Posted on 02/16/2003 8:25:01 AM PST by quidnunc
Canada's world is collapsing. In the wake of Sept. 11 and Washington's new, muscular take-it-or-leave-it approach, the network of international alliances so painstakingly constructed by this and other countries over the past 60 years is breaking down.
For Ottawa, this is the real tragedy of the Iraq crisis. Canada's government does not much care what happens to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. But, as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien told a Chicago audience two days ago, it is horrified that the dispute over Iraq is tearing apart both the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — organizations that, in Ottawa's view, offer this country some leeway to operate independently in the world.
Indeed, Chrétien's decision this week to send peacekeeping troops to Afghanistan only underscored the flimsiness of the old, post-1945 world order in which Canada once so deftly moved.
At one level, the Prime Minister's move was characteristically crafty. By committing ground troops to Afghanistan, Canada will be unable to play a significant role in the expected U.S. war against Iraq. We simply don't have enough soldiers.
Thus if, as expected, Chrétien backs a U.S. invasion of Iraq, he will still be able to straddle both sides of the fence — giving political comfort to the American war without risking too many Canadian lives.
As well, the decision to send as many as 2,000 soldiers to Afghanistan as part of a U. N. force will, Ottawa hopes, reaffirm Canada's commitment to international peacekeeping, in the grand tradition of former prime minister Lester Pearson.
But Afghanistan is now a sideshow. U.N. peacekeeping, which in the time of Pearson was designed to cool international hot spots, has become a clean-up. Canadian troops going into Kabul will act as a kind of janitorial service, to sort out the mess left after the war against Afghanistan's former Taliban government.
The peacekeepers are expected to salve the world's conscience. They are not expected to accomplish anything serious in the matter of rebuilding the war-wracked country.
Meanwhile, both the U.N. and the once-formidable NATO alliance are fracturing. As they do so, Canada's role in the world becomes more uncertain.
In official Ottawa, this uncertainty expresses itself as fixation with Canada-U.S. economic relations, particularly with border access. The federal government is consumed with making sure that nothing harms Canada's lucrative cross-border trade.
"They're traumatized by the border," says former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy, after recent visits to his old political and bureaucratic colleagues. "There's a feeling they have to bend over backwards to please the administration (of President George W. Bush)."
Certainly, Canada's focus on the U.S. is not new. But since World War II, successive governments deliberately tried to wrap Canada-U.S. relations inside the cloak of what aficionados of foreign affairs like to call multilateralism.
Put simply, much of Ottawa's foreign policy since 1945 has been directed at entangling its southern neighbour in a web of international institutions that allow medium-sized nations such as Canada to exercise some influence over Washington's actions.
In the political and military field, the U.N. and NATO were the most important.
Now, they seem like relics of another time.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at torontostar.com ...
Put simply, much of Ottawa's foreign policy since 1945 has been directed at entangling its southern neighbour in a web of international institutions that allow medium-sized nations such as Canada to exercise some influence over Washington's actions.
So Canada is our bestest friend in the whole wide world, eh?
But the end of the Cold War had other, more profound effects. Without a common Soviet enemy, the contradictions within NATO began to bubble openly. What was the use of an Atlantic alliance if there was no one to ally against?In the U.S., never enamoured of either the U.N. or Europe, some were coming to similar conclusions from a different angle. What use were international institutions when the world knew only one military superpower? Why should the U.S. allow other, ostensibly friendly, nations to tie it down at all?
Why indeed, especially when they've spent the last five or so decades trying to cripple us?
But to those around Bush, U.S. unilateralism resulted naturally from the failure of the old order. They saw an America drawn by its allies into conflicts, such as Somalia and Yugoslavia, in which it had no national interest. Even U.S. involvement in the 1999 Kosovo campaign, while technically a success, served to underscore Europe's penchant for convincing America to do its dirty work.If the U.S. must take the military lead anyway, the hawks around Bush concluded, better that it engage in wars that it wants to wage against countries that it — not the U.N. or NATO or the French — wants to conquer.
In principle I agree.
And so Canada is bereft, deprived of the mechanisms that once allowed it a small degree of foreign policy independence. That was the real theme of Chrétien's Chicago speech. His plea to the United States to work inside the U.N. was a cry from the heart, a last-ditch appeal.
It was the gibbering of a card-carrying member of the Axis of Weasel!
Well, duh... It's a whole new ballgame now and the old tricks don't work anymore. As #2 said, it's time (long past time IMHO) to dismantle them.
That is what comes from not being able to distinguish between friend and foe and good and evil.
But they only entangled and hampered us, not the Soviet Union.
The Soviets paid no attention to UN mandates unless it suited their purposes to do so.
replace the word Soviet with the word Iraq and there ya go :>
20th Century tools for fighting thte Cold War. They have been obsolete and toothless since the fall of the Soviet Union and the freeing of Eastern Europe.
We are the one undisputed superpower on the planet. We are militarily, economicaly, technologicaly, culturaly and moraly more powerful than every other country in the World put together. It is past time they learned to bend the knee and tug the forelock.
PAX AMERICANA
So9
So9
STAY THE COURSE, GW!!! The Marxists and planners are BLINKING!!! They cannot survive without sucking the blood of free people and nations.
GW, the fate of the world is in your hands. Do not falter. Evil triumphs when and where good people and nations do nothing.
A good plan, executed with resolution, is better than a perfect, great plan, never attempted.
GW, repeat after me: I will not get squishy; I will not get squishy........
Name for me, please, another time, another place, another superpower, besides which a country as empty, resource-rich, and vulnerable as Canada would possibly have been allowed to retain its independence, unmolested, with unarmed borders?
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