PRIME MINSTER LESTER PEARSON’S ARRIVAL AT THE HEAD OF a minority Liberal government in April 1963 put an end to the confrontation with the United States over nuclear weapons that had blighted the relationship between the two countries under John Diefenbaker. Pearson accepted all sorts of nuclear weapons for Canada’s air force and army under the agreement that Diefenbaker had signed in ignorance, all under “dual-key” arrangements that allowed Ottawa to maintain the fiction that they weren’t really Canadian nuclear weapons since an American officer also had to turn a key to arm them.
The warheads will remain in United States custody, and for this purpose small units of United States custodial personnel will be stationed at the Canadian storage sites, at bases which will of course remain under Canadian command and control.… The arrangement does not add to the numbers of governments having nuclear weapons at their independent disposal.
Prime Minister’s Office, press release, August 16, 1963
I think [there was] sort of a feeling that this was a super-power business, and that we had no business being involved in it. Some of us felt, “well, that’s fine as long as we’re not hypocritical about it.” I mean after all, it was our uranium that armed the western world to a very large extent. We were very pleased to have those dollars in our country, especially in Mr. Pearson’s riding [Algoma East]. And so, you can make a case for us not being in this business (and a good case), but let’s not say it’s due to superior righteousness. Let’s just admit that it’s because we’re a small power and we can do other things that are more useful and more effective, and spend our dollars more wisely than getting into a game that leads nowhere but to destruction.
Paul Hellyer, minister of national defence, 1963–67
Canadian public opinion had never really been very excited by the nuclear weapons controversy, and when the weapons finally arrived over the next few years there was no outcry—even though the ones with our NATO forces in Germany were clearly destined to be used in densely populated parts of Western Europe. And then, as the vehicles that carried them (Bomarcs, Voodoos, Starfighters and Honest John missiles) became obsolete and were scrapped, their nuclear warheads were quietly handed back to the Americans. Canada became a born-again nuclear virgin, and nobody in Washington minded all that much; by then twenty years had passed, and nuclear fashions had changed.
What really did bother Canadians was the U.S. war in Vietnam. President John F. Kennedy’s early commitment of U.S. forces to South Vietnam went virtually unnoticed in Canada, where he was liked and trusted, but the rapid escalation of the U.S. military commitment by the more abrasive President Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 quickly created a vocal opposition to the war in Canada that tracked the rapid growth of the anti-war movement in the United States itself.
Canada was never under serious pressure from the United States to send Canadian troops to Vietnam; no other NATO member sent troops either. (The Australians and New Zealanders did, of course, but they were a great deal closer to the scene, and their defence policy at the time consisted solely of a determination to send troops to help in every American war, however needless or futile, in the hope that such loyalty would guarantee U.S. military intervention to defend them if it ever became necessary.) The pressure on the Canadian government came from the radicalization of the youth in both countries, the steady flow of draft dodgers/war resisters across the border from the United States, and the growing demand that Canada should “take a stand” against the war. Since official Ottawa also thought that the Vietnam War was a great folly, it was willing to oblige—but at first it was all done through diplomatic channels. Mustn’t cause a fuss.
We said to the Americans… “We are against the war. We think you have made a mistake. I think it’s going to cause you a whole lot of trouble. We don’t intend to get into it.” And then [U.S. secretary of state Dean] Rusk said, “Oh well, it isn’t going to last as long as you think.” And I said, “How long is it going to last?” and [U.S. secretary of defense Robert] McNamara said, “If necessary, a thousand years.”
Paul Martin, secretary of state for external affairs, 1963–68
It was a particularly frustrating business for Charles Ritchie, the Canadian ambassador in Washington. “It was all very well to say, ‘you just trust the diplomatic channels’ and so on, but I would go down and see Rusk, and he’d be like this sort of Buddha, you know, nodding his head about Canadian views and suggestions and hesitations and so on. He would sort of take note of them. He would never discuss them, or refute them.” Nevertheless, Ritchie warned Pearson: “Don’t move into public criticism on the war in Vietnam. Try to influence through diplomatic channels, and through contacts between the Prime Minister and the President, but don’t make speeches about it.”
