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Foreign policy
Whither Canadian foreign policy?
It’s not Americans our leaders are afraid to tell the truth to, it’s Canadians they fear
by Kevin Potvin
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Canada, badly misgoverned by a virtual satellite American regime, and badly served by a timid political opposition and a sycophantic and jingoistic national press, has missed yet another opportunity to get its tarnished name over to the peace and justice side of the international ledger.
US plans this spring to “surge”—that is, to escalate—their already lost war in Iraq by rushing 20,000 more bewildered and trigger-happy troops to Baghdad should have been condemned by an independent Canada. Instead, with the whole world listening for it, Canada said nothing, as though the alarmingly rapid collapse of the short-lived post-Cold War international order, and the fear and uncertainty the collapse spells for the whole planet, has nothing to do with Canada or her interests.
How effective has the US escalation been since it was implemented in February? In the roughly 100 days since the beginning of the “surge”, which added 15% more US troops to Iraq, the US rate of casualties has reached an average of 3.26 per day, for a “surge” of 22% over the average of daily US deaths in the 200 days prior to the escalation, which was 2.66.
More notably, reported deaths of Iraqi civilians and police have jumped across the same time period by 14%, from 65 per day prior to the escalation to 74 per day after the escalation. Following these trends, increasing US troop strength from the current 160,000 to 500,000, as some opposition Democrats in the US have suggested, would likely increase US troop deaths to over 10 per day, or exactly the average rate of death US troops suffered in Vietnam, where 500,000 troops also were deployed.
It is estimated about one million Vietnamese civilians were killed in the 10 years of serious US deployment in that conflict, or about 100,000 per year on average. The Lancet, the revered British medical journal, estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians perished in the first year of US deployment in this conflict, and there has been no update since then, after the war has grown far more intense.
In another curious parallel, if we consider Iraqi police and military forces as part of the “coalition”, the rate of death in the coalition is currently 10 per day, the average rate of death of US forces and allies in Vietnam.
It is important to note that these casualties are not being incurred during any further forward offensive moves by the US. For at least two years, the stated US mission in Iraq has been to settle conditions sufficiently to begin extracting the US deployment. They are not trying to take more territory; rather, they have been engaged solely in trying to preserve any further losses of territory. The highest rates of death of US forces and their allies in Iraq have occurred since the US has announced it wants to quit the country and go home.
Perhaps this is why former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in a recent interview that the situation for the US in Iraq is “much worse” than it was in Vietnam: it has been an ongoing “helicopter-on-the-roof-of-the-embassy” moment for two years now.
Those who argue that the US should get out of Iraq immediately should realize that that is exactly what the US has been trying to do. As predicted in this newspaper in late 2004, getting out of Iraq will not be a viable option for the US any more than getting out of Afghanistan was a viable option for the Soviet Union two decades ago. It took the complete collapse of the Soviet Union to end that conflict, with Russian soldiers holding up buses to try to steal rides home.
No one could believe the Soviet Union could collapse so fast. In retrospect, we saw that it spent its last decade as a hollowed-out shell. Similarly, the Katrina disaster has revealed what little there is of an American government in this decade.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, it had ceased to play a pre-eminent role in the world and its order, and its disappearance caused relatively minor ripples. The United States, on the other hand, remains a pre-eminent force in the world, and its disappearance would cause tsunamis by comparison. Perhaps that is why competitors like China have chosen not to contribute to the demise of the US just yet, a choice they could alter at any time, being holders of roughly $1.3 trillion in US treasury bills.
Thankfully, Canada’s exposure to US economic fortunes is much less than supposed. We’re commonly told 50% or more of our gross domestic product is dependent on trade with the US. In fact, when miscounting, double counting and other errors are removed, the percentage of our GDP that is dependent on trade with the US is less than 10%.
Our leaders and our media tell us we can’t be too honest and overtly oppose the US and its foreign policy choices for fear of economic reprisals. The truth is, our leaders and our media can’t effectively oppose the US and its foreign policy because, by and large, they don’t oppose them, they support them. It is the Canadian public that our leaders and our media cannot be honest with for fear of reprisals, both economic and political, here at home.
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