Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

by Gwynne Dyer

  Does this mean that the Soviet Union might have survived for at least another decade or two if it had not tried so hard to match American defence spending? Impossible to say, of course. But it is clear that by the time Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government took power in Canada in 1984, after a generation of Liberal rule, Soviet power—and in particular Soviet military power—was in irreversible decline. Gorbachev’s assigned (but hopeless) task was to save the Communist system politically by re-basing it on consent rather than compulsion, and to rescue it economically by breaking the stranglehold of the “metal-eaters’ alliance” (the Soviet version of the military-industrial complex), which was consuming an estimated one-third of the country’s gross domestic product. And it was precisely at this point that the Mulroney government decided it needed to build up the Canadian armed forces to counter the “growing Soviet threat.”

  First, however, there was the peculiar episode of Defence Minister Erik Nielsen’s attempt to pull all the Canadian troops out of Germany. Nielsen was actually deputy prime minister, but he was parachuted into the Defence job as well when Mulroney’s first appointment, Robert Coates, was forced to resign after an ill-advised visit to a West German strip club while visiting the Canadian troops in Europe. By chance Nielsen, who had been a bomber pilot in the Second World War and had a healthy disdain for the defence orthodoxy of the time, inherited a chief of defence staff, General Gérard Thériault, who was also something of an iconoclast—and together they came up with the most radical proposal for a new Canadian defence policy of the entire Cold War era. (It may have had something to do with the fact that they both had air force backgrounds, for the proposal would have eliminated the Canadian army’s main justification for staying in the “big leagues,” while leaving the air force’s roles more or less intact.)

  Nielsen and Thériault began with the belief, never adequately documented but widely accepted, that Canada’s Mechanized Brigade Group and the Canadian Air Group in Germany, which accounted for only about 8 percent of Canadian Forces’ personnel, were consuming about half of the defence budget in one way or another. Yet in fact (as Thériault later said in public), “Our forces in Central Europe mean next to nothing in military terms.” They were purely symbolic, a token of Canada’s intent to stand by its NATO allies in the event of war. So Nielsen and Thériault began concocting a plan to maintain a token Canadian commitment somewhere else in Europe, while bringing the great majority of Canada’s troops home. The device they hit upon was the Canadian Air Sea Transportable (CAST) Brigade, a commitment dating from 1968 to send Canadian troops in an emergency to reinforce Norway’s northern frontier with Russia.

  It was a paper commitment only: the notion that a Canadian brigade and its equipment could be rapidly moved from Canada to Norway in the midst of a NATO-wide panic about an imminent war in Europe was risible. But it gave Nielsen and Thériault something to work with, and in consultation with a selected group of National Defence officials (who were ordered not to report their work to their superiors) they came up with a plan. The Mechanized Brigade Group would come home from Germany, but all its heavy equipment would be moved to northern Norway. The Canadian Air Group would return home too, but in an emergency three squadrons of CF-18s would fly over to Norway, as would the Canadian soldiers who would man the pre-positioned equipment. In normal times, however, there would be no significant number of Canadian troops left in Europe.

  It was a bold but quite rational plan, although there was bound to be hell to pay when the Canadian army and the External Affairs Department found out about it. Nielsen even got initial approval from U.S. secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, although he must later have realized that he was simply being sent out to draw fire. When Nielsen travelled on to London and Bonn, however, he ran into a wall of panic and outrage: British defence secretary Michael Heseltine refused even to discuss the proposal, and West German defence minister Manfred Woerner “just went crazy.” They didn’t care about the Canadian forces as such, but they saw the plan as setting a precedent for an American withdrawal from Europe.

  Nielsen came home with his tail between his legs, to meet a comparable barrage of condemnation from the defenders of NATO orthodoxy at home. Weinberger, of course, disavowed Nielsen, who was subsequently forced to resign all his government offices and soon afterward left politics entirely. During House of Commons hearings Thériault’s successor as chief of defence staff, General Paul Manson, denied ever having heard of or seen a paper on the “Thériault plan”; it had been consigned to the memory hole. And it was perhaps a minor by-product of the incident that the second broadcast of the television series that the original draft of this book was based on was cancelled by the CBC.

