The Delusional Presidency

When the dust has cleared and historians start to get their heads around the Second Bush Administration, they might -- in their search for primary sources -- turn to Jack Goldsmith's book, The Terror Presidency. Goldsmith is a conservative legal scholar who teaches at Harvard. But, in October 2003, he was appointed to head the Bush Administration's Office of Legal Council. Shortly after assuming his post, he determined that several of the administration's previously written legal opinions rested on "severely damaged legal foundations," because they were "sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the president."

When Goldsmith sought to withdraw some of these opinions, he encountered stiff resistance, particularly from David Addington, who now serves as Dick Cheney's chief of staff -- and who has advanced the novel argument that Cheney is not a member of the executive branch of government. As Goldsmith tells the story, when he sought to withdraw the so called "torture memos," which interpreted the Geneva Conventions as allowing certain interrogation techniques like water boarding, Addington was furious. The fact that the United States had prosecuted water boarding as a war crime for one hundred years was irrelevant. "The president has already decided," Addington told Goldsmith, "that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections. You cannot question his decision."

And therein lies the essential delusion of the Bush presidency -- in a time of war, when the nation's security is at stake, a president has full authority to do as he chooses. Congressional and legal oversight -- which would allow for second guessing -- be damned.

That essential delusion has, in the case of Iraq, led to a series of other delusions. The first was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The second was that the United States could bestow democracy on Iraq. The third was that the so called "surge" would buy Iraqis "breathing space" to achieve national reconciliation. The latest delusion, as was apparent last week, is that if the surge does not promote "top down" reconciliation, it will promote "bottom up" reconciliation -- with Anbar province serving as exhibit A for the defense. But, as many reporters who have been on the ground in Iraq will tell you, that reconciliation began before the surge was conceived.

Goldstein resigned his position nine months after he assumed it, presumably because the powers that be were not heeding his advice. And his advice was that there was a template for the way presidents should exercise power in wartime. That template was established by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, two presidents with some experience of conducting a war. Instead of relying on what Goldsmith calls "the hard power of prerogative," the second president Bush would have been wiser to practice "the soft factors of legitimization -- consultation, deliberation, the appearance of deference and credible expressions of public concern for constitutional and international values -- in dealing with Congress, the courts and allies."

The irony, of course, is that the first President Bush understood and practiced this template. It is tragic that, while the father provided his son with a "teachable moment," the lesson was lost. Obviously, the second president Bush has -- as the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne once phrased it -- "learned much amiss."

On Thursday, Mr. Bush announced that the thirty-one thousand soldiers in the surge would be home by the time he left office. He did not note that the joint chiefs have told him that the armed forces does not have the manpower to sustain the surge. Instead, he claimed that the reduction of troops represented a "return on success" -- meaning that there will be the same number of troops in Iraq when he leaves office as when the surge began. Clearly, Mr. Bush holds fast to his delusions.

The Bitter Gardener

Former prime minister Brian Mulroney has had a lot of time to brood since he left office in 1993, as the upcoming publication of his memoirs makes clear. It is not unusual for politicians to use their memoirs as an opportunity to settle old scores. But, in an interview with CTV last week, which preceded the release of his eleven hundred page magnum opus, Mulroney 's vitriolic recollections of his two arch political enemies made headlines.

Mulroney's animus for his one time law school chum, Lucien Bouchard, should surprise no one. The story -- that if Bouchard showed up at his funeral, Mulroney had instructed his wife Mila to ensure that the traitor was escorted to the door before the obsequies commenced -- has been circulating in the media for years.

What did stun many Canadians, however, was his bitter attack on Pierre Trudeau. He blamed Mr. Trudeau for scuttling the Meech Lake Accord, which Mulroney had carefully crafted with Canada's provincial premiers. But he went further than that. Referring to Trudeau's anti-war activism in the early forties -- when Trudeau was barely out of his teens -- Mulroney fumed, "This was a man who questioned the allies when the Jews were being sacrificed; and when the great extermination program was on, he was marching around Outremont on the other side of the issue."

One can understand Mulroney's disgust with Trudeau. Rex Murphy -- who argued last year that Trudeau deserved the accolade The Greatest Canadian -- wrote this week in The Globe and Mail that Trudeau's condemnation of the Meech Lake Accord, "blistered where it didn't demean, and only ceased to scorn when it turned to deliberate and scathing ridicule." Murphy conceded that "Mr. Trudeau in full snarl was a terrifying spectacle."

But Mulroney's condemnation of Trudeau in the forties does not consider Trudeau's actions in the context of either time or place. Mulroney neglects to mention the 1944 election in which conscription dominated the debate -- and in which Mackenzie King's campaign slogan was "Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription." Quebecers have historically been loathe to enter what they see as foreign wars. The same dynamic is currently at work as the Royal 22nd Regiment fulfills its mission in Afghanistan. Furthermore, Trudeau was not the only prominent French Canadian who opposed Canada's participation in the war. Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, as a young man, was on the same side of the issue -- a decision which both admitted later was misinformed.

But Mulroney misses the larger point of Trudeau's wartime activities: Trudeau saw Quebec nationalism from the inside; and, in the larger world, he saw the consequences that kind of nationalism had when it was allowed to play itself out on the world stage. Trudeau learned from the experience; and it left him with a passionate commitment to multiculturalism and pluralism. Most important of all, however, it is hard to accuse the man who was prime minister during the October Crisis of 1970 of a lack of "moral fibre."

Mulroney's take on Trudeau also puts in relief his failure to see Lucien Bouchard for who he was. After all, Bouchard began his political journey as an ardent supporter of Trudeau. But, as Lawrence Martin traces that journey in his book, The Antagonist, Bouchard soon deserted Trudeau for Rene Leveque's vision of an independent Quebec. By the early 1980's, Bouchard returned to the Federalist fold to become Mulroney's ambassador to France. But Bouchard joined the separatist camp yet again when he founded the Bloc Quebecois in 1991 -- after breaking with Mulroney over Meech Lake. He subsequently left the BQ to become the premier of Quebec under the Parti Quebecois banner. He has since resigned that position to sit as a private citizen in magnificent isolation. If Mulroney had really understood Quebec Nationalism, he would never have made his Faustian bargain with Bouchard.

For in the end, Trudeau did not kill Meech Lake. Mulroney did that himself by setting in motion what Peter C. Newman called a "bloodless revolution." In his book, The Canadian Revolution, Newman argued that in the decade between 1985 and 1995, Canadian attitudes underwent a profound shift: Canadians traded their traditional deference to authority to open defiance of it.

"Deference to authority," wrote Newman, "the root attitude that separated Canadians from the earth's less timid mortals, had at long last come into open disrepute. As the Mulroney years rolled on, and the attitude toward their namesake shifted from simple derision to blind hatred, Canadians set out to challenge that most painful of paradoxes: that in a functioning democracy like Canada, people get the politicians they deserve. By the early 1990's this sentiment became too painful to endure."

Thus, when Mulroney told Canadians that Meech was a good deal, they simply didn't believe him. And, when the 1993 election rolled around, even though Mulroney had retired and the hapless Kim Campbell had taken his place, the party which had rolled up the largest majority in Canadian history was reduced to two seats in the House of Commons -- and its popular support stood at 7%.

Mulroney's tirade against Pierre Trudeau is simply an attempt to shift blame. No amount of name calling will obscure the fact that Mulroney's poor judgment is at the root of his attacks on both Trudeau and Bouchard. The good news is that Canada survived Mulroney, and so did Trudeau. And, even though Trudeau could be withering in his criticism, as Marc Lalonde reminded reporters last week, Trudeau's reaction to Mulroney's assault on his reputation would probably be something like his reaction to the discovery that, on one of his infamous White House tapes, Richard Nixon had referred to Trudeau as "a son of a bitch." When asked to comment, Trudeau quipped, "I've been called worse things -- by worse men."

The harvest from Mr. Mulroney's garden tastes distinctly sour.

