January 20, 2016
By Matthew Behrens
For the past quarter century, the Iraqi people have served as a
convenient geopolitical punching bag, used to justify unfounded racist fears
and massive military budgets. The callousness with which successive Canadian
governments have treated Iraqi lives as less than human is reprehensible and – rhetoric
aside – Justin Trudeau is proving no different, waging an intensifying air war
against that country with 47 separate air strikes since he won the election
last October.
Canada has been dropping 500-pound bombs on the Iraqi people since
November, 2014, and yet there has been little public dissent beyond quibbles
over mission timelines and objectives. And while Trudeau defenders claim it’s
not that easy to issue an order to ground Canada’s warplanes, the military has
been very clear, indicating at
a December 17 press conference: “We’ll do that when the
Canadian government directs us to do so.”
But
Canada’s “bad-ass” War Minister Harjit Sajjan, who was directed “to do so” in
his ministerial mandate letter over two months ago, is either incompetent or
just plain cowardly in refusing to issue a grounding order to his
brothers-in-arms. It’s not as if Canada’s bombing allies are concerned. The day
after Trudeau was elected, he immediately called the White House and then told
reporters Obama “understands the commitments I’ve made
about ending the combat mission.” Trudeau also spoke with NATO officials during his first overseas trips in
November and met with no resistance, while later that month a prime ministerial
adviser told CBC there was “absolutely
no pressure for Canada to continue its contribution to the bombing
mission."
On
December 6, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion told Canadians that bringing an
end to the bombing would be “a matter of weeks, not months.” Meanwhile, Canadian
bombers dropped their load over the Iraqi people on Christmas and New Year’s,
and over one-and-a half months later, the bombing continues.
While
the Liberals may seem in disarray, it’s more likely that they are simply being
dishonest: they clearly want to stay in the fight because of the bizarre belief
that, by bombing people, they have a right to be “at the table” where
discussions about the future of the region will eventually be carried out. That
also translates into being part of the marketplace for fellow bombing countries
to purchase new weapons systems through the Canadian Commercial Corporation,
the global death merchant that brokered the $15-billion armoured brigade
vehicle deal with the beheading regime of Saudi Arabia.
A Laboratory for Warfare
Iraq has long been a laboratory for modern warfare, in which
weapons merchants try out their destructive products against real people and
real buildings courtesy of a mutually-beneficial arrangement with agencies like
Canada’s own War Department. That symbiosis also plays out in efforts to push
weapons systems on potential buyers. As the Ottawa Citizen reported
last week, Canada rents out its soldiers to play the role of catwalk models in
corporate sales pitches of Canadian weaponry. Between 2012 and 2014, such
Canadian Forces demonstrations were used to promote armoured brigade vehicles
produced by London, Ontario’s General Dynamics Land Systems to the regimes in
Kuwait (which was not at the time on the registry of countries eligible to
receive Canadian war materiel) and the UAE (which for 17 months has illegally
detained and tortured Canadian citizen Salim
Alaradi with barely
a whimper of concern from Ottawa).
Hence, continued Canadian bombing is as much an economic as a
political investment for the Trudeau Liberals. What Dion, Sajjan and Trudeau
have failed to acknowledge, however, is that every time their CF-18 bombers
take to the air, people are killed by these bombing sorties, both civilians or conscripted
fighters in Iraq.
Clearly, Canadian officials do not care about this human cost.
That’s not surprising, given this country’s historic, ongoing, profitable role
in destroying the Iraqi nation, killing well over 2 million people, and
banishing a number of generations to intense poverty, environmental
degradation, daily violence from the air and on the ground, and depleted-uranium
weapons-induced cancer.
That
stunning disregard for human life was illustrated perfectly by Canadian
attempts to cover up the CF-18 slaughter of some 30 Iraqi civilians in January,
2015, an air strike that only came to light 8 months later when the Globe and
Mail reported on
documents released not by Ottawa but by the Pentagon. They indicated that “[t]he
Canadian military made it clear to the United States shortly after the alleged
incident that it felt no obligation under the Geneva Conventions to probe what
happened, the Pentagon records show. ‘It should be noted that Canadian Joint
Operations Command [legal advisers] opinion is that, under the Law of Armed
Conflict (LOAC) there are no obligations for the Canadian Armed Forces to
conduct an investigation’”.
