OPINION: A Bush-league response?
Jun. 11, 2006. 01:57 AM
PETER SCOWEN
"Their alleged target was Canada, Canadian institutions, the Canadian economy, the Canadian people. We are a target because of who we are and how we live, our society, our diversity and our values — values such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law."
— Stephen Harper, June 3
Our prime minister, Stephen Harper, has been accused more than once of deliberately adopting the style and tone of President George W. Bush.
Critics cite Harper's emphasis on his faith, his disdain for the press, his support of the military, and his socially conservative values as the main evidence for this.
It is a partisan critique, and not an especially effective one. Even if it is true that Harper assembled himself out of spare Bush parts, so? Stealing useful ideas from a fellow conservative leader who has been elected twice is good politics.
But now Harper, responding to the arrests of 17 terror suspects — whom we have since learned were planning to attack Parliament Hill and, prosecutors allege, to behead the prime minister if he didn't agree to pull our troops out of Afghanistan — has aped Bush in a way that is deliberately divisive and dangerous.
The quote by Harper at the top of this piece is what I'm talking about. His claim — made at a military swearing-in ceremony in Ottawa — that the terror suspects targeted Canada "because of who we are and how we live" is a rip-off of the official Bush White House response to 9/11.
After the attacks, Bush and his team began to push the message that America was an innocent victim attacked by fanatics who despised it for the freedoms and comforts it provides; the country was targeted, Bush said on Sept. 12, 2001, because it was "the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world."
Rudolph Giuliani, the heroic mayor of New York, made the same point in a speech on Oct. 1, 2001 — and added a warning to anyone who didn't agree:
"The era of moral relativism between those who practise or condone terrorism, and those who stand up against it, must end. Moral relativism does not have a place in this discussion and this debate."
The message was hard to miss: The attacks were not to be construed as a response to U.S. foreign policy. "Moral relativism" was the sin committed by anyone who disobeyed this edict.
A good synonym for "moral relativism" would have been "independent thinking," but that only became apparent after the world discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.
People who recall the period immediately after 9/11 will remember that the mantra of anti-moral relativism served the Bush administration well. The media raised no serious objection to the invasion of Iraq. (In May 2004, The New York Times published a gigantic apology to readers for not questioning the White House's war plans with the proper skepticism.)
So why has Harper plagiarized Bush in his statement about the arrests of 17 made-in-Canada terror suspects?
The obvious answer is that he doesn't want the arrests to affect our military's presence in Afghanistan, even if it is clear from the charges laid last week that the alleged recruiters used the war in Afghanistan, and Canada's part in it, to motivate some of the younger suspects.
Is Harper saying Canadians cannot sympathize with the accused men's demand that our troops withdraw from Iraq, even if those same Canadians would never support terror as a tactic, because to do so would be a failure to defend "who we are and how we live"?
The American who was most courageous in her post-9/11 writings was the late critic Susan Sontag. She was repelled by her government's reaction to the attacks and said so in a piece in The New Yorker.
This is the guts of what Sontag wrote in the magazine's issue of Sept. 25, 2001:
"A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counterintelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defence. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy."
Harper, like Bush and Giuliani were, is wrong when he says we are a terror target because of "how we live." Canada is and will be a target because of, as Sontag also wrote, our "specific alliances and actions."
We cannot, as a mature democracy, allow terrorism or its threat to dictate government policy — no one is saying that.
But we also cannot allow the threat of terror to shut down our ability to think.
And what we really don't need is a prime minister using a discredited U.S. political strategy to scare off serious, mature debate about Canada's military presence in Afghanistan and its alliances with the United States.
— Peter Scowen
PETER SCOWEN
"Their alleged target was Canada, Canadian institutions, the Canadian economy, the Canadian people. We are a target because of who we are and how we live, our society, our diversity and our values — values such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law."
— Stephen Harper, June 3
Our prime minister, Stephen Harper, has been accused more than once of deliberately adopting the style and tone of President George W. Bush.
Critics cite Harper's emphasis on his faith, his disdain for the press, his support of the military, and his socially conservative values as the main evidence for this.
It is a partisan critique, and not an especially effective one. Even if it is true that Harper assembled himself out of spare Bush parts, so? Stealing useful ideas from a fellow conservative leader who has been elected twice is good politics.
But now Harper, responding to the arrests of 17 terror suspects — whom we have since learned were planning to attack Parliament Hill and, prosecutors allege, to behead the prime minister if he didn't agree to pull our troops out of Afghanistan — has aped Bush in a way that is deliberately divisive and dangerous.
The quote by Harper at the top of this piece is what I'm talking about. His claim — made at a military swearing-in ceremony in Ottawa — that the terror suspects targeted Canada "because of who we are and how we live" is a rip-off of the official Bush White House response to 9/11.
After the attacks, Bush and his team began to push the message that America was an innocent victim attacked by fanatics who despised it for the freedoms and comforts it provides; the country was targeted, Bush said on Sept. 12, 2001, because it was "the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world."
Rudolph Giuliani, the heroic mayor of New York, made the same point in a speech on Oct. 1, 2001 — and added a warning to anyone who didn't agree:
"The era of moral relativism between those who practise or condone terrorism, and those who stand up against it, must end. Moral relativism does not have a place in this discussion and this debate."
The message was hard to miss: The attacks were not to be construed as a response to U.S. foreign policy. "Moral relativism" was the sin committed by anyone who disobeyed this edict.
A good synonym for "moral relativism" would have been "independent thinking," but that only became apparent after the world discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.
People who recall the period immediately after 9/11 will remember that the mantra of anti-moral relativism served the Bush administration well. The media raised no serious objection to the invasion of Iraq. (In May 2004, The New York Times published a gigantic apology to readers for not questioning the White House's war plans with the proper skepticism.)
So why has Harper plagiarized Bush in his statement about the arrests of 17 made-in-Canada terror suspects?
The obvious answer is that he doesn't want the arrests to affect our military's presence in Afghanistan, even if it is clear from the charges laid last week that the alleged recruiters used the war in Afghanistan, and Canada's part in it, to motivate some of the younger suspects.
Is Harper saying Canadians cannot sympathize with the accused men's demand that our troops withdraw from Iraq, even if those same Canadians would never support terror as a tactic, because to do so would be a failure to defend "who we are and how we live"?
The American who was most courageous in her post-9/11 writings was the late critic Susan Sontag. She was repelled by her government's reaction to the attacks and said so in a piece in The New Yorker.
This is the guts of what Sontag wrote in the magazine's issue of Sept. 25, 2001:
"A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counterintelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defence. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy."
Harper, like Bush and Giuliani were, is wrong when he says we are a terror target because of "how we live." Canada is and will be a target because of, as Sontag also wrote, our "specific alliances and actions."
We cannot, as a mature democracy, allow terrorism or its threat to dictate government policy — no one is saying that.
But we also cannot allow the threat of terror to shut down our ability to think.
And what we really don't need is a prime minister using a discredited U.S. political strategy to scare off serious, mature debate about Canada's military presence in Afghanistan and its alliances with the United States.
— Peter Scowen
posted by Traveller at
10:33 a.m.
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