With Power Comes Arrogance

I was reading through the Current Mail page at Jerry Pournelle's site, Chaos Manor in Perspective, and a letter from a Canadian regarding the current state of affairs in Iraq caught my eye. This letter was in response to another letter which was posted the day before in which an officer in the American military lauded all the positive things that have been accomplished in Iraq since the regime change, things that the sensationalist American news media have not seen fit to publish. But there were also comments in there about the American response to the Canadian refusal to participate in the military operations in Iraq.

Quoth the writer:

"From my perspective - yes, Iraq is better off without Saddam; But the cost to American prestige in the rest of the world is high. Canada made a point of saying - "We respectfully disagree with you, but we won't publicly criticize you. We will send extra troops to Afghanistan instead, since we agree with that foreign initiative." In return, we were lumped in with the Russians, the Germans, and (horrors!) le French, as too much of a menace to national security to be allowed to bid on Iraqi reconstruction contracts.

"He who is not with me is against me . . . " - That might work if you are Almighty, but it isn't any way to do diplomacy in a complex interdependent world. Mr. Bush has lost much of the sympathy and cooperation he gained all over the world after September 11th - I hope in the end he does end up with something worthwhile to show for his actions. "

Canadian foreign policy has always been such that we only go where we are invited to go. In most instances the parties issuing the invitations are either the UN or NATO. The point is, though, that those organizations inviting us to participate in their campaigns are international groups who are usually going in with the blessing of the local government. Canada does not stick its nose in where it doesn't belong. We have no intention of trying to save the world, but we will act when necessary to defend the cause of peace.

I have no doubt that Canada would have sent troops to Iraq if the UN had decided to go along with the American intention to oust the Saddam regime and replace it with a kinder, gentler government. But it didn't happen that way. Indeed, from the standpoint of the Canadian government it must have seemed as if Bush Junior was simply intent on finishing Bush Senior's Unfinished War. Certainly Canada has no desire to participate in such a campaign. It would go against our stated foreign policy to do so, and that is the one and only point that I will give the Cretin government: They recognized that Canada had no business being in Iraq without the rest of the UN and so they kept us the hell out of the fighting. But they also recognized that the Americans had a point about Saddam, so they sent additional forces to Afghanistan so that the Americans could free up some of their units for Iraq.

Just like the letter says, we respectfully disagree with your desire to invade Iraq without the support of the United Nations at this time. However, we value our relations with you, our neighbors to the south, and will send additional troops to a continuing campaign which we do believe in. Nice and polite, and perfectly in keeping with our stated foreign policy. Any other sitting President in the last twenty years probably would have nodded, said they understood our decision, and went on about their business.

But George W. isn't any ordinary President. He's a different sort of creature entirely, he is.

See, George W. knows that he has effective operational command of the world's largest standing military. The unfortunate thing is that he also seems to believe that if you have the power then you also have a responsibility to wield it. In the original Gulf War the American government encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up against the Saddam government. Then, just at the point where things were starting to happen, they withdrew their forces and left the insurrectionists to be slaughtered by the thousands.

I can just see that thought going through George W's mind the whole time he's been in office. My father left hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in Iraq to be butchered by Saddam, and now that I'm in his shoes I have a responsibility to make things right, to balance the scales. So I'm going to roll out the forces and oust Saddam and free the Iraqi's, do what we should have done ten years ago. And anyone who won't help us in our endeavor will be considered our enemy and will be treated as such.

People criticize Cretin for not sending troops to Iraq, because up until that moment we were actually having good relations with the Americans. But the moment we refused to send troops to Iraq George W all of a sudden decides that he is never going to meet with the Canadian Prime Minister as long as that man is Jean Cretin.

Am I the only one who sees the unforgivable arrogance in all of this? You did not answer the call when we asked you to help us topple the Evil Dictator, so you are now considered persona non grata. You will be classed as a threat to our National Security and you will have no part in any reconstruction effort in Iraq because you didn't help us change the regime. And when a single case of Mad Cow disease brings your beef industry to its knees we will close our borders to you and your beef industry can rot in hell.

With power comes the responsibility to use it wisely. And with power also comes a certain amount of arrogance. To my way of thinking the truly powerful people are the ones who don't flaunt it, the ones who don't show their muscle unless they are forced to do so. The ones who flaunt the power that they have, and who believe that they have to flaunt it in order to make people respect them, those are the frightening ones.

For better or for worse, the Americans are in Iraq. They have ousted the Saddam regime and are installing a democratic government in its place. They are working to build a better Iraq from the ashes of a ruined country. Personally, I wish them all the luck in the world. I think that the world is a better place without Saddam in charge and I have great hopes that the democratic experiment in Iraq pays off, and that the Middle East becomes that much more stable because of it.

However I don't believe that the Americans have the right to condemn a country just because they didn't want to participate in the military phase of the operation. I don't think that the Americans have the right to all but discontinue diplomatic relations just because a country does not agree with an invasive American foreign policy.

I do think that as the dominant military power they have a responsibility to act as an example to the rest of the world. After all, the world will be looking to America for guidance and assistance, and as good as American industry is the simple fact is that they need foreign trading partners. The better they handle the diplomatic side of things, the more those countries will be willing to do business. But telling the world that it's your way or the highway is just going to make other countries want nothing to do with you.

I am perfectly willing to criticize Cretin for a lot of things, but our faltering relations with the United States are not one of them. In fact I believe that it is the one time in his entire tenure as Prime Minister that he actually did the right thing by adhering to a foreign policy that Canada has followed for decades. But may God have mercy on his soul for the rest of the things he's done to Canada, because God is the only one who can help him now.