The
War Department’s meticulously compiled, anodyne datebook of terror strikes
against Iraq, Operation Impact, proudly touts that since it began, the Air Force has flown some
2,017 “sorties”, while “delivering some 20,522,000 pounds of fuel to
coalition aircraft.” There are no human casualties listed whatsoever. That work
is left to people such as the tireless researchers at airwars.org,
who continue trying to piece together bits of information to show the true
tally of the bombing campaign’s victims (estimates of up to 2,400 civilians
killed, and over 35,000 bombs and missiles dropped).
What’s remarkable
is that anything is left standing after 25 years of almost constant warfare and
devastating, Canadian-enforced economic sanctions that the UN’s former Humanitarian
Coordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, called genocidal. While those who
committed war crimes by deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in Iraq
do book tours and appear as talk show guests, people who resisted the sanctions
by providing food and medicine were criminalized. Among the most glaring cases
are those of Dr. Rafil Dhafir, a
Syracuse oncologist, still behind bars as part of a 22-year sentence for a “crime
of compassion” (sending humanitarian aid and medical supplies to the Iraqi
people), and Dr. Shakir Hamoodi (jailed
for three years because he sent money to his own and 14 other impoverished families
in Iraq).
Remembering 1991
While Saddam
Hussein was certainly a loathsome dictator, he was not loathsome enough to
prevent arms dealers from around the globe supplying him with their deadly
wares. And when it appeared the fall of the Soviet Union would leave the
weapons industry in a shambles, Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait was
greeted with jubilation in the offices of the war industry. A new enemy was
proclaimed, Hussein was suddenly Hitler, and he had to be stopped. Ratcheting
up war fever was assisted by the blood-stained Hill & Knowlton PR group
(which created the myth of Kuwaiti babies
being ripped from incubators). Hill & Knowlton’s Canadian arm was then run
by David MacNaughton
(appointed this week to be Trudeau’s ambassador to the U.S.).
While the Mulroney
government was quick to utter self-righteous pieties about illegal occupations
of sovereign territories, the Conservative government of the day did the exact
same thing that summer by sending in 2,600 Canadian troops to occupy sovereign Mohawk
land during the Oka crisis. Their armoured vehicles, helicopters, aerial
surveillance equipment, miles of barbed wire, and countless other means of
firepower served to enforce the same kind of sanctions the Iraqi people were about
to face, cutting off power and trying to deny the entry of food, water, medicines,
and clothing to the Indigenous resisters behind the wire. The military
bolstered an additional 4,000 paramilitary SQ members, numbers that dwarfed the
initial commitment of 900 Canadian troops sent to take on Hussein.
In a “post-Cold War” world,
Canada’s military and its war industries welcomed a new enemy, and while
Indigenous resistance has always provided a major rasion d’etre for Canadian
Forces and related state security agencies (witness the massive,
barely-reported Gustafson Lake crisis of
1995), having an overseas target proved invaluable.
Indigenous lands
were the first testing ground for weapons systems used against the Iraqi
people, from fighter bombers who dropped 1000-pound “dummy” bombs over the Innu
territory of Nitissinan to cruise missiles tested on Cree Territory. Canadian
universities helped with the more horrific forms of firepower to be employed.
For example, fuel air explosives, known as a “poor man’s atom bomb,” invert gravity
and are designed to suck people out of air raid shelters; they were researched
at McGill University,
which continues to be a major war research contributor. Canada’s chemical
weapons testing field at Suffolk, Alberta, had been used by a Belgian company
to experiment with long-range artillery shells that were sold to the Iraqis during the 1980s.
From the moment
Kuwait was invaded, Canada was eager for war, taking every conceivable step to
prevent a negotiated solution while lobbying UN Security Council members to
authorize force. Then Foreign Affairs Minister Joe Clark said Parliament need
not be recalled if the need to go to war was imminent. And while the narrative
of sanctions as a tool to force Hussein out of Kuwait was trumpeted by the
U.S.-led coalition, the Toronto Star reported that “when Canada was committed
to no more than enforcing a trade embargo against Iraq, Ottawa was calmly
setting aside funds for a full-blown war.” Some $500 million in federal cuts to
social programs were initiated to help pay for the war, and the government
resurrected legislation allowing it to control wartime production, with General
Motors in London (the predecessor to General Dynamics Land Systems) announcing
it could switch from civilian work to military production of armoured personnel
carriers at a moment’s notice.
Clark also
distinguished himself by naming as “counterproductive” any pledges that Allied
forces would not use nuclear weapons against Iraq. On October 26, 1990, he
declared Canada would go to war whether the UN authorized it or not. In November, the government ordered 800 body
bags (with a weak-kneed NDP only questioning the high number of the bags). With
the outbreak of war, General John de Chastelein cheerily declared, “We are now
at war and the distinction between whether our roles are offensive or defensive
is immaterial.”
