Posted on 04/30/2002 7:03:23 AM PDT by Pokey78
Whenever our men have been heroic, our Defensive Minister bravely deflects attention on to himself
There have been two news stories about the Princess Pats this last week. If you're the sort of Canadian who gets his news from the CBC, Globe And Mail, etc., you'll only know about one of them: the deaths of four of our soldiers in Afghanistan. The other, less reported story -- the Pentagon's wish to honour five of our snipers -- is at least as revealing of our country's vexed relationship with its military.
I felt a little out of it during the media's attempts to whip up a Dianysian grief jamboree. The practice of returning fallen soldiers to their homeland is an American one. In our soldiering tradition -- that's to say, the British and Commonwealth tradition -- the dead are buried where they fall. In Rupert Brooke's famous lines,
"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed ..."
In western Europe, you don't have to go far to find foreign fields that are forever Canadian. Old soldiers, in my experience, like that idea: They hold the terrain they fought for in perpetuity, as their comrades press on.
By contrast, the desire to pull the dead out and ship them home has the whiff of a posthumous retreat about it -- or at least a portent of retreat. And so, in last week's moving funerals, the anti-war faction found the most potent symbolism yet to bolster their call to chuck it in. "The terms of engagement were not clear enough," said renowned military analyst Alexa McDonough, saying she felt a "sense of rage" that Canadians were being "taken for granted." "If Canadian troops cannot be certain that they're not going to be fired on by Americans, we have no business being there," huffed Svend Robinson, the suicide bombers' favourite gay infidel. In Saturday's Toronto Star, readers were uniformly critical of our participation in an American war: "Canada should question its role in the war on terror ...", "I think the Prime Minister should advise the Governor-General to pull our troops out ..."
Some of these guys are just the usual reflexive anti-Yank types. But the more artful ones managed to whip up a most unbecoming hysteria about Bush's insufficient prostration before his touchy neighbour to the north. Bush should have said sorry quicker and more feelingly! He should pay compensation! He should have personally called the families of the four soldiers!
Of course, if he had made calls to the widows and parents, these same critics would have been the first to cry that this was an outrageous assault on our sovereignty, that Bush was treating our boys as his -- as if he were their commander-in-chief and they mere colonial conscripts to the Yank army. Australia, the first ally to lose a man in Afghanistan, didn't carry on like this, nor did the British, who in the Gulf War lost far more men (including an old friend of mine) to U.S. friendly fire. But even the more sober commentators managed to produce a convoluted argument that, precisely because Canada's military contribution is so small and thus fatalities are so rare and so few, Bush should have been aware that he needed to make a bigger deal about it.
Leaving aside the predictable opportunism in these effusions, a reasonable person would conclude that ours is a culture no longer at ease with soldiering. This was confirmed by the other story involving the Pentagon and the Pats: America's wish to honour five PPCLI snipers with the Bronze Star for being so good at ... killing the enemy. As the National Post and nobody else reported, the Canadian Government put this request on hold on the curious grounds that the Americans hadn't observed the correct protocol. Apparently, what's meant to happen is that the Deputy Under Assistant Secretary of State notifies the Assistant Under Counselor for Paper Work at the Canadian Embassy who shuffles it to the Deputy Chief of Carbon Copies at the Department of Obfuscation in Ottawa who runs it by the Prime Minister on the 14th hole at Royal Montreal who forwards it to the Conrad Black Memorial Committee for Honours Incompatible With Canadian Citizenship at its headquarters on an ice floe in Queen Maud Gulf, where the matter can be expedited at their next biennial meeting.
After the Post drew attention to this strange delay, the government lifted the Conradian freeze and announced that they had no objections to the Bronze Stars. Indeed, Art Eggleton, the Defensive Minister, declared that this was the first he'd heard of it.
This seems to be Canada's newest military tradition. Whenever our soldiers are discovered to have done anything heroic, such as capturing or killing al-Qaeda terrorists, Mr. Eggleton steps into the limelight and bravely deflects attention on to himself. If successful Canadian military operations have to be mentioned in public at all, it should be in the context of unsuccessful Parliamentary enquiries into the vortex of the Defensive Minister's reverse-Nixonian persona: What did Mr. Eggleton not know and when did he not know it? The "fog of war" has nothing on the fog of Grits.
You'll recall how the Patricias wound up in Kandahar. Ottawa assumed, after the fall of Kabul, that they'd be a shoo-in for a little light peacekeeping in the stabilization force. Instead, the British gave us the brush and Mr. Chrétien was faced with being a non-participant in the "war on terror": at G7 meetings, when the talk turned to the war, he'd be the eunuch in the harem -- observer status only. So Ottawa pleaded and begged and eventually Washington said OK, you can string along in Kandahar. Because this was a combat mission, Ottawa got to swan around telling folks that, sure, the Brits had their little peacekeeping operation going but frankly we Canadians have been there, done that and this time we were looking for something a little more macho. They were so busy spinning they forgot that for once what they were saying was actually true: Our boys were going to be over there killing Johnny Foreigner.
So now they have done, and very impressively so. Washington wants to reward their bravery, Ottawa isn't even sure this is something you discuss in polite company. Everywhere from the government primer for putative citizens to the Molson ads to the new $10 bill, we're told that Canadian soldiers don't wage war, they make peace. So, when the Pentagon says, "Hey, guys, don't be so hard on yourselves," it's understandable that the Defensive Minister doesn't quite know what line to take.
Pace Svend and Co., the Princess Patricias died in the service of Queen and country, not of Uncle Sam and his global hegemony. They are not in Kandahar to "help out" in America's war. This is our war, too -- as much a threat to us in the long run as to America. So it is in our interest for the Pats to kill as many al-Qaeda fighters as possible. This sits uncomfortably in a culture that, on the evidence of the last weeks, prefers to see its soldiers as victims rather than warriors.
The anti-Americans know what they're doing: The four soldiers buried last week are far more use to them dead than they ever were alive. If you're opposed to this war, then obviously the only good soldier is a dead soldier, and preferably dead at the Americans' hands. But an amazing 69% of Canadians resisted the media barrage and told the pollsters they don't believe our troops should be pulled out. They're the ones the government and the wretched Eggleton should be speaking to. Instead of telling us what he doesn't know, why doesn't he tell us something he should know? That our guys are doing a great job there, that some of them have done an extraordinary job, and that we're proud their heroism is being recognized by our allies. I think that's what their four comrades would have wanted -- that the Pats stay and see it through.
I am grateful for the service of Sergeant Leger, Corporal Dyer, Private Green and Private Smith. But I am also grateful for that of the five snipers, and a government that was truly committed to this war wouldn't need a protocol row to force them to acknowledge their existence. A Canadian serviceman shouldn't have to die to get in the papers.
bood-thirsty canadian bump.
Truer words have not been spoken, eh
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
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regards
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