by Gwynne Dyer
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 had caught us all completely off-side. We found out about an hour before.… If you had come into the Department of National Defense headquarters after that speech, most of us looked like deer caught in headlights.… We were shocked because we had other projects and this would tap us out. It made Iraq impossible.… I resigned because we were too stretched. It came out of the blue without consultation and without discussion. The minister said in a statement that I was in charge of planning for this deployment in Afghanistan. He was wrong. It was Iraq I was planning for.
Major-General Cameron Ross, director general of International Security Policy, National Defence Headquarters, 2003
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.
In terms of Canadian casualties, Chrétien’s decision probably didn’t make much difference. If Canadian troops had been sent to Iraq instead, they would almost certainly have been based around Basra in the south of the country with the British army. The British lost 179 killed in Iraq, out of a force that totalled 43,000 during the invasion but rapidly dropped thereafter to 8,000 or less. Canada lost almost that many soldiers killed in Afghanistan, out of a force that was at all times significantly smaller than the British contingent in Iraq—but it should be noted that only four Canadian soldiers were killed in the ISAF operation before the force was moved from Kabul to Kandahar in late 2005. That decision was taken by Prime Minister Paul Martin, Defence Minister Bill Graham and the chief of defence staff, General Rick Hillier, long after Chrétien had left office.
And while the Afghanistan operation was authorized by the United Nations, in contrast to the lawless American invasion of Iraq, it was just as pointless and futile. Even within the broader lunacy of using regular armies to fight a “war on terror,” both those wars made no strategic or political sense. This was more obvious in the case of Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had no contact whatever with the al-Qaeda terrorists and was indeed one of the Arab rulers whom they hoped to overthrow, whereas there actually were several hundred al-Qaeda members, mostly Arabs, in Afghanistan as guests of the Taliban regime before the 9/11 attacks on the United States. However, no Taliban member has ever been involved in terrorist attacks abroad (except in Pakistan), and it is very much to be doubted that Osama bin Laden told the Taliban leaders that he was planning to launch the 9/11 attacks. It would have been a dangerous breach of security, and, more important, it would have alarmed his hosts, who would rightly have anticipated that they would be blamed for the attacks and invaded by American forces. A brief military incursion to destroy the al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan might have made sense, but the continued military occupation of the entire country for thirteen years after the surviving al-Qaeda members had fled across the border into Pakistan, a much better base for their operations, was an expensive irrelevance. But Canadians still don’t do their own strategic thinking, and there is no evidence that any senior officer in National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa ever seriously questioned the absurd notion, dominant in the United States, that large conventional military forces were an appropriate instrument for dealing with a rather modest terrorist threat.
When General James Wolfe captured Quebec City in 1759 and added Canada to the British empire, his army was only 4,800 men. The Marquis de Montcalm’s army was about the same size, and the battle on the Plains of Abraham caused only 260 British and French deaths (including those of both commanders). It was quite typical of pre-modern wars, in that the returns on a successful war more than justified the cost in money and lives in the eyes of the participants. In those days, nobody saw the institution of warfare as a “problem,” and even losing a war was generally just a setback, not an irreversible catastrophe.
The advent of fully industrialized warfare in the early twentieth century changed this situation for good. In the First World War, the cost in lives and resources was so great (eleven million dead, and the equivalent of at least two years’ national income for all the main participants) that it was a disaster even for the victors. All the governments on the losing side and one on the winning side (Russia’s) were overthrown, and two empires that had existed for centuries were carved up and destroyed. Communism and fascism, radical political doctrines that had previously been marginal, gained power in great states like Russia and Germany.
Twenty years later, the Second World War killed at least four times as many people as the first, and left half the cities of the developed world in ruins. Canada, the
United States and Britain had a relatively easy time of it, since their armies were only involved in major ground combat at the very end of the war and the North American countries were not even bombed, but in the last month of the war, nuclear weapons were used on cities for the first time. After the fighting ended, many of the surviving leaders of the defeated powers were tried and executed as criminals, and both Germany and Japan were occupied by foreign military forces for a decade.
We were all climbing a steep learning curve about industrialized total war, Canada no less than the great powers, and the initial response in almost every country was the same: to define the struggle as good against evil, for how else could the scale of the losses be justified? By the end of the First World War, Canadians genuinely believed they were defending democracy against tyranny. They even believed it at the end of the Second World War, although the biggest winner was our great ally, the Soviet Union. It was the right side of the brain, full of hate and hurt and righteous wrath, that wrote the vengeful peace treaty with Germany after the First World War and made the Second World War almost inevitable. But even in 1918 the left brain was also engaged, and its analysis of the problem of war (everybody now agreed that it was a problem) was very different.
The very same people who wrote the Treaty of Versailles also founded the League of Nations, which was a more or less rational attempt to fix a faulty international system. The fix was not well thought out, and the League of Nations fell at the first hurdle, but the underlying analysis was quite correct: it was a system problem. The traditional right of every sovereign state to wage war against any other sovereign state made militarization inevitable and wars very likely. That had been acceptable when wars were small-scale events that did little damage to civilian society, but now great-power wars had become intolerably destructive, so sovereignty had somehow to be restrained. These two ideas—the notion that war is a crusade against evil, and the hypothesis that it is actually a system problem—are mutually incompatible, of course, but that didn’t stop intelligent people from believing them both.
The same bipolar vision prevailed after the Second World War: yes, the fascist dictators had been a particularly nasty set of men, who could fairly be described as evil. But it was also obvious that wars between the great powers would continue to occur, with or without fascist dictators, until the international rules were changed. But changed in what way?