Woe to the Witless

Michael Ignatieff sent the image makers of his party into fits of apoplexy last week, during the annual gathering of the Liberal caucus, which is held every year before the fall session of Parliament. It seems that the entire caucus -- meeting in Bay Bulls, Newfoundland -- boarded a ship, named the Atlantic Puffin, to do a little whale watching. Unfortunately, the whales refused to put in an appearance. When a reporter expressed his disappointment at not seeing any whales, Ignatieff tried to see the bright side of things. He took a couple of minutes to wax rhapsodic -- tongue in cheek -- about the bird which gave the boat its name.

"The puffin is a noble bird," said Ignatieff, "because it has good family values. They stay together for thirty years. I'm not kidding. They lay one egg and they put their excrement in one place. They hide their excrement. . . . They flap their wings very hard and they work like hell. This seems to me a symbol of what a party should be."

The strategists in the party were horrified. They immediately had visions of Conservative attack ads, featuring clips of Ignatieff commenting on the virtues of hiding one's excrement. Given past ads which the Harper government has run against Stephan Dion, they were not conjuring up imaginary chimeras. But sometimes the best way to deal with a bully is to laugh at him.

And, as Susan Delacourt wrote in Saturday's edition of The Toronto Star, Mr. Dion seems incapable of using humour in his defense or in a counterattack.. He "isn't able to arouse crowds to anything but polite laughter," she wrote, " and usually that's a line that has been written for him." As for the Prime Minister, Delacourt noted that, before he was elected to the cat bird seat, he was known to do "good spirited impersonations of Liberal cabinet ministers and some gentle pokes at his own party's foibles." But,"Harper's idea of a joke now is to say something mean or dismissive about his opponents. He also thinks it's funny to make a joke about the media almost every time he appears at a press conference." She concluded that "humour seems to have gone out of fashion in Harper's Ottawa."

The editors of The Globe and Mail have suggested that the Prime Minister learn to "lighten up." But The Globe's own Jeffrey Simpson has noted that among the many adjectives -- like "sober, serious, self assured, intelligent, controlling, decisive, cold, formal and, sometimes, imperious" -- which accurately describe the prime minister -- "humourous" is not one of them. "No politician who has a clothing and makeup adviser, as Mr. Harper does," writes Simpson, "will ever 'lighten up.'" So it would appear that, while both leaders of Canada's governing parties are "intelligent" (in an academic sense) neither has much of a sense of humour. That's a pity.

Over the weekend, my wife, our youngest son and I visited Sir John A. MacDonald's former residence in Kingston, Ontario. MacDonald was Canada's first prime minister and, as my son commented -- laughing as he did so, "Canada's most famous drunk." But he was also renowned for his sense of humour. My favourite MacDonald story is about the day MacDonald encountered one of his political rivals on a narrow sidewalk which both were trying to navigate. "I will not yield to a liar and a drunk!" huffed his opponent. MacDonald -- stepping off the sidewalk -- replied, "But I will!"

MacDonald's time was much like our own. Slander was standard political practice; and liquor fuelled most political discussions. But with his supporters and his rivals he managed to build a country which -- by land mass at least -- is the second largest in the world. He knew how to use humour to dissolve tension and outrage. Today we have a surplus of both. What we need is more humour.

American Napoleon?

Even George Bush's strongest supporters were surprised last week when he chose the Vietnam analogy to buttress his argument that there should be no draw down of troops in Iraq. Actually, he was using an argument that has long been a favourite of American conservatives, starting with Ronald Reagan. That argument is that America lost in Vietnam because it lost its nerve, once congressional Democrats -- taking advantage of the disarray following Richard Nixon's resignation -- stopped funding the war. Mr. Bush claimed that, if American troops leave Iraq, there will be a replay of helicopters leaving the roof of the U.S. embassy, accompanied by scenes of military equipment being pushed into the sea or being abandoned in the desert.

However, the Vietnam analogy is fraught with problems for Mr. Bush. To begin with, there is the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the argument -- which historians generally agree was a trumped up case -- for the escalation of the war. Recalling Lyndon Johnson's rationale for widening the war brings up echoes of those weapons of mass destruction and the mushroom cloud conjured up by National Security Advisor Condi Rice. Then there are Mr. Bush's and Mr. Cheney's personal histories, where -- by student deferments or family connections -- both men managed to avoid service in Southeast Asia, while others had no such option. It reminds people that those who serve in Iraq bear an unequal burden. Now most citizens, like Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, can choose not to serve. Finally, there is that black marble wall in Washington, which is a reminder of those who died in the service of a failed policy.

There are more negative parallels between Vietnam and Iraq than positive ones; and Mr. Bush has given his critics lots of ammunition to use against him. Writing in his blog on August 22nd, Robert Reich -- Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Labour -- concluded, "The apparent stupidity of this man -- or his assumption of the stupidity of the American people -- is unfathomable."

But perhaps the Vietnam analogy really doesn't fit. In an article in The Nation for the week of September 10, Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian History at the University of Michigan, argues that the real echo of Mr. Bush's invasion of Iraq is Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. "There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures," Cole writes, "not the least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery invoking the spirit of liberty, security and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts."

Cole is not alone in seeing the similarities between the French Invasion of Egypt and the American invasion of Iraq. In a report on May 17th, 2004, CBS News correspondent Tom Fenton pointed out that two prominent historians saw Mr. Bush's decision to invade Iraq as folly. Henry Laurens, who Fenton called "an eminent specialist on the Arab world," noted that,"the French went in posing as liberators, proclaiming their goal was to free the Egyptians from the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. Impoverished, backward Arabs would welcome French soldiers and the revolutionary ideas they brought." But, even though Bonaparte's campaign began well, "remnants of the old regime began a guerrilla campaign in the countryside, and in the cities several insurrections had to be harshly repressed. The war widened, and the French finally lost Egypt against the forces of the British and the Ottomans." Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations, saw the American invasion of Iraq in similar terms. He claimed that "the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has spread, rather than contained the war;" and, he concluded, the war against the Iraqi people was a struggle which the United States would "never win."

The final paragraph of Cole's article is a cogent summary and comment on the parallels between Mr. Bonaparte's and Mr. Bush's forays into the Middle East. It bears repeating:

"It is no accident that many of the rhetorical strategies employed by George W. Bush originated with Napoleon Bonaparte, a notorious spinmeister and confidence man. At least Bonaparte looked to the future, seeing clearly the coming breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the likelihood that the European Powers would be able to colonize its provinces. Bonaparte's failure in Egypt did not forestall decades of French colonial success in Algeria and Indochina, even if that era of imperial triumph could not, in the end, be sustained in the face of the political and social awakening of the colonized. Bush's neocolonialism, on the other hand, swam against the tide of history, and its failure is all the more criminal for having been so predictable."

Government by Logical Fallacy

Teachers of rhetoric are fond of enumerating and explaining several logical fallacies, which have become the stock and trade of those who practice mass communication. A favourite example is the loaded or trick question, best illustrated by the query, "Do you still beat your wife?" Anyone who attempts to answer the question puts himself in a double bind. If he answers yes, he admits to being a sadistic monster in the present; if he answers no, he admits that he was such a creature in a past life. Either way, he makes an unflattering comment on his character.

When Stephen Harper shuffled his cabinet last week, he once again put himself in a double bind -- something which he has done since he came to office. Ostensibly, the shuffle was necessitated by Gordon Connor's poor performance as the Minister of Defense. Mr. O'Connor has displayed an ongoing failure to master the facts surrounding the commitment and performance of Canadian forces in Afghanistan -- to the point where he has had to admit that in recent pronouncements he has "misled the house."

