the Labour Party to a sweeping victory in Britain, there was an air of excitement and hope. The interminable right-wing assault on working people carried out by Margaret Thatcher and her unremarkable successor, John Major, was over at last.
Under Blair, schools and hospitals and dilapidated infrastructure would surely be mended. The rapidly widening income and wealth gaps between the rich and the rest of the population would be narrowed, it was hoped. And Britain could take its place alongside Germany and France in the construction of a socially progressive European Union it was reasonable to anticipate.
Now as Blair prepares to leave 10 Downing Street, his record is one of disappointment on all of these files. But the most important legacy of the Blair years has been Britain’s involvement in failing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Blair came to office during Bill Clinton’s second term in the White House and it seemed that the two leaders would join forces in developing an amalgam of liberalism and social democracy as a mildly progressive antidote to the impact of globalization on wage and salary earners, the much ballyhooed Third Way.
It is not as Clinton’s partner that Blair will be remembered, however. Rather he will go down in history as the collaborator of George W. Bush, and the chief foreign enabler of his wars. It was of inestimable value to Bush that he had the supposedly progressive leader of the British Labour Party at his side when he unveiled his doctrine of pre-emptive war and launched his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Bush cloaked his wars in the garb of human rights, democracy and freedom. He managed to win the endorsement of liberal intellectuals, among them Christopher Hitchens and Michael Ignatieff, for these crusades. But the political warrior who did the most to legitimate his disastrous adventures was Tony Blair.
On the other files, depressingly little was achieved by Blair. The Third Way turned out to be No Way. The schools, hospitals and infrastructure of the UK look much as they did at the end of John Major’s watch. Today the UK has replaced the US as the advanced country with the highest level of child poverty. In addition, Britain is now home to a sizeable cohort of young males who are regarded as uneducable and unemployable. These youths have become the scourge of British cities.
As far as Europe is concerned, the UK remains where it was---on the perimeter---outside the Euro zone, a low wage, low tax barrier to progressive advance.
Blair did contribute to the peace process in Northern Ireland, but the bitter legacy of the Iraq War is one reason Scottish secessionism is once more on the rise.
More that most leaders, Tony Blair plotted the negative course his country took in defiance of plenty of advice from others who pointed the way toward an alternative route. The reverberation of Britain’s imperial past, and the vainglorious desire to play on the global stage proved too alluring a brew for Blair. Now his country is left with the hangover.
Under Blair, schools and hospitals and dilapidated infrastructure would surely be mended. The rapidly widening income and wealth gaps between the rich and the rest of the population would be narrowed, it was hoped. And Britain could take its place alongside Germany and France in the construction of a socially progressive European Union it was reasonable to anticipate.
Now as Blair prepares to leave 10 Downing Street, his record is one of disappointment on all of these files. But the most important legacy of the Blair years has been Britain’s involvement in failing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Blair came to office during Bill Clinton’s second term in the White House and it seemed that the two leaders would join forces in developing an amalgam of liberalism and social democracy as a mildly progressive antidote to the impact of globalization on wage and salary earners, the much ballyhooed Third Way.
It is not as Clinton’s partner that Blair will be remembered, however. Rather he will go down in history as the collaborator of George W. Bush, and the chief foreign enabler of his wars. It was of inestimable value to Bush that he had the supposedly progressive leader of the British Labour Party at his side when he unveiled his doctrine of pre-emptive war and launched his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Bush cloaked his wars in the garb of human rights, democracy and freedom. He managed to win the endorsement of liberal intellectuals, among them Christopher Hitchens and Michael Ignatieff, for these crusades. But the political warrior who did the most to legitimate his disastrous adventures was Tony Blair.
On the other files, depressingly little was achieved by Blair. The Third Way turned out to be No Way. The schools, hospitals and infrastructure of the UK look much as they did at the end of John Major’s watch. Today the UK has replaced the US as the advanced country with the highest level of child poverty. In addition, Britain is now home to a sizeable cohort of young males who are regarded as uneducable and unemployable. These youths have become the scourge of British cities.
As far as Europe is concerned, the UK remains where it was---on the perimeter---outside the Euro zone, a low wage, low tax barrier to progressive advance.
Blair did contribute to the peace process in Northern Ireland, but the bitter legacy of the Iraq War is one reason Scottish secessionism is once more on the rise.