Canada played a minimal role in this debate after the First World War, when it was mainly concerned with establishing itself as an independent country in the eyes of the world, and it was positively destructive in the 1920s, when it succeeded in establishing the principle that safer countries like itself (the “fireproof house”) had the right to abstain from collective military action to enforce international law. But after the Second World War it played a different and quite useful role. Although we had a much easier time in that war, Canadian politicians and diplomats were well aware that the existence of nuclear weapons had made it even more urgent to create an institution and a set of rules that would lessen the danger of a Third World War—and in 1945, for the one time in its history, Canada was almost a great power. It was a transitory status, due solely to the fact that most of the real great powers were temporarily flat on their backs because of war damage, but we used our fleeting power well. Canadian diplomats played an important role in writing the Charter of the United Nations, which has served us far better than most people recognize.
Nobody in San Francisco truly believed that the United Nations could stop all the wars in the world. Its real purpose was to prevent any more wars between the great powers, for that kind of war was already killing in the tens of millions, and another time it would probably be in the hundreds of millions. Unfortunately, no matter what kind of new rules you write for the conduct of international affairs, the great powers cannot be forced to obey those rules, for there are by definition no greater powers. So the drafters of the Charter did the best they could, making it illegal for any country to use military force against another country no matter what the excuse unless it was explicitly authorized by the Security Council—and that turned out to be enough. No great power has fought any other great power for sixty-nine years now. That is around three times as long as ever before.
Smaller countries can fight each other, and many have. The Security Council does have the authority to use force against an aggressor in such cases, but it has only twice managed to agree to do so: when North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, and when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Great powers can still attack lesser countries with impunity—the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the American invasion of Iraq, for example. But the great powers do not fight each other any more.
This self-restraint is not really due to some newfound respect for international law on their part. They genuinely do not want to fight each other any more, no matter what the provocation, because they are acutely aware of the probability that any open warfare between nuclear-armed great powers could quickly escalate into mutual nuclear destruction. Nevertheless, their leaders still operate in a domestic political context where “backing down” and failing to defend “vital national interests” will expose them to savage criticism and quite possibly loss of power. What they need, therefore, is some means of backing away from a dangerous confrontation that will not result in accusations that they have betrayed the national interest.
The United Nations provides that means. Rather than give in to the threats of a rival great power and suffer an unacceptable loss of face, a national leader can draw back from the brink out of respect for international law and the (imaginary) authority of the United Nations. It seems a very slender reed on which to base the world’s hopes of avoiding another, even more devastating great-power war, but it has already saved us several times, most notably in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
There is, of course, no guarantee that this flimsy barrier against a return to the great wars of the past century will hold forever. Whether it does will depend to a large extent on a fear of great-power war that has been acquired through the experience of two such wars with modern weapons, and it is not certain that emerging, non-Western great powers that do not have that terrible history will be equally and adequately frightened of the consequences of not backing away from a confrontation. But the founders of the United Nations did the best they could, and they did better work than they knew.
And then, having done our best to end the cycle of great alliance wars, we panicked in the late 1940s and created another great alliance to stop the Russians (who weren’t coming). Canada took a leading role in the panic, being one of the two countries that persuaded the United States to go down the road that led to the foundation of NATO, and we devoted most of our military efforts to the Cold War for the next forty years, doing peacekeeping on the side to assuage our nagging suspicion that we had taken the wrong road. After the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we even went along with the conversion of NATO into a sort of freelance world police force, there being no longer any rival great power to put a brake on our ambitions. Some of the small wars we took part in could be justified in humanitarian terms, and we did manage to dodge the most flagrantly illegal one, in Iraq, but the pretense that “coalitions of the willing” or the “international community” (aka NATO) had the right to use force unilaterally undermined the always shaky authority of the United Nations. However, the declining enthusiasm of the United States for such wars may put an end to this policy before it does irreparable damage to the international rules of conduct that we worked so hard to devise and entrench.
It is a distinctly mixed record, and the best that can be said is that so far we have got away with it. When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget that your original aim was to drain the swamp. But that is the job we embarked on almost a hundred years ago, and it’s still very much a work in progress.
However deficient in many ways the United Nations may be, I think it’s an a
bsolutely essential organization. There is no way in which ths effort cannot be made—it has to be made—knowing perfectly well that you’re pushing an enormous boulder up a very steep hill. There will be slips and it will come back on you from time to time, but you have to go on pushing. Because if you don’t do that, you simply give in to the notion that you’re going to go into another global war again at some point, this time with nuclear weapons.
Brian Urquhart, former undersecretary-general, United Nations
Amen to that.
Wounded Canadians after Paardeberg. “Leavitt is not expected to live. Boers surrendered to the Canadians. Roberts said we did fine work.… Men are horribly shot.” Albert Perkins, February 27, 1900. (photo insert 1)
Soldiers leave for war, 1915. (photo insert 2)
B Company, Newfoundland Regiment, in front line, Suvla Bay, 1915. Capt. Alexander (left) and Capt. Nunns (right). (photo insert 3)
The enthusiasm of the early days was long gone, but in its place was an inflexible determination to win the war and to make sure that the suffering was shared by all. (photo insert 4)
Talbot M. Papineau, April 1916. (photo insert 5)
Sir Robert Borden chats with a wounded man at Base Hospital, March 1917. (photo insert 6)
How did people in the West feel about conscription? “Well, I think they were all for it. Because after all, the flower of the flock had already been taken.” Naomi Radford, Edmonton. (photo insert 7)
Lester B. Pearson, spring 1918. “Mike” was the invention of Pearson’s Royal Flying Corps squadron commander who thought “Lester” an inappropriate name for a fighter pilot. (photo insert 8)