Dishonouring the Memory

One of the seminal events of the twentieth century was the mass slaughter of the First World War. The casualties of battles such as Ypres, Loos, the Somme and Passchendaele persuaded the people of the belligerent countries that industrialized war was not a Victorian adventure anymore. It was destructive, fruitless and bitter.

Canada suffered as much as any nation in the First World War. With nearly a million citizens in uniform out of a population of only eight million, the 60,000 fatal casualties suffered by the Canadian Expeditionary Force were a blow to the people of Canada. So bitter and sad has been their memory that, to this day, Remembrance Day has continued as a collective opportunity for the citizens of Canada to lament our dead. The tradition was and has been renewed with the further suffering of the members of our military in the Second World War, Korea and subsequent active operations.

Because of our history, the deaths and wounding of Canadian soldiers overseas is of national interest. It is more than just news. It is a reminder that the foreign policy and military decisions made by our politicians sometimes cost the lives of young men and women. That is a bitter price to pay, and we need to be reminded of it.

The decision of the staff of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to limit media access to the ceremonies marking the return to Canada of the remains of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan is lamentable. Published reports in the Globe and Mail claim that the decision was not made by the military or by the Minister of Defence, but by the Prime Minister's Office. The decision was also a political one. Mindful of the demoralizing effect that images of the return of dead American soldiers from Vietnam and Kuwait had on earlier generations, the Prime Minister has apparently decided to emulate the more recent American example of forbidding media access to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, which is the place to which Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are repatriated. The American approach is intended to insulate the public from the reality of what bullets and bombs do to the bodies of young soldiers. One must presume that Harper's intentions are the same.

The Prime Minister's decision is shameful. It does a disservice to the memories of our soldiers killed overseas from 1914 to today, and it should be offensive to the families who have lost their children. Commentators have suggested that the Prime Minister is merely respecting the wishes of the families of the dead and of serving members of the military. This is dissembling. Families who are suffering through the grief of loss should not be asked to set public policy and nor should their anguish be used to justify limits on reasonable media coverage of events of national importance.

Members of the military are also suffering grief, and while we honour their service and sacrifice we should be mindful that they are servants of the Crown. If it is in the interests of the Canadian nation to see our dead returned from overseas, it is no dishonour to the men and women of our military. Indeed, the sight of young men killed in Afghanistan for unclear reasons may trigger a debate in Canada about whether this sacrifice is worth making. This debate does not question the valour of our military. It questions whether that valour is being misdirected.

Stephen Harper should be ashamed of himself for manipulating the memory of our war dead and the serving members of our military for his political ends.

God Sets My Foreign Policy

In a recent speech, President George W. Bush stated that he bases "a lot" of his foreign policy decisions on things he thinks are true, including the existence of the Almighty and the Almighty's inspiration to make people free.

Now, I am not here to criticize the many people who calm their fears of death with faith in the heavenly kingdom. It works for them, and probably acts as a valuable buttress to civil society. However, most people who choose to make the leap of faith necessary to accept Christianity are not in charge of the world's most powerful military and are not responsible for fighting a major war in Iraq.

Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were good Christians, but it appears they left their faith at church and fought the Second World War with a ruthless and coldly rational detachment which has won them respect and honour ever since (whatever else may be said of is morality). Say what you like about Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, but they were both shrewd enough politicians that they did not limit their options in Vietnam by relying on guidance from God.

It is curious how national leaders who make bad military decisions often blind themselves to rational solutions to their strategic problems. Hitler had a mystical belief in the overwhelming moral power of the German frontkampfer. German soldiers were very good, but not so good that they were immune to American bombs, British artillery, or Soviet bullets. Hitler's irrational approach to war was the despair of his generals, and more than any other person he was responsible for the military disasters which followed the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Similarly, the French Army in the First World War believed in the tactical efficacy of the bayonet. This was not a religious delusion, but hailed back to the French Revolution, when mass armies of politically-inspired citizen levees defeated the professional armies of the other European monarchies. The spirit is captured in the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, which waxes nostalgic about flooding the furrows of the fields with the blood of the invader. This elan could not stand up against artillery and machine guns, and a million French soldiers were killed and wounded before the end of 1914 alone. Unlike Hitler, the French changed their strategic and tactical thinking and the war was not lost.

Now freedom is something that I appreciate, and I would not trade Canadian democracy for anything, but the will to conquer in the name of the Jehovah and to spead freedom around the world is not a military tactic. It will not defeat insurgents, Iranians, North Koreans or anyone else who is uninterested in converting to Christianity and becoming Republican.

It will not win the war in Iraq, and President Bush's statement that it inspires his foreign policy is the strongest indictment yet of his capacity as a national leader.

Is George W. Bush the Worst President in American History?

A recent article in Rolling Stone magazine - formerly home of the party reptile neo-con P.J. O'Rourke - asks the question whether George W. Bush is the worse president in the history of the United States. The article purports to poll historians of the United States on the subject and it appears that a surprising number of them believe this may be the case.

This poses an intellectual problem to me. The closer events are temporally to the present, the more difficult it is for historians to maintain their objectivity. I can remember high school history teachers who railed against Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, and university history professors who railed against Margaret Thatcher and George H.W. Bush. The problem was - and many of them would have acknowledged this - they were not speaking as historians so much as political commentators.

Is George W. Bush the worst president in American history? Is he as bad as Nixon? Condoleeza Rice gives me the same intellectual chill that Henry Kissinger used to give my father. I have the feeling that I would enter a debating contest against either of them essentially unarmed. However, they are the exceptions and both Nixon and Bush have surrounded themselves with a generous number of dim bulb advisors (viz Pat Robertson for the former and Donald Rumsfeld for the latter).

Surely the more pertinent question is whether George W. Bush is a bad president. We cannot summon Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln back from the grave to assume the reigns of the administration, so comparing Bush to them is moot. I used to wonder if Bush is really just a good actor, like Reagan was (alright, not so much a good actor as an actor who played the President quite well). Perhaps his dumb, Texas-cousin routine was intended to conceal a finely-tuned and calculating mind from his political adversaries and foreign opponents.

If that was the case, he is trapped in the role of idiot now. I would have thought the best way to wear down European opposition to the war in Iraq would be to overawe the French and Germans with the wisdom of one's strategic vision. That, in turn, would build multilateral support to pressure Iran and North Korea into behaving themselves. This is not what has happened, and America has gone from owning the sympathy of the world on 12 September, 2001 to today being despised internationally like it was in 1973 at the height of the Vietnam debacle. Perhaps it is time to hang up the cowboy hat and start talking like a President.

Or perhaps that is beyond the capacity of the man who may well be the worst President in the history of the United States.