JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE ON A COLUMN BY LEWIS MACKENZIE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“NATO’s purpose, now long vanished into history, had been to exist as a counter to the WARSAW pact and the threat of Soviet hegemony.

But now the Soviet Union and the WARSAW are gone – and so should NATO have disappeared”

Absolutely.

But NATO has another important purpose, and it is this other purpose that keeps it going.

The U.S. uses NATO as a kind of theatrical costume for events like Afghanistan. Instead of the world’s seeing America acting as lone bomb-dropping lawgiver to the world, it sees the somewhat more benign face of NATO, benign only because the organization carries the suggestion of plausibility with a number of nations agreeing on some objective.

The reality is, of course, America’s NATO allies do not genuinely regard Afghanistan as a serious threat: their relatively small commitments and refusal to expand them effectively are screaming this truth at us.

NATO is also used by American policy to keep Europe from becoming a genuine competitor on the world stage, a role Europe’s economy, the largest in the world, fully justifies.

American policy uses all kinds of subterfuges towards this goal, as for example keeping alive the many decades out-of-date conception of “a special relationship” with Britain, a game, appealing to the feelings of a declined imperial power, which keeps Britain from fully integrating into the Europe which is clearly its destiny.

As for MacKenzie’s silly way of talking about the Taleban, let’s remember they are a major part of the population, not some foreign invader like the United States. And they never attacked anyone in the past. American policies have made them an enemy. Just as American policies are driving Pakistan towards disaster.

Remember what America achieved in Cambodia during its holocaust in Vietnam.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY LEWIS MACKENZIE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Canada will not abandon Afghanistan!”

Sounds like some Colonel Blimp sitting over a large gin fizz in one of the leather armchairs of his men’s club.

Lewis MacKenzie was a failed general, and we have no reason to put any credibility in his words.
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“we love freedom, but we’re afraid to risk our lives for it? we love freedom, but we don’t want anyone else to experience it? why are canadians so selfish?”

What planet is the author of those laughable words living on?

Afghanistan is NOT about freedom. Full stop.

It is run by a crook, placed there by American invaders, and the real powers, the regional governors, are a bunch of thug warlords no different to the Taleban.

Afghanistan is, and was, about American paranoia. Americans don’t, and never did, give a damn about “freedoms” elsewhere, especially in a backward place where they have never existed.

You cannot hurl a vast nation from the Middle Ages to modernity. It cannot be done.

That’s like saying you could go to 14th century Spain and tell them they should live like 21st century North Americans.

Ridiculous, and you would soon find yourself burned at the stake.

Of the 200 or so countries in the world, many of them with backward economies, poverty, and ignorant superstition, Afghanistan was about the least likely ever to have caught Canadians hopes or imagination.

We are there only to please the Pentagon, America’s having undergone a form of national insanity over the last eight years.

It has killed more than a million people over a criminal act in which all the 19 perpetrators died.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY FORMER GENERAL LEWIS MACKENZIE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Our infantry ranks are so diminished that Canada’s combat role in Afghanistan has to end”

Good.

There is no more wasteful enterprise on earth than the military.

Like police, you need some military, but it should always be regarded with great care as a necessary evil.

And the bigger the military of a country is, the greater is the temptation of politicians to use it to bad purposes.

Analysts of the pointless bloodbath called the Great War agree that the level of armaments in the various states was a major contributor to starting the war. And what was Hitler’s first priority after taking power? The armed forces, of course.

The United States is the clearest contemporary example of that hard truth. Here is a nation that rebelled against imperial military forces only to end up being a greater imperial military force.

It spends as much on its military Frankenstein as all the other countries on the planet put together.

And the results are: occupation of two countries, neither of which ever attacked that country; regular bombing in a third country, Pakistan; constant threats to a fourth country, Iran; support of apartheid in Israel; plus innumerable other intrusions and black-ops.

The world surely is a better place for the three million the US murdered in Vietnam, isn’t it? And for the sea of Agent Orange and landmines it left there? And for the million deaths it generated in Cambodia by destabilizing a neutral government with secret bombing? And don’t forget the million or so killed in Iraq plus a couple of million refugees and an economy set back for a lifetime.

Lord Acton said it best for all time: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Why is it that conservatives and militarists like Lewis MacKenzie do not understand these things? That’s like asking a careless boy why he just smashed a bird’s nest.
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Arctic sovereignty I fear is an illusion.

Who is it that is actually going to challenge it?

Why, the world’s military colossus of course.

Would our outposts of troops wave at the passing American atomic submarines and guided-missile cruisers?