CF-18s Deadly, Destructive
Canadian bombers
began their runs over Iraq on January 20, 1991, with General Gerard Theriault
reminding Toronto Star readers “the destructive ability of one CF-18 [is] as
great as an attack by hundreds of bombers during World War II.” After the
equivalent of one and a half Hiroshima bombs was dropped on Baghdad the first
night of the war, the NDP’s John Brewin stood and declared: “The first feeling
is one of concern for the safety of the pilots and sympathy for them. We admire
the courage they will need in a very difficult assignment.” Keeping in mind the
Iraqis had little anti-aircraft capacity and half the country’s population was
under the age of 15, Brewin’s remarks were hardly a voice of principled
opposition.
Meanwhile, Joe
Clark proclaimed, “Some wars can be a point of principle; this is one of those
wars.” He insisted that the Geneva Convention protocols to which Canada was a
signatory (concerning “excessive loss of civilian life”) were not being
violated. Clark then fumbled his way through another statement, the like of
which he was quite famous for, when he declared: “If there is one priority, one
lesson, which the world must learn from this war, is that an unrestricted arms
trade in the region is no longer acceptable and constitutes a threat to all
members of the United Nations.” Fine words, perhaps, but not matched by the
actions of a government that would very shortly change the Criminal Code at the
behest of arms manufacturers Diemaco (Colt Canada now) and General Motors to
allow for the import and possession of automatic weapons (crucial to the
signing of the first Saudi armoured brigade vehicles contract in 1991).
One of the
strongest NDP stands during the slaughter of the Iraqi people urged people
across the land to send Valentines messages to the troops. Meanwhile, Ontario
NDP leader Bob Rae, despite closing hospital beds due to budget cuts, opened several
up for troop casualties, while his government discussed security measures to
deal with “terrorist” threats. Needless to day, anti-Arab sentiment and
violence ran high (as documented in Zuhair Kashmeri’s book, The Gulf Within: Canadian Arabs,
Racism, & The Gulf War).
The horrific war
crimes against the Iraqis continued directly for a good three months, followed by
a 12-year-long daily grind of aerial warfare termed enforcement of no-fly
zones, and sanctions that killed over 1 million people (leading to Madeleine
Albright’s infamous statement about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children: “we think the price is worth it”). Then came the 2003 escalation of the war:
a bloody invasion and occupation with major Canadian participation that
continues in various forms to this day.
Canada’s Victims of the Gulf War
As much as Canada has
refused to acknowledge the many victims of its foreign and military policy of
the past 25 years – rendering the Iraqi people invisible unless we need them
for photo-ops – they have equally refused to recognize the humanity of Gulf War
1 veterans who have returned to die slowly, painfully, and largely in silence.
Canada does not keep statistics on Gulf War Syndrome (a horrific condition
marked by exposure to depleted uranium, a whole slew of neurotoxic and biological
warfare chemicals, and an over-the-top vaccination regime that followed no
proper protocols). Among those vets suffering is former navy Lieutenant Louise
Richard, who recalls being in touch with at least 400 veterans suffering
symptoms similar to hers, a number of whom have since died.
A nurse and former
triathlete who entered the war in top form, she returned a completely different
person, as she testified in
2013: “The Gulf War veterans and modern combat vets as a
whole have been made to feel like toxic waste that has been disposed of and
dumped…We are released from DND undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or not diagnosed at
all. We're left untreated. We're left on our own to find our own doctors,
civilian doctors, specialists, therapists, psychiatrists. Canadian vets have
been totally abandoned. Our symptoms, illnesses, and concerns have been
minimized, belittled, ignored —stress. As for the doctors and specialists we do
find who are willing to take us on, VAC [Veterans Affairs Canada] has the nerve
to challenge their diagnoses, their treatments, and their credentials. Veterans
Affairs dictates to us how many treatments, and the distance we can travel on our
claims. Policy always overrules the needs of the ill veteran.”
Just as the
seeds of violence Canada planted with the 1991 slaughter of Iraqis continue to
yield horrific crops, so veterans like Louise Richard continue to suffer from a
war-produced chemical brew that will occupy their own bodies in perpetuity. She
is not allowed to give blood, and she shocked committee members when she
challenged them thusly:
“This is in
our blood supply. Depleted uranium, as we know, goes all over the body, to the
organs. Does anyone here want an organ of mine if you're in a car crash
tomorrow?”
