Herd mentality

Opposition to “Operation Charging Bison” demonstrates same tired, old thinking

Bryan Peeler Volunteer Staff

The Canadian Armed Forces are planning possibly the largest urban warfare exercise in Canadian history. Beginning April 30 and continuing for a week, Winnipeg’s downtown will be turned into an “urban battle field.” The project is designed to simulate the conditions of what military planners believe will be the future of warfare.

Col. Kelly Woiden, commander of 38 Brigade, was quoted in the Winnipeg Free Press as saying, “We’re going to create a realistic environment of the situation that individual soldiers can face today. You could be doing humanitarian relief one moment and then fighting a war the next. It is the most complicated terrain for a soldier.” The operation is part of a long-term plan to prepare 200 of the brigade’s soldiers to support a 1,000-person task force in 2008, if necessary, he said.

Needless to say, the anti-war left has gone apoplectic. Groups like the Marxist-Leninists, the Manitoba-Cuba Solidarity Committee, Friends of Grassy Narrows and others were out Saturday protesting the exercises and marking the third anniversary of the Iraq War. They trotted out the silly complaint that public space should not be used for training people to kill or the even more ludicrous claim that a kind of martial law is being imposed. The last time I checked, our military was still under civilian control.

A large part stems from the marchers’ complete misunderstanding of the role Canada’s military has played as peacekeepers. We are all told the story of how Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for putting United Nations troops between the British, French and the Arabs in the Sinai Desert in1956. But contrary to the mythology, Canada neither invented peacekeeping nor initially embraced it. When Canada was asked to join the proposed United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization in the Middle East in 1948, then-Prime Minister Mackenzie King refused.

All these people fail to realize that peacekeeping is no longer peaceful; it has become combat and peace-building. And when it fails, as it did in Rwanda, it leads to genocide. In places like Haiti, Canadian troops now are the law. They are asked to stop rapes, pick up dead bodies and take the sick and wounded to hospitals. These men and women are the thin line between minimal security and the random violence that affects the lives of the Haitian underclass. Our soldiers must be trained under realistic conditions.

The World People’s Resistance Movement (WPRM), in a statement protesting the exercises, even went so far as to call for the removal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan since they are helping to put down a “legitimate resistance movement.” The Taliban and al-Qaida are legitimate resistance movements?

Their aim is to restore the lost caliphate. They would redraw the map of the Arab world by getting rid of countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, and they would impose sharia law. Their grievances are with unveiled women, the very existence of Jews and homosexuals, Hinduism, music and dance, and East Timor’s liberation from Indonesia. Does the WPRM really support such aims?

Included in their statement was the outrageous claim that, “in Afghanistan, Canadian Forces are helping to prop-up and defend a vicious theocracy that is completely opposed to the interests of the people there.” Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a recovering country, one that is attempting to create a democracy from scratch and that has seen its population increase by almost two million returned refugees. Why would these people want to return to such a place if this were in fact true?

What is it that such groups still don’t understand? The WPRM’s cries of “We Must Resist” and “Walkout! Against War” conceal the ludicrous idea that we have no argument with the Taliban al-Qaida. A better slogan, one from the 1930s — “Fascism Means War,” is more worth recalling. It preserves the central idea that totalitarian regimes are inherently unstable and that it is we who should choose when and where we will fight.

Everywhere we must confront regimes that see the citizen as property of the state. The protesters who were out this past Saturday hate George W. Bush so much that they would rather see people be forced to live under fascist dictators such as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein than have U.S.-led forces (the only forces that could do the job) remove them.

As we mark the third anniversary of the Iraq War, it appears I must remind the marchers of what would have happened if they had had their way from the start: Kuwait would be the 19th province of Iraq, Bosnia would be part of Greater Serbia, Kosovo would have been ethnically cleansed of its inhabitants and Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule.

It is just these sorts of unsound arguments that serve to demonstrate the continued bad faith of those who marched on Saturday. Once again, they have demonstrated their all-to- easy willingness to betray the principles of internationalism that they claim to support.

Bryan Peeler is an instructor in the department of philosophy. He is also a pre-masters political studies student.