More that most leaders, Tony Blair plotted the negative course his country took in defiance of plenty of advice from others who pointed the way toward an alternative route. The reverberation of Britain’s imperial past, and the vainglorious desire to play on the global stage proved too alluring a brew for Blair. Now his country is left with the hangover.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Sarkozy's First Hundred Days
Nicolas Sarkozy intends to follow up his victory in the French presidential election with a one hundred day long offensive to transform the country. His first task will be to lead his right-wing party to a solid majority in the French National Assembly in two rounds of voting on June 10 and June 17. (The momentum he enjoys from the presidential campaign is likely to ensure him a majority in the National Assembly elections, although there will be plenty of resistance to him in the coming contest.)
Then it will be down to business. (Right now, Sarko is taking time off to cruise around the Mediterranean on a luxury yacht with room for his family and his closest confidants.)
Sarko’s priorities will be to toughen France’s immigration laws, make it easier to expel illegal immigrants from the country, stiffen penalties for those convicted of crimes, cut taxes, lessen the power of unions, lay off many thousands of people who work in the public sector, and repeal the country’s thirty-five hour work week. This is a sweeping Margaret Thatcher-style agenda. It will pit the president and his allies in the National Assembly up against millions of workers, students, immigrants, and the families of recent immigrants.
Sarkozy won office at the head of a political party, many of whose members don’t trust him, by showing that he was prepared to get tough with the kids of immigrants in the dreary suburbs of the great French cities and that he was prepared to crack down on lawlessness.
On the immigration issue, Sarkozy has been the beneficiary of the decades-long, relentless campaign of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National to stigmatize immigrants as the cause of France’s ills. While Sarko would never acknowledge it, without the spade work of the Front National, he wouldn’t have stood a ghost of a chance of being elected.
He will make it even more difficult than it already is for immigrants to enter France and he will not hesitate to mobilize the forces of law and order to hunt down and expel those who are in the country without papers. Like other politicians of his stripe, he will constantly remind the people of France that he has a mandate to do what he said he would do during the campaign. (Remember Margaret Thatcher, Mike Harris, Stephen Harper et. al.---they do not soften once in office.) Sarko will show mercy to a few people who have suffered abuse in their countries of origin so he can claim to be a civilized human being, but in the overwhelming majority of cases the hammer will come down.
Tax cuts and their accompaniment---the sacking of those on the public payroll---will start him down the neo-liberal path to the more American-style economy he seeks. In the main it will not be bureaucrats who will lose their jobs, but a wide range of employees who work in hospitals, schools, day care centres, universities, servicing roads and other infrastructure, keeping cities clean, beautifying parks etc.
Key to Sarkozy’s campaign was his promise to let the French work harder if they choose to do so. That means he will set out to scrap the thirty-five hour work week. That measure, introduced by the Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (under the presidency of right-winger Jacques Chirac), came into effect in 2000. The law which applied initially to large enterprises, provided for a phase-in for smaller companies. It was intended to give workers more leisure time and to create jobs by enticing companies to make up for the loss in hours worked by hiring new employees. When it came into effect, the law was popular among workers and was reviled by employers. Economists and foreign analysts were horrified by the law which they said would discourage foreign investment. Perhaps their real fear was that it could prove attractive to workers in other countries, just as previous movements for the forty-eight hour week and later the forty hour week became causes that motivated working class movements.
The transition to the thirty-five hour week did not provoke the ruinous consequences that the political right had predicted. Unemployment in France today is lower than it was when the law was introduced.
Sarkozy has targeted the law however, and with it the union movement in France. He has convinced a large proportion of the population that France is stagnating, that it needs a more enterprise-centred market economy. One might imagine from all the hysteria about French stagnation that free enterprise has been suffering in France. In fact, 2006 saw record high profits for the companies listed on the country’s leading stock exchange, the CAC 40.
Capitalism is already alive and well in a country in which the gap between the rich and the rest of the population has been widening (although not as much as in the US, the UK and Canada). Sarkozy’s goal is to free capitalism from the remaining restraints it faces. He wants to deliver the death blow to what remains of the distinctive French economic and social model.
There will be one hell of a fight.
Sarkozy won 53 per cent of the vote last Sunday, but the 47 per cent of the French population that voted for Socialist Segolene Royal is a very sizeable portion of French society. The new president is a highly polarizing figure. While adored by those on the right, he is detested in equal measure by those who opposed him.
Sarkozy will attempt to use the power of the state to crush those who stand in his way. Those on the other side can expected to resist, however. Since 1789, France has always been divided between the right and the left, the counter-revolutionary tradition and the revolutionary tradition. That division has not ended.
