And Prof. English, a former military officer, notes a developing movement within the U.S. armed forces to promote American military culture – emphasizing truth, duty and honour – as superior to American civilian culture.
However, the Canadian military hierarchy has had difficulties overcoming Canadians' stubborn and lingering affection for the image of their military as peacekeepers, not warriors – an image eloquently put into words by one of Canada's most outstanding diplomats, Allan Gotlieb, in a private letter to Pierre Trudeau in 1967.
“To many Canadians,” Mr. Gotlieb wrote, “Canada has a moral obligation to help solve the problems of the world. Our culture, our character, our geographic location, our prosperity – all these and other factors have been thought to combine to endow us with a special role in helping to bring peace and sanity to the world.
“What makes the decline of this role particularly serious for Canada is that it played an important part in forging our unity in the postwar era.
“Like the Danes who made good furniture, the French who made good wine, the Russians who made Sputnik, Canada, as a specially endowed middle power, as the reasonable man's country, as the broker or the skilled intermediary, made peace.”
It is a catechism Canadians have found hard to forget, although it's fading. What interests scholars is the significance of the shift.
“We don't know how deeply entrenched this is,” Prof. Harrison says.
“What we know is that Canadians are supportive of the troops, and it's a dramatic and important thing when lives are lost, and we're sympathetic and supportive. But whether or not we're supportive of further kinds of engagements like Afghanistan ... this could be one of the last of these things for a long time, and if there's no Afghan mission, what the heck does the Canadian military do?”
Michael Valpy is a writer for The Globe and Mail.