Clearly, Mr. Harper needed to make a change. But by placing Peter McKay -- his Minister of Foreign Affairs -- in the defense portfolio, he opened up the foreign affairs post for Maxime Bernier, a man with little political experience and no expertise in foreign affairs. Both men possess the virtue of being bilingual, which will make it easier to communicate with French Quebecers, who are historically adverse to foreign military entanglements -- something which the unilingual O'Connor could not do. But the move underlined what James Travers, in The Toronto Star, and Josee Legault, in The Montreal Gazette, have noted: the downgrading of the Ministry which, in Ottawa, is referred to as Fort Pearson, in memory of former Prime Minister Lester Pearson who, as Canada's Ambassador to the United Nations, helped defuse the Suez Crisis in 1956 -- and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

These two changes necessitated other changes. Jim Prentice, for instance, moved to Bernier's post as Minister of Industry; and by the time Mr. Harper had finished, there were eight cabinet changes. The official reason given for the changes was, of course, to" better communicate" with the people. However, Canadians are well aware by now that all policy announcements are made by Mr. Harper himself, with his ministers standing in the background. If the government does a poor job of communicating with its citizens, the fault lies with Mr. Harper, not his cabinet.

Indeed, that is the point. The problem is Mr. Harper. Canadians have come to understand that he is a logical contradiction. He espouses policies -- such as the recognition of Quebec as a "nation within a nation;" and he attempts to proscribe federal authority with regard to the provinces. But he also centralizes all authority in his office and in himself. He does not trust his ministers to handle their own affairs; yet he claims that the provinces should handle theirs.

He tries to smooth over this contradiction with the firm conviction that his vision is superior to those underneath him. Unfortunately, such faith based administration ignores facts on the ground and, ultimately, leads to broken promises and reversals in policy. Thus, the Tory Clean Air Act was replaced with recycled Liberal environment policy. Harper's promise to not tax income trusts led to his decision to reverse that policy; and his promise to stand four square with his NATO partners by extending the deployment of Canadian forces to Afghanistan for two more years has run smack up against public skepticism about a mission which was poorly executed from the beginning.

Simply put, Mr. Harper and Mr. O'Connor suffer from the same disease. The facts always get in their way. The difference is that Mr.O'Connor has paid for his mistakes. Mr. Harper has not. But Mr. Harper and his party are still mired in the low thirty percent range in the polls. Canadians are not ready to hand the estate over to them. They recognize a logical fallacy when they see and hear it.

It Starts When You're Always Afraid

Canadians were justifiably proud when Prime Minister Jean Chretien refused to join the "Coalition of the Willing" before the invasion of Iraq in 2001. But when previously censored documents were released last week, we discovered that we had no cause to be proud of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service -- or, indeed, of the Chretien government -- after Maher Arar was detained in the United States and shipped to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year -- tortured -- and eventually released.

Last summer, a judicial inquiry headed by Justice Dennis O'Connor, concluded that the Americans were acting on faulty information provided them by the RCMP. The government awarded Mr. Arar ten million dollars in compensation and set up another inquiry to investigate the role that the Mounties and CSIS played in the affair. But the Harper government also censored sections of O'Connor's report, citing national security, and claiming that release of the censored information could damage relationships with international security agencies, more specifically, the C.I.A.

Last week, the Federal Court of Canada ordered the release of the censored material. And it immediately became apparent why the government had tried to keep the information under lock and key. To begin with, the RCMP had provided misleading information to the judge who granted a warrant to look into Arar's affairs. The Mounties neglected to tell him that the information they possessed had probably been obtained under torture and could therefore be tainted. Most disturbing of all, CSIS suspected that as soon as Arar was handed over to American intelligence officials, he would be whisked out of the country and taken to a site where the kind of interrogation prohibited in the United States could take place.

Two days after the U.S. secretly deported Arar, Jack Hooper -- the second in command at CSIS -- wrote a memo in which he speculated that, "the U.S. would like to get Arar to Jordan where they can have their way with him." This opinion was bolstered by a report from a CSIS liaison officer, based in Washington, who had noted a trend "that when the C.I.A. or F.B.I. cannot legally hold a terrorist subject, or wish a target questioned in a firm manner, they have them rendered to countries willing to fulfill that role."

All of this was known by Canada's police and security services long before The Washington Post reported on "black sites" overseas, which were used to expedite the process of "extraordinary rendition"-- an Orwellian phrase if there ever was one -- which made torture by proxy sound like a new and melodic cover of an old song.

What is most shameful of all is the fact that, knowing all of this, the Liberal government let Mr. Arar languish in a Syrian jail for a year, even though they knew the Syrians considered him more of a nuisance than a critical threat. And, to fuel the fires of cynicism, William Elliot -- the newly appointed commissioner of the RCMP (who was appointed supposedly to clean up incompetence in the national police force) -- revealed at the end of last week that he participated in the censoring of Justice O'Connor's report.

It's clear that when a government (of any stripe) cites national security as the reason for withholding information from the public, chances are that its real motive is to avoid hanging out its dirty laundry. Last week's revelations are a reminder that, in Canada, the judicial inquiry is a critical oversight mechanism, whose purpose is to keep the government of the day honest -- and that paranoia's first target is the judicial system. As Buffalo Springfield reminded us four decades ago, "It starts when you're always afraid."

A Mesopotamian Conversion

Like Paul, two thousand years ago, Michael Ignatieff -- former Harvard professor and presently the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada -- has had his own experience on the road to Damascus -- or, more precisely, on the road to Baghdad.

In an article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Ignatieff writes about visiting northern Iraq in 1992. "I saw what Saddam Hussein had done to the Kurds," he writes. "From that moment forward I believed he had to go. My convictions had all the authority of personal experience, but for that very reason I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can the Kurds, Sunnis and Shites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together in terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self justifying, and in matters of ultimate political judgment nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of self justification through cross examination and argument."

The people who understood what would happen in Iraq, says Ignatieff, asked the hard questions; and they did not "take wishes for reality." They were not foolish enough to assume that "because they believed in the integrity of their own motives, everyone else in the region would believe it too. They didn't suppose that a free state could arrive on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn't suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn't believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq."

In the end, writes Ignatieff, "Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take care to understand himself. The sense of reality which might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then it is doubtful that warning bells have sounded in him before. He has led a charmed life, and in charmed lives, warning bells do not sound."

Mr. Ignatieff is something of an expert on the subject of leading a charmed life. Descended from Russian nobility on his father's side, and a descendant of the Grants -- part of Canada's old line aristocracy on his mother's side -- he is no stranger to privilege. He knows how privilege can help one develop a tin ear. Like Mr. Bush, the warning bell did not sound inside Mr. Ignatieff.

The warning bell did not sound inside another scion of privilege, John Kennedy, when he launched his failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. But he was soon forced to confront the fiasco which his lack of judgment had spawned. Allowing that "success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan," Kennedy acknowledged his failure and accepted responsibility for it. Naturally, the man who had been elected by the thinnest of margins, was the target of fierce and bitter criticism. But his response to the Bay of Pigs was, in Kennedy's own phrase, a profile in courage. More importantly, the lessons he learned from that acknowledged failure shaped his response to the Cuban Missile Crisis a year and a half later; and it motivated his work to achieve the first nuclear test ban treaty between the United States and Russia.

Mr. Ignatieff's recent admission and analysis of how and why he got the preemptive strike against Iraq wrong is a similar act of courage. That kind of self criticism is the first step in setting things right.

Constitution? We Don't Need No Constitution!

In John Huston's 1948 study of the dark side of human nature, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a group of bandits claim to be federal police officers. Humphrey Bogart and his fellow prospectors ask to see their badges. In a line that has gone down in movie history, the leader of the bandits replies, "Badges? We don't need no badges!" In a Hobbesian world, intimidation and brute force equal legitimacy.

The president and the vice president of the United States live in a Hobbesian world. The forget, however, that the men who founded their nation -- men they say they revere -- were products of the Enlightenment. The American Constitution was a firm and direct rebuke of everything Hobbes stood for.