In 1968, millions went into the streets of France to oppose the government of Charles de Gaulle, a president who was seen as a demi-god in the country. While they did not topple his regime, the consequences of that movement were the defeat of a constitutional amendment in a referendum the following year and de Gaulle’s resignation. Still later, the movement of 1968 laid the foundation for the election of Socialist Francois Mitterrand in 1981, the only left-winger to win the top job in the Fifth Republic.
Sarkozy is threatening to turn the clock back in France to an era of greater exploitation of working people, to take away from wage and salary earners much that they have gained. That there will be powerful resistance is clear. How powerful, we will have to wait and see.
Then it will be down to business. (Right now, Sarko is taking time off to cruise around the Mediterranean on a luxury yacht with room for his family and his closest confidants.)
Sarko’s priorities will be to toughen France’s immigration laws, make it easier to expel illegal immigrants from the country, stiffen penalties for those convicted of crimes, cut taxes, lessen the power of unions, lay off many thousands of people who work in the public sector, and repeal the country’s thirty-five hour work week. This is a sweeping Margaret Thatcher-style agenda. It will pit the president and his allies in the National Assembly up against millions of workers, students, immigrants, and the families of recent immigrants.
Sarkozy won office at the head of a political party, many of whose members don’t trust him, by showing that he was prepared to get tough with the kids of immigrants in the dreary suburbs of the great French cities and that he was prepared to crack down on lawlessness.
On the immigration issue, Sarkozy has been the beneficiary of the decades-long, relentless campaign of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National to stigmatize immigrants as the cause of France’s ills. While Sarko would never acknowledge it, without the spade work of the Front National, he wouldn’t have stood a ghost of a chance of being elected.
He will make it even more difficult than it already is for immigrants to enter France and he will not hesitate to mobilize the forces of law and order to hunt down and expel those who are in the country without papers. Like other politicians of his stripe, he will constantly remind the people of France that he has a mandate to do what he said he would do during the campaign. (Remember Margaret Thatcher, Mike Harris, Stephen Harper et. al.---they do not soften once in office.) Sarko will show mercy to a few people who have suffered abuse in their countries of origin so he can claim to be a civilized human being, but in the overwhelming majority of cases the hammer will come down.
Tax cuts and their accompaniment---the sacking of those on the public payroll---will start him down the neo-liberal path to the more American-style economy he seeks. In the main it will not be bureaucrats who will lose their jobs, but a wide range of employees who work in hospitals, schools, day care centres, universities, servicing roads and other infrastructure, keeping cities clean, beautifying parks etc.
Key to Sarkozy’s campaign was his promise to let the French work harder if they choose to do so. That means he will set out to scrap the thirty-five hour work week. That measure, introduced by the Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (under the presidency of right-winger Jacques Chirac), came into effect in 2000. The law which applied initially to large enterprises, provided for a phase-in for smaller companies. It was intended to give workers more leisure time and to create jobs by enticing companies to make up for the loss in hours worked by hiring new employees. When it came into effect, the law was popular among workers and was reviled by employers. Economists and foreign analysts were horrified by the law which they said would discourage foreign investment. Perhaps their real fear was that it could prove attractive to workers in other countries, just as previous movements for the forty-eight hour week and later the forty hour week became causes that motivated working class movements.
The transition to the thirty-five hour week did not provoke the ruinous consequences that the political right had predicted. Unemployment in France today is lower than it was when the law was introduced.
Sarkozy has targeted the law however, and with it the union movement in France. He has convinced a large proportion of the population that France is stagnating, that it needs a more enterprise-centred market economy. One might imagine from all the hysteria about French stagnation that free enterprise has been suffering in France. In fact, 2006 saw record high profits for the companies listed on the country’s leading stock exchange, the CAC 40.
Capitalism is already alive and well in a country in which the gap between the rich and the rest of the population has been widening (although not as much as in the US, the UK and Canada). Sarkozy’s goal is to free capitalism from the remaining restraints it faces. He wants to deliver the death blow to what remains of the distinctive French economic and social model.
There will be one hell of a fight.
Sarkozy won 53 per cent of the vote last Sunday, but the 47 per cent of the French population that voted for Socialist Segolene Royal is a very sizeable portion of French society. The new president is a highly polarizing figure. While adored by those on the right, he is detested in equal measure by those who opposed him.
Sarkozy will attempt to use the power of the state to crush those who stand in his way. Those on the other side can expected to resist, however. Since 1789, France has always been divided between the right and the left, the counter-revolutionary tradition and the revolutionary tradition. That division has not ended.
In 1968, millions went into the streets of France to oppose the government of Charles de Gaulle, a president who was seen as a demi-god in the country. While they did not topple his regime, the consequences of that movement were the defeat of a constitutional amendment in a referendum the following year and de Gaulle’s resignation. Still later, the movement of 1968 laid the foundation for the election of Socialist Francois Mitterrand in 1981, the only left-winger to win the top job in the Fifth Republic.