From Pearson’s point of view, however, the “softly, softly” approach had two major defects. Not only was it not working, but the fact that he was trying to get the Americans to see reason about Vietnam was not visible to the Canadian public. Safely back in office with a four-year mandate, President Johnson went for broke in 1965, increasing the number of U.S. ground troops in South Vietnam eightfold and plastering North Vietnam with bombs in “Operation Rolling Thunder.” The Americans had completely lost their sense of proportion. Pearson felt compelled to say something in public—and to say it in the United States.
In April 1965 Pearson was going to Temple University in Philadelphia to accept a World Peace Award, and he decided to address the Vietnam War directly. His speech was ultra-cautious, full of praise for the American decision to help the South Vietnamese government and warning that “no newly independent nation could ever feel secure if capitulation in Vietnam led to the sanctification of aggression through subversion and spurious ‘wars of national liberation.’ ” He was humble, he was tentative, he was polite almost to the point of sycophancy—but he suggested a partial ceasefire. “There are many factors which I am not in a position to weigh,” Pearson said. “But there does appear to be at least a possibility that a suspension of air strikes against North Vietnam, at the right time, might provide the Hanoi authorities with an opportunity, if they wish to take it, to inject some flexibility into their policy without appearing to do so as the direct result of military pressure.”
Immediately after the speech, Pearson was invited to Camp David by President Johnson, and as usual a helicopter was sent to pick him up. Charles Ritchie, who was still Canadian ambassador in Washington, accompanied Pearson to the mountain retreat, where they were greeted by Lady Bird Johnson and the president. As far as Ritchie was concerned, things started off badly: the president only had one Bloody Mary before lunch. Then he spent the entire time on the phone, often discussing Vietnam, while “Mike” and Lady Bird made polite small talk about their mutual interest in the Civil War, trying desperately to pretend that everything was fine.
Then after lunch, Mike sort of led by saying something like, “What did you think of my speech?” And then the President said, “I thought it was awful, awful.” After that I ceased to be part of the meeting because they went out onto the terrace, and I was taken for a walk by [national security adviser McGeorge] “Mac” Bundy, who kept needling and needling me about this whole thing. You know, how could I?, and hadn’t I taken it on board that he had said that this would be the result, and it was counter-productive, and it was so sad, and regrettable, and all the rest of it. And I got very fed up with this in the end and said that if they couldn’t get on with Mike Pearson they couldn’t get on with anybody.
Then there was this story that the President picked up Mike by the collar and swung him in the air or something. He didn’t do anything of the kind. In the first place, Mike was quite a solid person, besides he would have been intolerably insulted, it didn’t happen. What he did, he grasped hold of Mike by the lapel of his coat, and he was anguished, you know, shaking Mike, and sounding and resounding and appealing and recriminating and exhorting. And Mike was sort of, you know, leaning against the terrace getting further and further back, while this great man moved in on him, getting closer and closer. It was a close encounter. Then it sort of quieted down. Mike wasn’t as shaken as I was. He was very India-rubbery.
Charles Ritchie, Canadian ambassador to Washington, 1962–66
If there had not been a kind of “et tu, Brute” feeling about the assault, without any personal unpleasantness of any kind, I would have felt almost like Schuschnigg [the Austrian chancellor] before Hitler at Berchtesgaden.