It is interesting that one of the main sources of opposition to Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney comes from former aides to Ronald Reagan, whose mantle Bush and Cheney have claimed. Last week, in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, P.X. Kelley (a former commandant of the Marine Corps) and Robert F. Turner (who served as one of Reagan's lawyers) condemned the president's recent executive order, which "interprets" Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

They wrote, "we cannot in good conscience defend a decision that we believe has compromised our national honor and that well may promote the commission of war crimes by Americans and place at risk the welfare of captured American military forces for generations to come." Mr. Bush's order displays a long established pattern of rewriting or simply ignoring laws or treaties he finds inconvenient.

In a recent article in Slate, Bruce Fein -- who also worked for Reagan -- called for the impeachment of Dick Cheney. "In grasping and exercising presidential powers" Fein argued, "Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed George III." Fein then went on to list a number of, what he considered, were impeachable offenses.

Most disturbing of all is Bush's attempt to thwart congressional oversight, which the authors of the Constitution took as axiomatic in any democracy. Alberto Gonzoles continues to serve as Attorney General, despite what Congress sees as his clear incompetence and less than honest stewardship at the Department of Justice. But, in a stunning claim of executive privilege, Bush has forbidden employees and former employees of his administration to testify before the justice committees of both houses; and he has gone so far as to insist that, since U.S. attorneys serve at his pleasure, he will order any government attorney to refuse to expedite any claim of contempt of congress. Finally, Mr. Bush has proclaimed that politicians have no expertise when it comes to running a war. He vows that no decisions will be made about the war in Iraq until David Petraeus reports to Congress in September -- refusing to acknowledge the fact that politicians originally authorized his disastrous invasion of Iraq and -- under the Constitution -- they have the responsibility to declare when the war is over.

As Frank Rich made clear in the New York Times on Sunday, everyone knows what Petraeus will report in September. He has already hinted at what he will say. Patraeus told the Times of London last month that September "is a deadline for a report, not a deadline for a change in policy." Remarkably, a significant number of legislators have given up waiting for Godot, but not for Petraeus. Lindsay Graham has perhaps given the most succinct summary of their position. Speaking on Meet the Press three weeks ago, Graham proclaimed that he would "not vote for anything" unless "General Petraeus passes on it."

In other words, the policy which has been applied disastrously for over four years will not change. Perhaps because Bush and Cheney worked so hard to stay out of Vietnam, they are determined to display their courage now; and they define courage as staying the course. Mr. Bush knows there will not be any change in policy because a majority in the senate is 60, not 51; and, even if that threshold were reached, it would take 67 votes to overturn his veto. So the dance continues. So far, only four Republicans have -- when push came to shove -- voted against Mr. Bush's conduct of the war.

So the burden now falls on those senators -- the old lions of the Republican Party, like Senator Warner and Senator Lugar -- who say they harbour grave doubts about the course this administration has followed. There will not be a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. Logistically, it will take a lot of time. But, until the withdrawal begins, the bodies will pile up; and the members of the president's party will have as much blood on their hands as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. Together they will have to answer the question which John Kerry asked thirty-five years ago -- long before he became a senator, and long before the Swift Boat Veterans impugned his patriotism -- "What do you tell the last man to die for a mistake?"

Lessons from Niagara

My wife, our youngest son and I spent last Friday at Niagara Falls. Our son's science course this year focused on the environment. One of the phenomena he studied was erosion by wind, water and ice. There is no better example of water erosion than Niagara. But having never seen the Falls, our son needed to experience them. So we decided to rectify that oversight.

I have seen the Falls several times -- but always from above or from the caves underneath. However, this was the first time any of us had stood on the deck of one of the several Maids of the Mist. Without a doubt, the Falls are most impressive from below. The sheer amount of water, the roar it creates and the mist and spray which rise in the air, like the steam from some gigantic boiling cauldron, inspire both fear and reverence.

But more than that, when one stops to consider that water from four of the Great Lakes tumbles over the gorge into Lake Ontario and then down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic -- where it joins the ocean currents constantly circulating in a system which gives us rain in the summer, snow in the winter and life forever in renewal -- one can only pause in admiration.

Niagara is a natural monument to our interconnectedness. It reminds us that, in an age of muscular individualism -- which operates on the principle that Individual Choice is the prime directive -- all of our choices have consequences -- not just for us as individuals, but for all of humanity and for the planet we like to think we own.

One cannot walk the streets of Niagara Falls, Ontario without encountering the planet in miniature. After our ride on The Maid, my wife and son let me park myself on a tree-shaded bench, because my arthritic knees cannot now take the punishment which I once dealt them. While my wife and son went in search of souvenirs, I sat and looked ahead to the American Falls. I found myself at a small convention for Those Whose Knees Are Not What They Once Were. A woman from Colorado sat down beside me. Her family, too, was in search of trophies to take home to Denver. We were joined by a retired cardiologist from Toronto, who trained in Montreal, moved to Houston, but moved back to Ontario to retire. When his family came by and picked him up, a family originally from central China, then Los Angeles and Vancouver, sat down on the bench. This was their first trip to the Falls. Throughout their travels, they said, they had not encountered anything like them.

And there is nothing like them. The world beats a path to Niagara; and Niagara serves to show us the path to wisdom. It reminds us that we are all in this together; and the solutions to whatever problems we face now require international cooperation. We are not alone.

The Legacy of Life

Today, my neighbours at BlogCatalog and I are attempting to do a little consciousness raising. Our subject is organ donation. It is something of which we are all aware; however, we really don't give it much thought -- unless it becomes an issue in our immediate family. But it is one of those phenomena where demand far outstrips supply.

In Australia, over 1700 patients are awaiting organ transplants. In Latin America, more than 50,000 patients are waiting; in Europe and the United States the number is 95,000. And in China, more than 2 million Chinese need organ transplants. The demand is so great that in South Asian countries, such as Pakistan and India, perfectly healthy people are willing to sell an organ -- like a kidney -- in the daily battle to survive.

Perhaps we don't give the idea of donating our organs much thought because what precedes it is too uncomfortable to contemplate. However, most of us prepare wills in preparation for that day. As part of that process, we should also consider what donating our usable organs can mean to those who face premature deaths.

We can give the gift of life to those who still have so much to give to life. And there is no greater gift than the gift a of stranger who gives -- not in the expectation of receiving something in return -- but because the need is great.

It is a gift that will be remembered with each new sunrise.

Lord Black and Captain Ahab

Canadians have never felt much sympathy for Conrad Black. Perhaps that's because he never displayed much sympathy for them. Black's disdain for what he viewed as the Canadian inferiority complex -- which he felt made Canada an economic backwater and a land of limited opportunities -- was well known to his countrymen.

But, as the Lord of Crossharbour found himself a convicted felon last week, it is safe to say that Canadians were not above feeling a sense of catharsis. For, like a Greek or Shakespearean tragic hero, Black's tragic flaw was hubris. The problem was that he clearly was no Oedipus or Othello -- because, in the end, Sophocles' and Shakespeare's creations were self critical enough to at least acknowledge their flaws. Lord Black appears to be much more akin to the classic American tragic hero Captain Ahab, in Melville's Moby Dick. And perhaps that is fitting, given the fact that Black frequently extolled the virtues of Canada's southern neighbour, going so far as to write admiring biographies of two of its presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.

Like Ahab, Black felt that he was the constant target of lesser creatures who insulted his intelligence. And, like Ahab, he exhibited a heightened sense of injury. When Ahab was told by Starbuck, his first mate, that it was "blasphemy" to hunt an elemental -- a force of nature -- Ahab responded, "Speak not to me of blasphemy, man. I'd strike the sun if it insulted me." And, like Ahab, Black appears to feel no sense of remorse. Ensnared in a tangle of legal harpoons -- some of which he threw himself -- his raised middle finger is a gesture of defiance. He will go to the bottom, refusing to acknowledge that there are some fates which should not be tempted.