Sarkozy is threatening to turn the clock back in France to an era of greater exploitation of working people, to take away from wage and salary earners much that they have gained. That there will be powerful resistance is clear. How powerful, we will have to wait and see.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
General Rick Hillier Makes a Foray into Politics
Chief of Defence Staff General Rick Hillier says Canadian soldiers are mighty disgruntled that their mission in Afghanistan has been eclipsed by allegations that prisoners handed over to the Afghans by Canadians have been tortured.
“Let me just come out and say very frankly here that I’ve met a variety of soldiers who are pissed off,” Hillier told reporters in Kandahar.
Over the past two weeks, the Harper government has been raked over the coals in the House of Commons and in media reports over the issue of prisoner abuse. With his comments in Kandahar, General Hillier has crossed the line into the terrain of political debate. That is not the job of a military commander in a country where the civilian political leadership establishes national policy.
The “pissed off” comment is clearly aimed at cooling the ardor of the opposition parties in pressing their case on the prisoner abuse issue in the House of Commons. If Hillier wants to participate in national political debates, he should resign his military commission and go into politics.
He might find the going tough on the hustings. Unlike Americans who love to reward generals with high political office----George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were all generals who became president---Canadians don’t turn to men in uniform for political leadership.
Even in the United States, when generals get too big for their britches, the civilian leadership calls them to account. In the spring of 1951, at the climax of a great national debate between President Harry S. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in Korea, about who should call the shots in the war, the president relieved the General of his command. MacArthur returned to the U.S. after a fourteen year absence and was feted by millions of Americans in the streets of the great cities, the finale being a ticker-tape parade in New York City. He went to Washington and testified before a Congressional Committee. From there his political fortunes dwindled. While he had seemed likely to become an unstoppable presidential candidate in the next election, his vanity and imperial bearing frightened Americans. It would be sometime before the old soldier died, but he did fade away. In the next election, Americans turned to a general, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was a firm believer in civilian control. He did not have a Caesar-like glint in his eye.
It’s time for Hillier to stop quoting soldiers he does not name as though their service in Afghanistan ought to give them extra standing in determining Canadian policies in the war.
Meanwhile the politicians ought to spend more time considering the fact that on a per capita basis more Canadians soldiers have died in Afghanistan than has been the case for any other NATO country. That’s something that does "piss off" Canadians.
“Let me just come out and say very frankly here that I’ve met a variety of soldiers who are pissed off,” Hillier told reporters in Kandahar.
Over the past two weeks, the Harper government has been raked over the coals in the House of Commons and in media reports over the issue of prisoner abuse. With his comments in Kandahar, General Hillier has crossed the line into the terrain of political debate. That is not the job of a military commander in a country where the civilian political leadership establishes national policy.
The “pissed off” comment is clearly aimed at cooling the ardor of the opposition parties in pressing their case on the prisoner abuse issue in the House of Commons. If Hillier wants to participate in national political debates, he should resign his military commission and go into politics.
He might find the going tough on the hustings. Unlike Americans who love to reward generals with high political office----George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were all generals who became president---Canadians don’t turn to men in uniform for political leadership.
Even in the United States, when generals get too big for their britches, the civilian leadership calls them to account. In the spring of 1951, at the climax of a great national debate between President Harry S. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in Korea, about who should call the shots in the war, the president relieved the General of his command. MacArthur returned to the U.S. after a fourteen year absence and was feted by millions of Americans in the streets of the great cities, the finale being a ticker-tape parade in New York City. He went to Washington and testified before a Congressional Committee. From there his political fortunes dwindled. While he had seemed likely to become an unstoppable presidential candidate in the next election, his vanity and imperial bearing frightened Americans. It would be sometime before the old soldier died, but he did fade away. In the next election, Americans turned to a general, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was a firm believer in civilian control. He did not have a Caesar-like glint in his eye.
It’s time for Hillier to stop quoting soldiers he does not name as though their service in Afghanistan ought to give them extra standing in determining Canadian policies in the war.
Meanwhile the politicians ought to spend more time considering the fact that on a per capita basis more Canadians soldiers have died in Afghanistan than has been the case for any other NATO country. That’s something that does "piss off" Canadians.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Sarkozy Shows His Hand
In the last week of the French presidential election campaign---voters decide between the two top candidates on May 6---right-wing standard bearer Nicolas Sarkozy has served notice that if he is victorious he will be a divider, not a unifier, of the people of France.
