If Canadians didn't know who their Chief of the Defence Staff was before, they certainly know him now. General Rick Hillier did something very un-Canadian last week by not only talking frankly about how he felt, but using the sort of adjectives -- "scumbags" and "detestable murderers" ready to spread their "venom" on our shores as soon as they can catch a flight out of Afghanistan -- generally reserved for late-night cop shows and Dirty Harry impressions.
The candour was refreshing, particularly so when it comes from a ranking officer, a clique notorious for viewing public displays of honesty as tantamount to treason. But it was also a disturbing admission that Canada is about to embrace the very foreign policy that has gone so disastrously wrong for the U.S. and Britain.
For those who have waded through the most recent defence policy statement that Gen. Hillier has been proudly promoting, this will not come as much of a surprise. Canada's new direction will be one of intervention, joining coalitions to intercede in the affairs of "failed and failing states." Anyone who had hopes that we are a country committed to working solely through the United Nations, focused on peacekeeping and supporting missions, had better think again.
As Gen. Hillier was eager to make clear last Thursday, National Defence is a unique branch of the civil service whose "job is to be able to kill people," an activity he seems rather eager to engage in, given his rhetoric.
That's well and fine if it actually achieves the desired end, namely a "victory" in the war on terror. But there's little evidence that brute force in foreign lands pays any dividends (unless you're a General Dynamics stockholder). The world's mightiest military machine has not reduced terrorism one iota. If anything, it has merely stirred up and spread a hornet's nest: Attacks against Western nations have increased, not decreased, since 9/11 and, if Britain is any example, the "venom" has long since left the hills of Afghanistan.
Gen. Hillier has embraced the rhetoric and the disingenuous arguments that have appalled so many in Canada when used by the Bush administration to exhort a nation into engaging in the folly of what is now an Iraqi quagmire. Taking a page right out of the Karl Rove book of motivational speaking -- Chapter 5: "They hate us" -- the only thing missing was a sneer and a dash of Texas bravado. The "detestable murderers and scumbags," we are told, "detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties." That's a whole lot of detesting going on, on all sides, and it's this sort of thinking that speaks volumes about the lack of solutions to an ever-growing problem.
All this is not to discredit or undermine the mission to Kandahar in which the Canadian Forces will be participating, a mission that will be risking the lives of our soldiers in ways not seen since Korea and the Second World War. But unlike 1939, a time Gen. Hillier compares with the present, the West is as much to blame for the mess in Afghanistan as the Taliban. This is not a case of the Blitzkrieg tearing across Poland, but a country that has spent decades at war, being the pawn in an international game of chess that has seen the U.S. and others support warlords, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden himself in search of an endgame that has never materialized. It is now our bloody job to help restore to Afghanistan some degree of stability, though, as one officer recently said, that may take generations.
Part of that job will involve aggressive action on the part of ground troops, including the elite Joint Task Force 2. But it is one thing to provide tactical support to stabilizing missions, using lethal force as a defensive measure for the safety of support personnel and rebuilding efforts, and quite another to root out "scumbags" who detest us in a hawkish approach to foreign policy and terror fighting that, at best, has kept the problem at bay and, at worst, exacerbated it. Yet, it is the latter philosophy we seem to be embracing, a change in foreign policy we would do well to consider very carefully.
Michael Nickerson is a columnist for the magazine Esprit de Corps and the e-zine Caffimage.com.