Posted on 07/19/2006 3:37:57 AM PDT by Clive
OTTAWA - Mediterranean cruise lines demand at least a year's advance notice for a private charter booking.
To locate, contract, displace passengers and dispatch seven ships for a 10-hour sail to a war zone in Lebanon, returning to Cyprus and Turkey filled with passengers for charter Air Canada flights to Toronto, is no trifling feat. It takes a mad negotiating scramble and some seriously deep pockets to cobble together an evacuation flotilla half a world away without notice in just over 100 hours.
Yet Canada's Foreign Affairs Department has suffered collateral damage from the bombardment of Lebanon for allegedly being a slow ride to the rescue for up to 30,000 Canadians seeking to flee a tourist trap turned into a retaliatory Israeli missile target almost overnight.
It's a bad rap, particularly criticism from the habitually crisis-hesitant Liberals.
Rolling out boarding ramps on rented ships for thousands of frantic Canadians trying to escape through a blockaded Beirut harbour -- which appeared an oasis of Middle East calm until July 12 -- is the ugliest of foreign affair eruptions in a logistically challenging location.
One can only imagine the rubbing of entrepreneurial hands when Canadian officials came calling in Cyprus and Turkey this week, looking to bump paying passengers off sold-out cruise ships in peak tourist season. While a spokesman for Foreign Affairs could not put a price on the total charter, my bet is that this rescue mission will cost tens of millions of dollars in the weeks it will take to relocate Canadians at a rate of 2,000 passengers every 24-hour cycle.
But there's no other way out. Canada has no naval presence in the vicinity. The airport is closed, preventing an escape using our traditional dependence on rented Russian heavy-lift aircraft. Even if you could somehow put our Sea King helicopters in Beirut's central plaza, it's doubtful they'd be mechanically able to serve in any serious airlift capacity beyond the city limits.
With the war's likely provocateur Syria to the north and east and sealed-off Israel to the south, the only escape is west into the water.
Given those conditions, with half of senior Foreign Affairs bureaucrats sitting lakeside in Muskoka, Canada has delivered a reasonable and, to borrow the Prime Minister's word, "measured" response to relocate its citizens to safety, provided they can now deliver on their plan.
Quibbles must be noted, however. The flow of information to anxious families has been hesitant and subject to change without notice. Relatives of those holed up in Lebanon are being told one thing while media are told another. Foreign Affairs doesn't know which cruise ships it has booked. It can't articulate the process for the orderly evacuation. It's not sure when Canadians will be returning home aboard chartered Air Canada jets. And it can't estimate how many Canadians will have access to Beirut or remain trapped in southern Lebanon.
For a Canadian embassy in an unstable democracy with so many citizens under its supervision, it might have been better prepared for an emergency of this sort.
Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay has yet to call a news conference to deliver political reassurance. And when he does open his mouth in selective interviews, he boasts that Canada is setting the pace for this global evacuation of visitors to Lebanon.
This is simply not true. The French and Italians have already relocated thousands of their citizens, while the Americans have booked a faster, 750-passenger ship to rush its citizens to Cyprus, which has yet to arrive.
But in the words of Bill Graham, while he was defence minister and trying to explain the former government's tardy response to the Asian tsunami, "it took some time for us to absorb and really understand" the scope of the tragedy.
The same caveat applies to MacKay in coping with the outbreak of hostilities in Lebanon. Had he rushed off to book cruise ships just a day or two into a budding crisis that might have quickly ceasefired, he'd now stand accused of a reckless foreign affair.
He still has plenty of opportunities to screw this up, of course. As we've seen from the last seven days, one week is an eternity in Middle East military matters.
There'll be no cruising to a happy ending in this crisis. The best he can hope for is a safe political landing.
Canada delivers a measured response
The Bush administration is also taking flak for its supposed slow response.
L
"The Bush administration is also taking flak for its supposed slow response."
If he did it in five hours they would be slamming him for the cost. these folks have no idea what they are talking about and their only intent is to slam Bush.
Same problem here. I wonder how many of these people now claiming to be Canadians or Australians hold dual citizenship and have been residing in their other homeland, namely Lebanon?
New media attack will be to blame the Bush administration for not getting Americans out of Lebanon.
Lebanon was relatively peaceful until recently.
We really need to take a hard look at just what our obligations are when we are asked to extract people from a country when those people are nationals of that country.
It would be interesting to do a bit of sum to see just what the aggregate is of those claiming protection of Canada, the US, Australia and the UK. It would also be interesting to try to find out just how many of them have dual citizensip or triple citizenship.
Still had a travel warning up. Since May of last year.
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Was the warning because of Hezbollah, or because of antiAmericanism in the region?
Isn't that the same thing?
Maybe because the U.S. is the only country in the world that charges its citizens taxes when they live overseas. What other services does the government provide to overseas citizens?
Was the warning about Hezbollah specifically or because of antiAmericanism rife amongst the populace in general?
Exactly!
Whats the difference? One is just as good as the other.
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