  By 1986 a new defence minister, Perrin Beatty, was laying plans for a major expansion of the Canadian Forces, including an upgrade of its NATO contribution in Central Europe: he argued that Ottawa should station a full mechanized division in Germany, with another fully equipped mechanized division to be held in Canada as a backup. The reserves would be expanded to forty thousand and integrated more closely with the regulars, and extra maritime reconnaissance aircraft, more CF-18s and patrol frigates, and new EH-101 anti-submarine helicopters were ordered. He even promised the navy a dozen nuclear-powered submarines. The price tag was forecast to be $8 billion ($14 billion in today’s money), but cost overruns would inevitably have pushed that even higher. Assuming that Beatty was not a Soviet agent tasked with turning the “Reagan strategy” against Canada and spending the country into bankruptcy, how could he have got it so wrong?

  The answer probably goes like this. During two decades of almost continuous Liberal rule, one of the Conservatives’ main criticisms against the government, regardless of the state of the international environment, was its neglect of the armed forces, so it was hard for the Conservatives to walk away from all their promises to build up the forces even if the Soviet Union was in steep decline by the time they actually got back in power. Moreover, they really didn’t understand just how rapid and terminal the decline was. It should have been obvious to them—I went back to the Soviet Union for a week in 1987 after five years’ absence, and immediately went home and made a deal with the CBC to visit the place every three months and interview all the major players, in order to deliver them a radio series as soon as the crash actually happened—but the Canadian government’s main source of information was, as usual, American intelligence assessments. In those intelligence reports, the Soviet “threat” was always “growing”: in all four decades of the Cold War, the American intelligence services never once issued a report that said the Soviet threat was shrinking. So the apparently sudden collapse of Soviet power in 1989 actually took both the U.S. and the Canadian governments by surprise.

  That put paid to Beatty’s grand plans, of course. The personnel strength of the forces continued to grow for a time, peaking at ninety thousand in 1990 before falling back to seventy-one thousand in 1995, but the nuclear submarines vanished at once and the new aircraft were also cancelled. The first of the promised new helicopters (now Sikorsky H-92s, to be known as CH-124s in Canadian service) may be delivered as soon as 2015.

  In 1993, after forty years in Europe, the Canadian forces in Germany all came home, and some wondered whether the Canadian armed forces could avoid serious shrinkage now that the only plausible enemy had retired from the confrontation. The NATO alliance that had been created to “contain” the Soviet Union had worked itself out of a job, and many thought it would just fade away. But they all underestimated the resourcefulness and staying power of a very large and experienced bureaucratic organization with powerful allies in the military forces of every member country.

  NATO did not fade away; it expanded right up to the borders of the former Soviet Union, taking in former Warsaw Pact members (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria) and even territories that had been part of the Soviet Union itself (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). By the early twenty-first century its
easternmost border was only 120 kilometres from Russia’s second city, St Petersburg. This was all in direct contradiction to the promise made by U.S. president George H.W. Bush to the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, that if Moscow were to withdraw its garrisons peacefully from Eastern Europe and accept the reunification of Germany, NATO would not recruit these former Warsaw Pact members to its ranks. But Russia under the leadership of the drunken Boris Yeltsin did not object very loudly in the 1990s, and even when Vladimir Putin took over at the beginning of the twenty-first century he grudgingly accepted the situation. One of the reasons he did so, no doubt, was that NATO had at least been tactful enough not to station foreign troops (i.e., Americans or Germans) on the soil of any of the new members of the alliance who directly bordered on Russian territory.

  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.

  Over the last few weeks the U.N. Security Council has been unable to agree on a new resolution authorizing military action [against Iraq]. Canada worked very hard to find a compromise to bridge the gap in the Security Council. Unfortunately, we were not successful. If military action proceeds without a new resolution of the Security Council, Canada will not participate.

  Jean Chrétien, House of Commons, Ottawa, March 17, 2003

  “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.

  I was the [Canadian] ambassador [to the United Nations] in New York, I had access to the reports of the UN weapons inspectors, and it was evident to me that the United States was putting exclamation points in places where they should have been putting question marks, that the evidence really wasn’t persuasive.…

  Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, and his people were basically going pretty much where they wanted to go in Iraq, and he wasn’t finding anything, and I went to see him and I said to him, “What’s happening?” He said, “I have asked the United States for the best intelligence they have and what they’ve given me, I go and investigate and I don’t find anything.”

  That was one thing; another thing was when the president said in the State of the Union Address that there is uranium material being imported from Africa to Iraq. I have a colleague who worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. It took them one day to show that that was a forgery, yet the United States was building a whole case of going to war, in part, on such evidence. The person who signed the document who was supposed to be authorizing this transfer wasn’t in office at the time the document was suppose
d to have been signed.

  Paul Heinbecker, Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, 2000–04

  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.