Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (51 page)

This brings us to the serious question, first raised in Excursion 1, of whether we are still living in a tightly coupled “critical system” that could pitch us almost randomly into a great war at any time. We and the Soviets certainly began to construct such a system again in the early years of the Cold War, but from the mid-1960s a great deal of effort was expended to move in the other direction: “hot lines” that permitted instant, direct communications between national leaders in a crisis, arms control agreements, early notification of missile launches and military exercises and a variety of “confidence-building” measures whose real purpose was to catch that random pebble before it started the avalanche. It was still an extremely dangerous system, but not a fully-fledged Doomsday Machine. And the post–Cold War relations between the former adversaries have been marked by the same desire to avoid unnecessary escalation and limit confrontations to the lowest possible level.

A case in point is the recent conflict over Ukraine, which was still unresolved at the time of writing (April 2014). So far, at least, there has been no panic reaction like the one that followed the Communist coup in Prague in 1948, when
NATO
turned itself into a traditional military alliance in response to the destruction of democracy in a
country that had already been abandoned to the Soviet sphere of influence at the Yalta conference three years before. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea has been almost universally interpreted as a crude face-saving action by President Putin, who was humiliated by the overthrow of the pro-Russian government in Kiev, and not as the first step in a Russian project for world conquest. While any further Russian encroachments on Ukrainian sovereignty would undoubtedly lead to a prolonged period of tension between
NATO
and Russia, the alliance has already made it clear that it has no intention of sending Western troops into Ukraine. There is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the whole notion of a new Cold War, and not simply because today’s Russia, with only half the population of the old Soviet Union and much less than half of the military power, is too weak to hold up its end of it.
NATO
doesn’t need a new Cold War to justify its continued existence: it has succeeded in finding other things to do.

Traditional peacekeeping operations have continued to occupy some Canadian troops in the post–Cold War world, and the UN-backed operation in Bosnia and Croatia in the mid-1990s saw Canadian troops involved in a considerable amount of actual combat. But the new fashion was for “out-of-area” NATO operations like the bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999, the International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF)
in Afghanistan, and the bombing campaign in Libya in 2011, all of which attracted Canadian participation. The Serbian and Libyan operations only involved the Royal Canadian Air Force and cost no Canadian casualties, but the major Canadian troop commitment to Afghanistan in 2003–2011 peaked at 4,000 soldiers and resulted in 158 fatal casualties—more than half of Canada’s total losses in overseas military commitments in the past sixty years. The way it came about was instructive. In early 2003 U.S. president George W. Bush’s
administration in Washington expected Canada to be part of the “coalition of the willing” that he was assembling for the invasion of Iraq—but Prime Minister Jean Chrétien said no.

“It was a very difficult decision to make, because it was the first time there was a war where the Americans and the Brits were involved and Canada was not there,” Chrétien told the
Huffington Post
on March 19, 2013, the tenth anniversary of the invasion. “But my view was there were no weapons of mass destruction, and we’re not in the business of going everywhere and replacing dictators. If we were to do that, we would be fighting every day.” A week earlier, he even boasted that it was “a very important decision for the independence of Canada, because unfortunately a lot of people thought sometimes we were the fifty-first state of America. It was clear that day we were not.”

In reality, Chrétien’s motives were a good deal more complex than that. In his Commons statement, Chrétien explained his decision in terms of international law (since 1945 it has been a crime to invade a sovereign country without the approval of the Security Council), but this was almost certainly not his primary concern. His doubts about the accuracy of the intelligence that the Americans were providing about Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction” were fully justified, but would he have seen that as a sufficient reason, all by itself, to defy and perhaps seriously alienate the Americans? There
is reason to believe that another, entirely domestic consideration was the decisive factor in Chrétien’s decision.

In terms of his dedication to upholding the authority of the Security Council, Chrétien’s record was distinctly spotty. Newly chosen as leader of the Liberal Party in 1991, he opposed the invasion of Kuwait in order to push Saddam Hussein’s army out of that conquered country, although the operation had been authorized by the UN Security Council. He even called the planned multinational military action “illegal.” (Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent troops anyway.)

The intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons which the United States produced in order to justify invading Iraq was not only wrong but, in some cases, deliberately fabricated. After it turned out that the “weapons of mass destruction,” the excuse for a war that ultimately killed several hundred thousand people, simply did not exist, there was a concerted attempt by those who had generated the misinformation and equally by their gullible victims to pretend that nobody could have known any better at the time. That’s nonsense. Even without any access to “classified” information, it was obvious to anybody with even a little experience that the intelligence was being cooked. If you were an insider, you would have had to work hard
not
to know.

