A rchive Date
[ 14-03-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.N ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/harris.html
An attack of common sense
By MICHAEL HARRIS - For The Ottawa Sun
March 14, 2003
So who has it right? The cheese-eating surrender monkeys or the burger-eating war monkeys?
As the cultural glue that holds the Western Alliance together cracks over the Iraqi crisis, anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism dominate commentary on both sides of the ocean. Saddam merely giggles. Before we guffaw at those anti-French jokes that are making the rounds on Crossfire these days, consider some of the facts.
America's relationship with France goes back to the very beginnings of the American nation. That statue out in New York Harbor didn't come from Bulgaria.
After 9/11, France and the rest of NATO invoked Article 5 and volunteered their military forces to help the United States in its war on terror. And if the "Old Europeans" are so wimpish, why do they make up so much of the peacekeeping forces in the Balkans and Afghanistan?
On the other side of the coin, there are no better reasons for insults against the Americans. It wasn't the Martians who twice came to the rescue of Europe when tyrant armies put some of the world's oldest democracies under the boot of fascism. It was the United States. The Americans deserve better than snobbish remarks about the Mickey Mouse Nation.
Jerks on both sides are making an already dicey situation worse. Sad to say, some of the more breathlessly stupid comments are coming from journalistic jingoists who can't wait for the "show" to begin. After all, the media studio in Kuwait has been built by the same guy who dreamed up the set for Good Morning America, the scribal war teams are embedded in U.S. military units, Paula Zahn of CNN is looking more and more like a vampire in need of a quart of fresh blood, good God, it's even ratings period, so what are we waiting for?
COOLER HEADS
Merely, I submit, for cooler heads to prevail. How cool? Well, Canadian Cool to be precise. If there is any solution to the schoolyard antics that are dominating the trash talk of war with Iraq, it is the one advanced by one Jean Chretien on behalf of a country that made its name on the international stage by finding a better way to solve problems than blowing people up.
The truth is that Canada has realized much more quickly than either the United States or the United Kingdom that invading Iraq without a united Security Council is far, far more dangerous than contriving a more elegant vice into which to put Saddam Hussein's private parts. Consider the consequences of letting the war genie out of the bottle before our St. Patrick's Day hangovers have subsided.
For starters, the aggressors in the war are breaking international law.
Tom Dalyell, who has served the British Labour Party for 41 years in parliament, said this about his party leader and Britain's prime minister: "If Mr. Blair goes ahead with his support of an American attack without unambiguous UN authorization and without a vote in our House of Commons, he should be branded as a war criminal and sent to The Hague."
Mr. Blair's international development secretary, Clare Short, has publicly denounced her own boss over his "reckless" handling of the Iraq crisis and vowed to leave politics if Britain goes to war without UN support. She has not been fired. Ms. Short's stand has prompted a group of Mr. Blair's own Labour Party MPs to say that if the British prime minister abandons the UN, it is time for the Labour Party to abandon its leader in special session.
Do we really want to see the leader of one of the world's great democracies denounced as a war criminal by his own colleagues in government, and maybe by the Hague, particularly when Mr. Blair fully realizes that the American goal of "regime change" is flatly illegal?
As for America, which has fought the good fight so many times in its relatively brief history, do we really want to see an anti-Americanism the like of which the world has never seen sweep the globe because people like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz want to take over Iraq for globally strategic reasons, as their signatures on the plan for a new American century makes clear? And oh yes, they were calling for the invasion of Iraq back in 1997 when 9/11 was no more than a glitter in an al-Qaida terrorist's malevolent eye.
The consequences of war in the region are no less momentous.
Are we ready for a bloody war in northern Iraq between Kurdish and Turkish forces over the region's coveted oil fields? Are we prepared to spark a civil war in Pakistan as that nation's Muslim population watches western powers decimate an Arab state with the connivance of their own leader?
And do we really want to become Osama bin Laden's recruiting agents by abandoning the very institution whose resolutions we pretend to be enforcing and engaging in an illegal war in Iraq? And finally, who wants to see unarmed non-combatants blown to bits by 10-ton bombs that are so prodigious in their killing power that it doesn't matter how smart they may be - all in their path will be destroyed?
SCORPION'S TALE
The cheese-eating surrender monkeys and the burger-eating war monkeys share the same goal. The disarmament of a tyrant and a dictator. Canada has wisely pointed out that what is at issue here is not shared values or the ultimate outcome, merely the means.
Jean Chretien rightly reminds the Americans and the British that their endgame can be achieved without dragging behind it the deadly scorpion's tail of war. A huge army sits on Saddam's borders; arms inspectors are finding and destroying weapons on a daily basis inside Iraq, and allied war planes patrol the north and south no-fly zones of the country, hemming in the dictator. The squeeze is on and the game is up.
Saddam Hussein is not about to attack either the U.S. or any of his neighbours. A process has begun to defang and declaw this odious fellow that he is powerless to stop.
The advice of the Cool Canuck is sound. It is no time to go making widows and martyrs because a few men and women in Washington are stamping their feet.
Author, broadcaster and investigative journalist Michael Harris can be heard Monday to Thursday, 1-3 p.m. on 580 CFRA.
Letters to the editor should be sent to oped@sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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