“Mike”: Memoirs, vol 3
It was, nevertheless, Canada’s muted declaration of independence from the ideologically driven Cold War policies of its giant ally, and when Pierre Elliott Trudeau succeeded Pearson as prime minister in 1969 he was able to go a good deal further. The Canadian public’s uncritical admiration of the United States, which had been Diefenbaker’s undoing, had pretty much dissipated by the end of the 1960s. The growing nightmare of the Vietnam War was sabotaging America’s reputation as an effective operator abroad just as the wave of urban violence was destroying its image as a bastion of justice and democracy at home, and the United States was coming to be seen in Canada as just another muscle-bound great power stumbling around without a clue. At the same time (and somewhat in contradiction to the above), the rise of détente, with frequent negotiations between the rival superpowers over various questions of arms control and nuclear security, created the space for a more detailed and leisurely examination of just what the panic of the early postwar years had got us into. So Trudeau launched a defence and foreign policy review that left no stone unturned.
Mr. Trudeau, for example, said we’re going to look at neutrality, we’re going to look at non-alignment, we’re going to look at just having a defence alliance with the United States—we’re going to look at them all. We start from zero and we examine every possible alternative.… He asked the question that nobody else dared to ask: “Are we on the right track?”
Mitchell Sharp, secretary of state for external affairs, 1968–74
It was a time when almost everybody was overwrought if not downright hysterical, and Trudeau was, as Pearson said, “the man to match the times.” Speaking at Queen’s University in November 1968, Trudeau declared: “Civilization and culture in North America are more menaced, more strongly threatened, by internal disorders than by external pressure. And this is the background of these reviews [of foreign and defence policy] in which we are embarked. I am not predicting what the outcome will be, but I am saying that in my scale of values I am perhaps less worried now about what might happen over the Berlin Wall than what might happen in Chicago, New York, and perhaps our own great cities in Canada.” And to be fair to Trudeau, the October Crisis in Montreal was less than two years away.
In the meantime, everybody who was anybody in Ottawa got stuck into the defence and foreign policy reviews. NORAD got next to no attention, having been reduced to near irrelevance by the collapse of the “bomber threat,” and the option of neutrality got only a cursory examination (although a group of Canadian parliamentarians got a nice trip to Sweden out of it). All the attention focused on NATO and Canada’s role in it, which seemed more than ripe for reconsideration. Canadian troops had been sent to Europe in the early 1950s during the panic caused by the Korean War; why were they still there twenty years later? There was a group of powerful ministers in the cabinet—Eric Kierans, Gérard Pelletier, Jean Marchand and Donald MacDonald—who favoured a military withdrawal from NATO, and possibly quitting the alliance altogether, but in the end they settled for a good old Canadian compromise. Canada stayed in NATO and the European commitment was kept, but half the Canadian troops in Europe were brought home.
Trudeau managed to pull this off without facing severe recriminations from the European NATO members because by then they had figured out that the presence of the Canadian brigade and air division in Germany was very important politically, but not so much so militarily. The Canadian troops were really there so that they would be involved in a war with the Warsaw Pact from the first shot, thereby guaranteeing that Canada would be fully committed to the ensuing war regardless of the (nuclear) risks to the Canadian homeland. For those purposes, five thousand Canadian soldiers were just as good as ten thousand, so the rest came home. And that was pretty much it for serious debates about Canadian defence policy for the next fifteen years. The one lasting defence-related achievement of the Trudeau years was the transformation of the Canadian Forces into a genuinely bilingual institution in which francophones were present in numbers that corresponded to their share of the national population and enjoyed the same promotion prospects as anglophones even at the highest ranks.
There was some excitement in 1970, when Trudeau deployed troops in the streets of Montreal during the confrontation with Front de libération du Québec terrorists at that time, but in general the Canadian Forces (as they were now officially known thanks to the “unification” of the three services under Defence Minister Paul Hellyer in the 1960s) entered a prolonged period of neglect and genteel decline. Indeed, this could be seen as the real consequence of the defence and foreign policy reviews, which concluded in essence that the Canadian Forces were still politically important as part of Canada’s foreign policy, but militarily almost irrelevant. Even peacekeeping, which had allowed Canadians to luxuriate in the belief that their army was actually an instrument of love, was losing popularity by the late 1960s, and was downgraded to the lowest level of priority in Trudeau’s defence review. The strength of the Canadian armed forces was cut from 120,000 in 1963 to just over 80,000 by the end of the decade, and new equipment purchases were few and far between during the next fifteen years: 128 used Leopard I tanks from Germany and 18 maritime reconnaissance aircraft from the United States in 1978, 137 new F-18 fighters in 1983, and six “patrol frigates” for the navy, for delivery in the late 1980s.