Heinbecker’s reports from the United Nations were going directly to Prime Minister Chrétien, and he was also in regular touch with him personally: “I told him there was no prospect of UN Security Council approval of a resolution mandating attacking Iraq. It just wasn’t going to happen—nobody in New York was convinced of the necessity of the action.” So Chrétien knew that the “evidence” of Saddam’s WMD was deeply suspect, and he also knew that the Security Council was not going to come up with a resolution that would legitimize what the Americans wanted to do. But what really tipped the scale for Chrétien was Quebec—and his final decision seems to have been made quite late in the day.

As late as December of 2003 Chrétien’s government still had plans for Canada to send up to eight hundred Canadian troops to Iraq if the UN Security Council authorized an attack, and senior Canadian Forces officers were still participating in the Pentagon’s war planning. Back home, however, opinion polls were revealing something quite alarming; Canadians didn’t want to go to war in Iraq without a UN Security Council resolution that made it legal. The numbers were clear: the various opinion polls held in January 2003 showed that only 26 percent of Canadians supported Canadian involvement in an invasion of Iraq without United Nations approval—and only 7 percent of
Quebecers did. For a Liberal government facing a national election within a year, and concerned about retaining its share of the Quebec votes, this was bad news.

The Liberal Party’s pollster, Michael Marzolini, chairman and CEO of Pollara, the country’s largest Canadian-owned market research company, told Chrétien that he could get national support for a commitment to Iraq if he worked at it: “A small majority of people outside Quebec were in favour of joining the coalition even though a lot didn’t like the war. We asked if they would support a government decision to participate and 46 percent said yes. About 48 percent said they would support the government if it decided to stay out. This meant we could have sold either position. Both were moveable to 53 percent with selling.” But those were the figures for Canada as a whole. You couldn’t sell it in Quebec, and that mattered a great deal to Chrétien.

The first sign that Chrétien was going to defy the United States came on February 12, 2003, when he responded to a United Nations request for some troops in Afghanistan by announcing in Parliament that Canada would send two thousand troops to that country, which had been occupied by Western forces since late 2001.

It only became clear in retrospect how this served Chrétien’s purposes. By sending most of the available Canadian combat troops to Afghanistan he had effectively emptied the bank, leaving nothing for Iraq, and yet it would let him claim that he was doing something to help the United States elsewhere. That would mollify the Americans and the English Canadians—and the French Canadians wouldn’t mind because Afghanistan was a perfectly legal, UN-approved operation in which there were, at this stage, very few casualties. He would already have been worried that a decision to join the United States in invading Iraq would damage the Quebec Liberal Party’s hopes of unseating the PQ in the next provincial election in Quebec, but the massive anti-war demonstration in Montreal on March 12 confirmed it. A quarter-million people marched in the city, while only a tenth as many marched in big English Canadian cities.

The Parti Québécois, facing likely defeat at the hands of the Quebec Liberal Party in the next provincial election, sensed an opportunity to campaign against an unpopular federally condoned war and called a snap election on March 14. That just confirmed Chrétien in his conviction that Iraq was a war to avoid, and on March 17 he made his statement in Parliament. On March 19, 2003 the invasion went ahead without Canada. Most Canadians were happy about that—and nobody else seemed very upset about it. Not even the Americans.

President Bush cancelled a state visit to Ottawa that had been scheduled for May, and some Americans boycotted Quebec maple syrup, but it was not renamed “freedom syrup.” Even the White House was not really feeling vengeful. When Chrétien ran into Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, at a wedding a few weeks later, Card told him: “You have been very clear with us [about not going into Iraq without a Security Council Resolution]. You did not double-cross us. We were disappointed, but we knew that you had said that.” As Chrétien reflected with some smugness: “Some of [the Americans] thought ‘at end of day you will come along anyway,’ and they were a bit surprised
that I did not come along anyway. But they could not complain about the clarity of my position.”

At home, Chrétien’s decision was the catalyst that crystallized public opinion against the war: 70 percent of Canadians approved of it. The opposition in Parliament condemned his decision, with opposition leader Stephen Harper comparing it to the failure to confront Nazi Germany in the 1930s. (Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches unity—and whoever first mentions the Nazis automatically loses the argument.) But even Harper came around eventually: in 2008 he conceded that his support for the American war in Iraq had been a mistake.