For, unlike Black, most Canadians live in the shadow of fate -- or of a natural environment which can seal one's fate. This is a land where prairie farmers have been known to tie ropes from the back doors of their houses to their barns -- as life lines to prevent their getting lost in a blizzard. Perhaps, because Mr. Black grew up a child of privilege, he knows little of the life of a prairie farmer and the elementals which are the axioms of his existence. Canadians tend to side with Starbuck. They know that one does not do battle with white whales or the Great White North. Admittedly, such an attitude is not very heroic -- to my knowledge the only legacy Starbuck has left behind is the bequest of his name to a chain of coffee shops. But at least one survives -- and saves one's soul.

None of us is qualified to analyze the state of Lord Black's soul. But, for many Canadians, when Black renounced his Canadian citizenship he was, in effect, cutting the rope from the back door to the barn. And they watched, knowing instinctively that Black was going to be caught -- snowblind -- in the storm.

This is not to say that Canadians would not allow Lord Black to return to Canada -- although his conviction makes his application for citizenship somewhat problematic. However, Canada has a long tradition of accepting refugees. They would insist, though, that he serve his sentence in a Canadian jail -- unless that sentence were overturned on appeal. We may not be a very heroic people (in the sense that we do not go in search of monsters to slay) but we are a tolerant people. In the end, I suspect that Canadians would be willing to give the Lord of Crossharbour a second chance. But they would insist that he acknowledge he made a mistake when he cut that life line.

The Difference Between a Battle and a War

We can learn something from the British response to the recent terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow. British authorities have relied on very good police work and very effective international cooperation. The same strategy paid considerable dividends when suicide bombers hit the London transportation system two years ago.

That insight is critical as Americans begin to call for a change of strategy in Iraq. Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld insisted that what was needed to combat terrorism was a war. And they brought all the technological resources at their disposal to effect "regime change" in Afghanistan and Iraq. But both countries have a history; and history suggests that in both countries a massive military response was -- and is -- counterproductive. The Russians tried that strategy in Afghanistan in the 1970's; and the British tried the same strategy in Iraq in the 1920's. Both Russia and Britain, despite their huge investment in weapons and human lives, failed to change the fundamental character of the region. Instead, they created what the United States has created in Iraq today -- insurgencies.

Why? Because, despite their sheer brute force, Russia, Britain and the United States -- in the tortured language of George W. Bush -- "misunderestimated" their enemy. The British have some experience with this problem. Perhaps that accounts for the way they are dealing with the attacks in London and Glasgow. But in 1776, they lost the thirteen original colonies because, as the historian Barbara Tuchman pointed out in The March of Folly, they failed to see that, essentially, the American Revolution was an insurgency and that their opponents were not ignorant and unwashed country bumpkins.

It is more than a little ironic that the present American administration is so ignorant of its country's history. It is even more ironic that thirty-five years ago the United States faced an insurgency in Vietnam which no amount of carpet bombing could bring to its knees. History -- whether ancient or modern -- has no bearing on their thinking.

The British encountered the same problem in India. When Mahatma Gandhi told the British that they would one day "walk out of India," Winston Churchill declared that he placed no store in the ridiculous assertions of a "naked savage." But Adolph Hitler misread the same Churchill and his countrymen in 1940, when his air assault on Britain produced the exact opposite of what he so confidently predicted. As a strategy, "shock and awe" is counterproductive against a population prepared to wait out the invaders.

In defending their homeland, the British have abandoned shock and awe for intelligence and leg work. Their chief weapon has been information; and they have relied on an international network of police forces and intelligence agencies to generate that information. Information has led them to abandon some of their previous assumptions -- like the enemy are all foreign infiltrators and they are all ignorant barbarians. The medical profession is the last place that any of us would begin to search for terrorists.

It is information, not ideology, which drives their strategy. The tragedy of the last six years is that the Bush administration has got so much backward. Intelligence comes before strategy; tolerance comes before democracy; battles are on going; but wars are -- or at least should be -- rare. And preemptive war is doomed to failure.

What we have needed from the beginning is a battle against Al Qaeda. All out war simply saps resources; and, as the First World War proved, it can obliterate an entire generation. The war we have waged -- including the war Canadians are fighting in Afghanistan -- is fought against an enemy who has better knowledge of the terrain and which is -- in the words of one military analyst -- willing to trade space for time. When things get tough, insurgents simply leave one area and pop up in another. What we have needed all along is a strong homeland defense, which emphasizes good police work, not a crusade to bring democracy to "savages."

Mr. Bush is not the first to misunderstand the world in which he lives and the battles which need to be fought. More importantly, he ignored advice that could have put him in a much different place. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell -- who knows something of war in general and of war in Iraq in particular -- has recently revealed that he spent two and a half hours with Mr. Bush, trying to convince him that his decision to invade Iraq was folly. "I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers," Powell told the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Powell has some knowledge of the limits of military power. Of the civil war the American invasion of Iraq has spawned, Powell says, "It is not a civil war that can be put down or solved by the armed forces of the United States." Unfortunately, says Powell, "It is not going to be pretty to watch, but I don't know any way to avoid it."

The way to avoid it was to do what Mr. Bush was loathe to do -- which was to avoid grandiose dreams and the rhetoric which accompanies them. If Mr. Bush had committed himself and his country to an admittedly long battle with Al Qaeda, which required stellar police work as opposed to smart weapons, he would not face the general revolt he now confronts. Having led his countrymen into a quagmire, they do not trust him to lead them out. Even his once most fervent supporters understand the fundamental miscalculation he made.

He could have won a battle against Al Qaeda. But he has lost the War on Terror.

Tricky Dicky Two

Richard Nixon once famously offered the opinion that "when the president does it, it's not illegal." After reading a series of articles in last week's Washington Post, one could be forgiven for thinking that the ghost of Nixon still stalks the halls of the White House -- or at least for concluding that his ghost has found a home and a kindred spirit in the office of the vice president.

Nixon forgot that the oath he took was not to "preserve, protect and defend" the United States. It was to "preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States." Mr. Cheney has consistently shown contempt for that document.

Two months after the September 11th attacks, Cheney brought a four page document to Bush which had been "written in strict secrecy by [David Addington] his lawyer." The Post reports that, "In less than an hour the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review." Then Mr. Bush signed the document. When Secretary of State Colin Powell heard about this new executive order on the evening news, his reaction was, "What the hell just happened?" Condolezza Rice was reportedly "incensed." Nevertheless, the order stood. Thus, write Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, "foreign suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court -- civilian or military, domestic or foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges, and would be tried, if at all, in closed 'military commissions.'"

Having got Mr. Bush to agree to a policy which placed detainees in a legal limbo, Cheney next moved on to the question of how they should be interrogated while in custody. The problem was that the Geneva Conventions got in the way of what Cheney called "robust interrogations." So once again, Addington set to work redefining the term "torture," which the Geneva Conventions strictly outlawed.

Addington produced a document (with which the Justice Department concurred) which "prohibit[ed] only the worst forms of cruel and inhuman treatment" but which permitted many other forms of interrogation based on the newly minted concept of torture, which Addington defined as, "equivalent in intensity to the pain of organ failure . . . or even death." A subsequent memo, produced on the same day, outlined a list of approved interrogation techniques -- including waterboarding -- which the United States had prosecuted as a war crime since 1901. Addington's memo was dated August 1, 2002. It only became public knowledge on June 8, 2004. Just as Mr. Cheney had kept the detainee memo close to his vest, he likewise kept the administration policy on interrogation techniques carefully under wraps.

Besides the influence he wielded in the development of policies on detainee confinement and interrogation, it has recently come to light that Mr. Cheney for the last four years has been quietly ignoring his obligation under law to pass on documents on intelligence to the National Security Archive. His rationale for doing so is that he is not a member of the executive branch of the government -- an argument which Mr. Addington has advanced on his behalf.

Finally, just as Americans were preparing to celebrate Independence Day, Mr. Bush commuted the two a a half year prison sentence of Mr. Cheney's former chief of staff, I. "Scooter" Libby. Given his past involvement, it is hard to believe that Mr. Cheney did not have some input into Mr. Bush's decision.