Many observers anticipated that Sarkozy would try to soften his image so as to appeal to the supporters of centrist Francois Bayrou who won 18 per cent of the vote in the first round on April 22. While he has made a few feints in that direction, Sarko’s main thrust has been an all-out assault against the left.
It is rare that events that are long in the past become fodder for an election campaign. That is why many seasoned politics watchers were astonished the other day when Sarkozy delivered a lengthy condemnation of the May 1968 French general strike that came close to toppling the regime of President Charles de Gaulle. In May 1968, eleven million workers and students filled the streets of France demanding a new social and political order for the country.
Even though the old order survived, workers achieved substantial gains in the form of a higher minimum wage, shorter working hours, earlier retirement and improved rights for unions to organize. While the right-wing won the national elections that followed, the next year de Gaulle proposed a constitutional change to be ratified in a nation-wide referendum. Well aware that if the president lost he would resign, voters voted No and de Gaulle left office.
Sarkozy’s purpose in raising the issue of the events of 1968 was to tar today’s Socialists with the brush of being agents of chaos and unrest. Just as those who went into the streets four decades ago had no morality and no values the same is true of today’s left Sarko has insisted. His message---the Socialists and the unions are on the side of the trouble makers in France.
Throughout the campaign, Sarko’s strategic objective has been to portray himself as the man of order and security. For years as Minister of the Interior, Sarkozy has been honing the anxieties of the population about unrest in the country’s great suburbs, the centres of large populations of immigrant origin. To a considerable extent, Sarko has been the political beneficiary of the decades of anti-immigrant propaganda carried out by the far-right Front National led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
In a certain sense it is appropriate that Sarkozy has set his sights on the legacy of May ’68. All campaigns for political office seek to move the front-line in the struggles between the social classes in one direction or the other. Sarkozy wants to move the front-line sharply in favour of capital and against labour.
All of his fear mongering has as its ultimate goal a transformation of France to roll back social programs, hold down salaries and wages, increase hours of work---in short to break the power of working class resistance to a neo-liberal agenda.
If Sarkozy does win next Sunday, that does not mean that French wage and salary earners will lie down and play dead. The struggle will be resumed in acute encounters in the National Assembly, at other levels of government and in the streets. French working people will not easily give up the gains they have won over the decades.
Many observers anticipated that Sarkozy would try to soften his image so as to appeal to the supporters of centrist Francois Bayrou who won 18 per cent of the vote in the first round on April 22. While he has made a few feints in that direction, Sarko’s main thrust has been an all-out assault against the left.
It is rare that events that are long in the past become fodder for an election campaign. That is why many seasoned politics watchers were astonished the other day when Sarkozy delivered a lengthy condemnation of the May 1968 French general strike that came close to toppling the regime of President Charles de Gaulle. In May 1968, eleven million workers and students filled the streets of France demanding a new social and political order for the country.
Even though the old order survived, workers achieved substantial gains in the form of a higher minimum wage, shorter working hours, earlier retirement and improved rights for unions to organize. While the right-wing won the national elections that followed, the next year de Gaulle proposed a constitutional change to be ratified in a nation-wide referendum. Well aware that if the president lost he would resign, voters voted No and de Gaulle left office.
Sarkozy’s purpose in raising the issue of the events of 1968 was to tar today’s Socialists with the brush of being agents of chaos and unrest. Just as those who went into the streets four decades ago had no morality and no values the same is true of today’s left Sarko has insisted. His message---the Socialists and the unions are on the side of the trouble makers in France.
Throughout the campaign, Sarko’s strategic objective has been to portray himself as the man of order and security. For years as Minister of the Interior, Sarkozy has been honing the anxieties of the population about unrest in the country’s great suburbs, the centres of large populations of immigrant origin. To a considerable extent, Sarko has been the political beneficiary of the decades of anti-immigrant propaganda carried out by the far-right Front National led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
In a certain sense it is appropriate that Sarkozy has set his sights on the legacy of May ’68. All campaigns for political office seek to move the front-line in the struggles between the social classes in one direction or the other. Sarkozy wants to move the front-line sharply in favour of capital and against labour.
All of his fear mongering has as its ultimate goal a transformation of France to roll back social programs, hold down salaries and wages, increase hours of work---in short to break the power of working class resistance to a neo-liberal agenda.
If Sarkozy does win next Sunday, that does not mean that French wage and salary earners will lie down and play dead. The struggle will be resumed in acute encounters in the National Assembly, at other levels of government and in the streets. French working people will not easily give up the gains they have won over the decades.
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