Stunned MPs
said no, but then proceeded on to other business.
Next steps for Canada
As for what Canada should
do next, there are no easy answers, but there is a clear conclusion: the
strategy of military engagement has time and again proven itself a deadly
failure that inevitably sows the seeds of next year’s and next decade’s
brutalities (just as militarist adventurism, support for dictatorships like
those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and proxy wars of the past 40 years have left
us at the current impasse). The only way
to end the spiral of violence is to stop adding to it. It would not be a crime
for Canada to step back, take a pause, examine how we can end our own contributions
to the spiral of violence, and proceed from there.
Canadian policymakers would
also do well to read the expert writings of Andrew Cockburn, who points out in
Harper’s Magazine that the ever-shifting allegiances in the region essentially
have “Western” powers cozying up with Al-Qaeda front groups as the preferred
alternative to ISIS. Al-Qaeda? You remember them, don't you? Aren't they
supposed to be bad guys that we created and funded in Afghanistan during the
1980s who had something to do with that 9/11 thing? Canadians should also be aware
that news of “progress” against ISIS is generally poppycock; indeed, some 50
high-level Central Command intelligence analysts wrote a letter of protest last
year, concerned that their intelligence was being manipulated to transform ISIS
strength into ISIS defeats, making Obama and company look like they were in
charge.
Canada is also a
less-than-honest player in the region given its utter silence on the brutal
Turkish military crackdown on Kurds, surrounding and starving whole communities in
the southeast of the country, cutting off power and denying sustenance. On the one hand, the Kurds are portrayed as
heroic fighters against ISIS, but the minute they talk about
self-determination, they are labelled terrorists by the Turks and Canadians
(Canada has labeled the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK a terrorist entity.)
And yet, as the hardly radical Wall Street Journal points out,
“The PKK and its Syrian affiliate have emerged as Washington’s most effective
battlefield partners” against ISIS.
Canada should also come
clean about its role in recruitment and facilitation of travel for young people
to join ISIS. In a story
that has disappeared from any discussion, Turkish authorities last spring
arrested an apparent asset of Canadian spy service CSIS, who was nabbed escorting
young women across the border into Syria to join ISIS.
As the Trudeau government
fidgets about its next steps, calls for an end to the bombing seem too narrow,
and provide Trudeau with the cover he needs to wage the war in a different
fashion (something he has clearly indicated he wishes to do). These narrow calls fail to ask how, exactly,
Canada (along with the rest of NATO) can contribute anything positive to the
region after applying so much direct and indirect violence. The calls could be
stronger if they demanded that Trudeau must also include an end to any military
“assistance” in the air (one proposal being considered is keeping refueling and
reconnaissance aircraft in the area, making Canadians simply bombers by proxy.
Indeed, Canada’s War Dept. proudly says
these aircraft “fuel the fight.”). He should also cancel the current and
proposed expanded role for Canadian Forces on the ground. The idea that the
armed forces of the Canadian state have anything to offer in this situation
(apart from their experience in repressing indigenous communities and their
design of hierarchical institutions in which violence against women is at
epidemic levels) is completely without foundation. As in Afghanistan, a
Canadian approach based on militarism leave behind a toxic legacy of hatreds,
trauma and violence.
Perhaps a period of
non-intervening reflection and consultation with grassroots groups on the
ground, or massive investments in food security, clean water, and reparations
for all the misery we have caused would be a far better choice. An end to the
production and export of Canadian weapons would help too. Working to stop the
flow of arms into the region from Russia, the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Turkey
would be a step forward. Investments in groups that work for reconciliation and
the conditions needed for true justice on the ground would be a bonus. There
are groups in the region who have been doing this work on a small-scale level for
years, such as Muslim Peacemaker Teams
along with numerous women’s groups who, in the heart of ISIS territory, have organized protests
and won demands. But in classic colonial fashion, Canada refuses to listen to
the voices on the ground, seeing our role as a “protector” and wise parent. As
German politician Jürgen Todenhöfer wrote
last November after spending 10 days embedded with ISIS, “we have to finally
start treating the Muslim world as true partners, and not as a cheap petrol
station we can raid when we feel like it.”
Ultimately, as we focus on
how to end the Canadian bombing of Iraq, we need to take into consideration the
broader picture, the lengthy history, the significant amount of blood on our
hands, and what we can do to prevent Canadian corporations and political
careers from profiting off the lives of people halfway around the world from
us.