Clearly, the vice president believes that he should obey laws only when it is convenient to do so. When it becomes inconvenient, he believes he has the right, by virtue of his office, to ignore them or rewrite them without congressional approval -- which is precisely what Richard Nixon maintained.

The whole Watergate saga was about who won that argument. Obviously, Mr. Cheney learned nothing from Watergate. What is even more disturbing is the thought that perhaps he believes Nixon was right.

There are those who bemoan the fact that the Democrats lack the votes to force a change of policy on Mr. Cheney and the man who has such confidence in his advice, the President of the United States. What they forget is that Nixon resigned only when a bipartisan group of senators -- led by Barry Goldwater, the godfather of modern neoconservatism -- went to the White House to tell Nixon that the jig was up and it was time to go.

To date, Republican congressmen have -- for the most part -- remained loyal to the administration. A few, like Senator Hegal of Nebraska, Senator Smith of Oregon and, most recently, Senator Lugar of Indiana have broken with the two men at the top. But, until a critical mass of Republican lawmakers have the valor to tell Bush and Cheney that the jig is up, democracy in the United States is in deep, deep trouble. The question is, how many Republicans have the courage of their convictions?

After 140 Years

Jacques Cartier was not impressed when he sailed down the St. Lawrence in 1534. "The land God gave to Cain" he concluded as he looked at the landscape. John A. MacDonald also acknowledged the difficulties inherent in the place he called home. But, after cobbling together the British North America Act with the other founding fathers, he turned to Isaiah for inspiration: "The wolf and the lamb will graze together and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock . . . . They will do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain."

One hundred and forty years has not changed the physical geography of the place. Anyone who has stood on the open prairie and watched a winter blizzard blow in, or who has tried to navigate the Bay of Fundy when the fog is a blanket thrown over the bow of the vessel, knows the feeling of insignificance -- and terror -- Nature can unleash on this, North America's attic. And the lion and the lamb have never coexisted as idyllically as MacDonald hoped they would. Just ask David Suzuki, who spent part of his youth in an internment camp during World War II. Or ask native Canadians to retell the sad history of life on a reserve or in a residential school.

And yet -- and yet -- as we celebrate Canada's birth for the one hundredth and fortieth time, there is much to be proud of -- in the usual unobtrusive Canadian way. Many claim that Canada should have disintegrated decades ago -- and, during what is almost a century and a half, it frequently appeared to be ready to do so. Yet the country has weathered the First World War, The Depression, World War II and two referendums whose purpose was to determine whether or not the citizens wished to tear the house down. From its three founding races -- British, French and Native -- it has evolved into a mosaic of races and cultures which bear little resemblance to the country's original inhabitants.

And what is most remarkable is that in a world which has been torn asunder by ethnic rivalries -- from Rwanda, to Bosnia to Iraq -- Canadians, despite their occasional lapses into ethnic insanity, have continued to strive for for that vision of tolerance which MacDonald found in Isaiah. As John Ibbitson writes in his book, The Polite Revolution, "We are a nation of strangers, bringing in more strangers by the hundreds of thousands each year, from every region of the globe, who then learn to live together as friends."

There is always something a little messy about this mix. To those who have not taken the time to understand how the country works, it appears to leave us without a clear sense of identity or history, where region counts more than country and where urban neighbourhoods function, at times, like city states. But it is that autonomy to act as free agents, while agreeing that somethings -- like the longest railway in the world, Medicare, the CBC, public higher education and the Canada (or Quebec) Pension Plan -- are national institutions and the product of the national will which make the country unique.

And make no mistake: Canada is unique. If its environment can make one feel insignificant, that same environment -- in different circumstances -- can soothe the soul. The same prairie landscape looks different under a summer sky, stretching out to infinity. And the Fundy mudflats are a source of wonder when the tides roll in on a clear day. Then there are Niagara, the Rockies, Payto Lake and the Fraser Canyon. There are no other places like them on earth.

But, most of all, it is the dream of the peaceable kingdom which drives the vision of Canada as a nation. The American humorist, Josh Billings, said: "There may come a time when the lion and the lamb will lie down together but I'm still betting on the lion." For the last one hundred and forty years Canadians have placed bets on both beasts, convinced that they will be able to work something out. They haven't always succeeded -- at least immediately. But Canada was never a done deal. Canadians know that each generation has to renegotiate the bargain. It is that commitment to renegotiate the terms of nationhood that we celebrate this Sunday. We are all the better for it.

On an entirely different subject, I want to thank Ron Hart for his advice. His comment on last week's post is actually attached to my post of June 5th. I have followed his recommendation. I recommend that readers of this blog visit his website at www.safewatergroup.org.

The Shop Up the Road

I ended last week singing The Call Centre Blues. After downloading a number of updates from Microsoft, my security system informed me that its "parameters were incorrect." I called up the help desk of my internet service provider -- a company in which we own a small number of shares. After doing what the person on the other end of the line suggested, I rebooted my computer (we only have dial-up service here) and I got the same message -- the parameters were still incorrect.

I called a second time, talked to a new person and -- after doing what I was told -- discovered that I could not surf the web. I called a third time, reached yet a third advisor, and I was told I should remove Explorer 7. "But," I said, "I have no other browser. "

"That's all right," I was told, "an earlier version is underneath it." After removing Explorer 7, I discovered that there was no earlier version on my hard drive.

My service provider has recently moved its support services to India. In theory I have no objection to that decision; and in truth, while I had to ask a couple of times to have the instructions repeated, I did not mind the Indian dialect. What bothered me was that my help was coming from half a world away. These folks were -- at least to begin with -- reading from a script. More importantly, they had no real hands-on knowledge of my computer.

I am aware that, in his book The World is Flat, Tom Friedman maintains that, because of startling telecommunications wizardry, service can be delivered from anywhere on the planet. However, my gut tells me that service is best performed by those closest to the problem or the client -- sort of a truncated version of Peter Drucker's management theory.

I probably screwed up my computer through my own ham handed ignorance. But to fix it, I took it to a little shop about half an hour up the road, in the small metropolis which breathes economic life into this rural community.

I talked to a person, not a disembodied voice. He brought me into the shop and showed me what he was doing. He checked the system out with me before I brought it home. And, the next morning, when I received a message which proclaimed that my modem had gone missing, I brought the computer back. He opened the machine up and showed me how the modem was slightly out of its slot -- and didn't charge me a cent for the quick fix.

When I bought the machine three years ago, I purposely went to a shop which was owned by someone I knew and trusted. His business has since been bought by the people who got my computer up and running this week. But they have continued to deal with people as they did -- and do -- deal with me.

The shares of my internet service provider are doing well these days. They provide a good income -- which is why, I suppose, several suitors want to harvest a controlling interest in the company. We hope that those shares and the income they produce will help us send our third and last son to university.

But as a client of the company, as opposed to a shareholder, I feel less well served. We have worshipped at the altar of efficiency for far too long. In the end, what makes a company great is quality -- not efficiency. And while it is undeniable that companies which do not make a profit disappear, it is equally true that companies which fail to provide quality service likewise disappear.

The folks who run Livewire Networks in Belleville, Ontario know that. In an era when big boxes and transnationals obliterate the competition, small quality operations deserve our support for one reason: they are good at what they do.

The Rising Revolt

Nova Scotia premier Rodney MacDonald is in Ottawa today trying to shore up support for Nova Scotia in its battle with the Harper government over his province's claim to off shore oil and gas resources. Thus, he joins Newfoundland premier Danny Williams in calling Harper a promise breaker. It is worth remembering that, some years ago, Harper expressed contempt for Atlantic Canadians and their "culture of dependency." Now that they have the opportunity to join Alberta in petro-prosperity, Harper says he wants a piece of the action. And his response to Messers. MacDonald and Williams has been, "So, sue me."

This is a strange response from the nation's politician-in-chief. But then it is not unusual, either. When Conservative MP Bill Casey complained about the Harper government's treatment of his province, he was drummed out of the caucus. The same thing happened to MP Garth Turner when he complained about the first Clean Air Act. Turner, after sitting awhile as an independent, joined the Liberals. Harper has a clear vision of what he wants to accomplish. Unfortunately, he lacks the people skills to do it. And that apparently does not concern him. In fact, Harper displays what the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald called "a vast carelessness" in his dealings with people.

He appears to care even less for the will of the people. A case in point is his recent support for George W. Bush's proposed missile shield in Eastern Europe. As Linda McQuaig points out in the Toronto Star, Harper "promised in the last federal election campaign that he wouldn't reverse Canada's opposition to [the proposed missile defense system] without a vote in the House of Commons, which he knows he could not win." Harper has "in effect [done] an end run around Parliament and the Canadian public, and helped advance a position that is at odds with Canada's own official policy."

On domestic policy Harper and his brethren cancelled the Kelowna Accord when they came to office. They say that they will introduce legislation which will expedite native land claims; but, as the recent federal budget makes clear, they have abandoned the promises made in that agreement. The rising tide of native frustration appears to be the last thing on Harper's agenda. And his refusal to heed premier Dalton McGunity's request for a ban on handguns continues to alienate Canada's urban dwellers, who only have representation because Harper co-opted Liberal MP David Emerson and appointed Montrealer Michael Fortier to his cabinet.

So, however Mr. Harper may deny it, he has earned his reputation as a promise breaker. He appears to believe that whatever policy promises the Liberals made were hogwash. The fact that they were Liberal policies, by definition, gives him the right to nullify them. What is interesting is the public revolt against his actions. One would expect an outcry from the Liberals. But, more significantly, he has managed to alienate two of the country's last three Conservative premiers. The other premiers are all from rival parties. And his support for Jean Charest in that province's recent election proved far from helpful. It takes a special talent to create this kind of mess.

How does one account for such an outcome? As a technocrat, Harper appears to suffer from a genetic weakness. It is the belief that he knows better than anyone else because, when push comes to shove, he really is the smartest guy in the room. He is not the only leader, public or private, who suffers from the affliction. The movers and shakers at Enron caught the virus. Paul Wolfowitz, another carrier, has been cashiered from his job at the World Bank. And Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are in the last stages of what has become -- for them -- a terminal disease.

The most recent polls indicate that Canadians are not impressed with any of their elected leaders. But, as the tide of opposition grows, I suspect that they are particularly happy that they didn't hand Mr. Harper the keys to the car in the last election. Recent history has proven that the smartest guys in the room can be remarkably stupid.

Syntax or Substance?

As the Conservatives roll out their latest attack ads against Stephane Dion, the nation's media are beginning to shine a spotlight on the Leader of the Opposition. Linda Diebel, of The Toronto Star, has just published Against the Current, the first full length study of Mr. Dion in English. And, last week, Lawrence Martin devoted a column to Dion in The Globe and Mail. Mr. Martin clearly admires Mr. Dion's integrity; but he laments Dion's fractured fluency in English. However, as those of us who grew up as Quebec Anglophones can attest, getting your tongue around any word which is more than two syllables in the other language takes some practice. Martin concludes, somewhat sadly, that "Mr. Dion is a gentleman and a scholar. In politics, that combination, as honourable as it is, has rarely been a winning one."

Susan Riley, of The Ottawa Citizen, has a much more upbeat assessment of Dion. While admitting that Dion appears to have a somewhat shrill superiority complex -- she quotes a Quebec satirist who claims that Dion has the "indignant air of a granny who's found a dirty hair in her tisane" -- he also has the courage to speak truth to power: He "has fearlessly marched into battle against Quebec's sovereigntist elite, stood up to an intimidating Prime Minister Jean Chretien ('This is not a time for joking,' he once famously admonished his boss, before startled cabinet colleagues) and has never hesitated to challenge illogical arguments or historic distortions."

That is why the latest ads smack of ignorance and arrogance. They hearken back to ads which the Conservative Party ran five elections ago -- the ones with the unflattering picture of Jean Chretien's lopsided mouth -- which were withdrawn within three days (after Chretien quipped that, of course, he only spoke out of one side of his mouth, unlike the Conservatives who spoke out of both sides of theirs.) Canada's "new" government seems to be stuck with some pretty old and ineffective communication strategies.

Perhaps that explains why the Conservatives, after riding a wave with their new budget, have seen their numbers sink back into the thirty percent range. The Liberals are also stuck in the same neighbourhood. And Mr. Dion is not without critics in his own party. Sometime ago, Raymond Heard -- a former news director at CanWest Global and now a Liberal Party operative -- bitterly criticized Dion for his election compact with Elizabeth May (the leader of the Green Party) claiming with Andrew Coyne, of The National Post, that Dion has moved the party too far to the left.

And Mr. Martin's concern about Mr. Dion's flawed English certainly has something to do with the general anxiety that Dion won't be able to sell his vision in places like Saskatoon. On top of that, Mr.Dion -- by his own admission -- is not a natural politician. Readers of this blog will remember that I did not foresee Mr. Dion' s victory at the Liberal leadership convention (see my post for October 4, 2006).

I too was worried about Mr. Dion's ability to communicate with English Canada. But I should have remembered that, when Jean Chretien arrived in Ottawa back in 1963, he didn't speak a word of English. Some would say that he never did quite get the hang of the language. But, despite his tortured syntax (which, by the way, was as tortured in French as it was in English) Canadians instinctively felt that Chretien, like him or not, only spoke out of one side of his mouth. They eventually came to see what Mitchell Sharp, that wise old man of the Liberal Party, saw in the young Chretien when Sharp took him under his wing. And, with time, Chretien developed into a very effective leader.

The question is, how much time has Mr. Dion got? For the moment, any election plans are on hold. I suspect that time will work in Mr. Dion's favour.

The Henry Ford Argument

Henry Ford's name will forever be linked with the Model T. It will also be linked with a much more controversial proposition, namely the belief that -- as Ford himself said -- "history is bunk." Ford's proclamation is particularly ironic in view of the fact that, as he aged, Ford seemed to be increasingly stuck in the past. By the time Tex Avery convinced Ford's grandson to hire a team of "whiz kids" from the Harvard Business School, Ford had driven his company into the ground. Avery brought Robert McNamara into the company; and together they turned things around. Unfortunately, McNamara would eventually become the architect of the Vietnam War -- but that's another story for another post.

Despite the obvious absurdity of Ford's proposition, his argument is alive and well. It raised its head again last week when Christopher Bond, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to The New York Times, "called for the committee to stop rehashing past controversies and to 'focus on the myriad threats we face today.'"

The immediate cause for Bond's admonition was the release of two pre-war intelligence reports on post-war Iraq. The reports predicted that after Saddam Hussein fell, "Iraq would be unlikely to split apart, but a post Saddam authority would face a deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict," characterized by "score settling" and "heightened competition for power among the different groups." The analysts also predicted that, "rogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare against the new government or coalition forces."

The popular argument is that because pre-war intelligence on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was wrong, no one should have believed these predictions. However, what is conveniently swept under the rug is the information which was coming from Hans Blix and his weapons inspectors, who were on the ground in Iraq before the invasion. They kept sending back reports that there were no WMD to be found. Besides Blix, Scott Ritter, a former Marine and UN weapons inspector, kept insisting that Saddam's nuclear capacity had been destroyed by 1998 and could not have been reconstituted by 2001. He also said that 90% to 95% of Saddam's chenical and biological capacity had been destroyed and that Saddam did not constitute the threat he was declared to be. However, Blix and Ritter were dismissed as dupes. Those in power knew better and they therefore deserved the public's trust.

And what should we do with this intelligence now? Well, say Mr. Bond and the president's supporters, it is obviously irrelevant, because that was then and this is now. But it is instructive to dip a little farther back into "then."

Jules Witcover, also writing in The Times, refers to James Mann's book, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet. Witcover reminds his readers that in the waning days of the first Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz -- who was then Deputy Secretary of Defence to Dick Cheney -- directed his assistant I. Scooter Libby (do these names sound familiar for other reasons?) to prepare a draft which "set forth a new vision for a world dominated by a lone American superpower actively working to assure that no rival or group of rivals would ever emerge." Libby, for his part, passed the assignment to Zalmay Khalilzad -- another familiar name. Khalilzad produced a document which "envisioned a world in which American military power alone could rival or replace the collective security that had marked U.S. containment policy during the Cold War."

Remember, this was 1992. There is no evidence that George W. Bush had anything to do with these deliberations. At the time, he had not entered politics and he was happily attending to business as a part owner of the Texas Rangers. But the plan was not thrown together hastily after September 11, 2001. It was the kind of plan whose sweep and -- some would say -- beauty appealed to Wolfowitz, the mathematician. It inspired a kind of shock and awe.


Convinced of its brilliance, why should the plan's authors have paid any attention to the intelligence at hand? Their only problem was selling the idea to their boss. The rest, as they say, is history. And -- as Mr. Ford said -- history is bunk.

The Triumph of Convenience

In his award winning book, The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer Dixon illustrates how the catastrophic failure of modern systems -- like the electricity grid which left millions of North Americans without power five years ago -- can be caused by several smaller but cascading failures. Like it our not, we live in an interconnected world; and a failure in any of the many links which tie us together can bring the house down.

What is true of technical systems is increasingly true of social systems. A striking example of this phenomenon is contained in an essay in the Armed Forces Journal of April 27th. Its author, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, criticizes the current senior officer corps at the Pentagon, claiming they lack moral courage. The "tendency of the executive branch," he writes is "to seek out mild mannered team players to serve as senior generals." And the senior generals perpetuate that leadership template. What we are left with is a system where "senior officers select for promotion those like themselves." What this means in practice is that career advancement lies in saluting and marching uphill, rather than questioning the wisdom of one's superiors.

This is not a new phenomenon. It happened during the Vietnam War and it happened in Renaissance England. In Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons, Thomas Cromwell -- the real villain of the piece -- lectures Thomas More on his failure as an administrator. More not only serves at the king's convenience, Cromwell says. He serves to expedite whatever the king deems convenient -- meaning that when he assumes public office the good administrator checks his conscience at the door.

More's reply has rung down the decades, ever since the play debuted almost fifty years ago: "I believe when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties . . . they lead their country by a short route to chaos." Thus, the debacle in Iraq comes down to, as Yingling amply illustrates, a team of weak leaders, acquiescing in one bad decision after another. Or, as Homer Dixon would put it, each bad decision in the public sphere forms a link in a chain, which eventually contributes to catastrophic public failure.

Whether it be at the Pentagon or at Enron, or -- closer to home -- in the self-dealing of the sponsorship scandal, we have seen the triumph of convenience over conscience. The path to success is not to speak truth the power, but to enable it. Those who do so are rewarded. Someone like More, who has the courage to disagree and offer reasoned arguments to whomever is the king, will lose his or her head -- or, as was the case with General Shinseki, his career.

We live in a time of wars and proxy wars, ecological degradation and extreme economic injustice. If we are to arrive at solutions to these problems, our public servants must hold to the courage of their convictions. Perhaps that explains why I feel so uncomfortable every time I see Stephen Harper making another public policy announcement. I watch as the minister or ministers who will manage the policy stand behind him, nodding silently -- like religious fundamentalists at a camp meeting, punctuating the preacher's sermon with silent "amens." I suspect that Mr. Harper does not seek out dissenters; and, despite the first part of that old saying, it seems to me that -- more often than not -- fools never differ.

In the absence of dissent at the highest levels of government, we, mere citizens, must have the courage to disagree. The disaster in Iraq or the Holocaust in Germany could only happen because thousands of Adolph Eichmanns sought career advancement, despite the demands of justice, in service of the king.

When Edward R. Murrow took on Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, he ended his broadcast with an allusion to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Cassius was right: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.'" McCarthy died an alcoholic mess -- a fitting end for a man who thrived on fear and character assassination. His demise was the product of a kind of courage which -- at present -- is in short supply. Without such courage we will bring the house down.

Paying Attention to the Facts on the Ground

Richard Gwyn begins his column in The Toronto Star this week by proclaiming that "Canada has done something remarkable -- it has figured out how to contain within it another country." Gwyn's observation has, at least in part, been triggered by the obvious disarray in the ranks of the Parti Quebecois, perhaps best illustrated by Gilles Duceppe's decision to run for the leadership of the party -- a decision which he reversed some twenty nine hours latter. Gwyn warns his readers that separatism is not dead: "The new creed in Quebec politics will be 'autonomy,' or making the province as separate as possible within Canada."

And it is that trend which worries The National Post's Andrew Coyne. Heading his latest column "scenes from a dying country," Coyne observes that Premier Danny Williams is sounding a lot like Jean Lesage these days, insisting that when it comes to the province's resources, Newfoundlanders should be "masters in their own house." Add to that the present Quebec premier's insistence that Quebec be considered a nation within Canada and be given a seat at UNESCO and the future begins to look darker. Alberta, too, "cannot decide whether it is or is not in favour of the concept of a single national securities regulator."

Could these men be talking about the same country? The answer is yes -- and it has always been thus. The fact that it has always been this way is no reason to be sanguine about the future. However, it is instructive to consider how we got from there to here.

Fundamentally, Canada is a country of ideas; but, for most of its history, it has rejected ideology. The country entered upon the world stage just as the free trade movement of the nineteenth century was at its apex. Yet John A. MacDonald immediately established the National Policy as a way to set Canadian manufacturers on their feet. By 1935, William Paley had developed a template for broadcasting in North America, which held that broadcasters were private entities who paid their bills through advertising. But the CBC was established as a public corporation. In 1956, after two world wars had confirmed the conventional wisdom that nation states projected their power by the use of military force, Lester Pearson insisted that Canadian forces would be used for peacekeeping, not self defense or military conquest.

In fact, throughout its history, Canada -- like its native son, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith -- has had a great distrust of what Galbraith called "the conventional wisdom." Instead, public policy decisions have had more to do with the facts on the ground than with any theory of the way things should be.

During all this time the country struggled with its identity, weathered the Conscription Crisis of World War I, The Great Depression, World War II, and the October Crisis of 1970. We relied on the tools at hand; and, if those tools proved inadequate, we -- after careful reflection -- changed them. Like the first Prime Minister, whose nickname was "Old Tomorrow," we tried not to make decisions impulsively.

Why this walk down memory lane? Well, it seems to me that the present government, for all its political calculation, does not think things through. When Gilles Duceppe threatened a motion to recognize Quebec's de facto sovereignty, Mr. Harper -- within a week -- came up with his "nation within a nation" resolution, something which is already coming back to haunt him. Just as rashly, he decided to extend Canada's mission to Afghanistan until 2009, not giving much thought to whether or not we possessed the resources or the expertise to meet the longer term commitment -- as the scandal over the treatment of Afghan prisoners illustrates. And then there was Harper's reversal on income trusts -- a fundamentally wise decision -- but a reversal of a promise made in an election campaign. Framing his decision in the ideology of a party which holds that taxes are a scourge, Harper committed himself to a bad idea. When a government ignores the way things are, as opposed to the way it thinks they should be, it generates alot of bad ideas.

As Gwyn points out, Canada has thus far arrived at a different place than Montenegro, Kosovo, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Perhaps Scottish voters will consider Canada before they seek a "velvet divorce." As millions of unhappy couples will testify, there is no such thing. The challenge is to remain committed to the union, by considering the partners' needs, aspirations and dreams. All of these things are manifested in what exists here and now, in what we have learned in the past -- and, most importantly, in not acting impulsively or in the heat of anger.

Gilles Duceppe concluded this week that seeking the leadership of the Parti Quebecois was a bad idea -- a decision bolstered by the fact that only two members of the party's caucus were prepared to support him. It would have been wiser to have taken note of that fact before he stepped in front of a microphone.