And the consequence of all these cuts and neglect was … nothing. They had no more effect on how the rest of the world unfolded during these years than cuts to the summer camp training budget for the Canadian militia would have had on the world in the 1880s. They wouldn’t have made any difference if we had all tumbled into World War Three, either. A few more fisheries surveillance vessels would have come in handy, but Canada’s maritime sovereignty was never at risk despite the alleged shortage of ships to enforce it. It was a perfect illustration of the extreme “elasticity” of Canada’s military requirements in the circumstances that prevailed then (and are even more pronounced in the current era).
The size and composition of the Canadian armed forces, to a far greater extent than those of most other countries, are not determined by the “threats” that face the country, and that might be deterred or defeated by military means. Broad oceans and Arctic ice protect us from the rest of the planet, and our one vulnerable border, to the south, is guaranteed not by force but by our commercial and treaty relations with the United States. So our options in national security are very wide. We could have very small armed forces and a minimal capacity for territorial and maritime surveillance—say, twenty thousand service personnel—and we’d still be all right. Since 1939 we have always been far above that level, but those choices are driven by the ideological fashions of the moment, by the expectations of our neighbours, allies and commercial partners (and how much we choose to give in to them) and by the needs and wishes of our own military-industrial complex. For almost half a century now, with the single exception of the Mulroney years, that level has never risen far above eighty thousand or fallen far below sixty thousand. That is, you might say, what the market will bear—and the fluctuations in the numbers occur almost independently of any external reality. As in the case of the great defence mini-buildup of the late 1980s.
Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.
Ronald Reagan, Moscow summit, May 1988
There is an American political myth, cherished by the right, that President Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold War by forcing the Soviet Union to spend itself into bankruptcy. He did this, it is alleged, by raising American defence spending to an unprecedented level and devoting it to various projects, like the “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile programme, that forced Moscow to spend comparable amounts to keep up. Since the Soviet economy was much smaller than that of America, the Russians eventually went broke, Communism collapsed and the Cold War ended.
It is an agreeable story, especially if you happen to be in charge of the U.S. defence budget, but it is simply false. It’s true that excessive defence spending forced the Soviet Union to try to make fundamental reforms in the economy, and that the political repercussions of that effort destroyed the entire system, but the dates are wrong. Ronald Reagan inherited a defence budget of $440 billion in current (2013) dollars when he took office at the beginning of 1981. His own first defence budget, for 1982/83, was $488 billion. It then continued to rise until 1985/86, peaking at $580 billion—but the Soviet attempt at reform actually began in 1982, after the death of the long-ruling Leonid Brezhnev.
The first reformer in Moscow, Yuri Andropov, unexpectedly died in 1984, and was briefly succeeded by a conservative, Konstantin Chernenko, before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and resumed the reform effort. Even in 1985, given the ponderous nature of the Soviet planning and budgetary processes, there had scarcely been time for Soviet defence spending to rise in response to Reagan’s higher budgets. Excessive defence spending did play a large part in bringing down the Soviet system, but Reagan was too late on the scene to have any appreciable impact. It was the relatively modest defence budgets of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Carter that brought the Soviet Union down.
Does this mean that the Soviet Union might have survived for at least another decade or two if it had not tried so hard to match American defence spending? Impossible to say, of course. But it is clear that by the time Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government took power in Canada in 1984, after a generation of Liberal rule, Soviet power—and in particular Soviet military power—was in irreversible decline. Gorbachev’s assigned (but hopeless) task was to save the Communist system politically by re-basing it on consent rather than compulsion, and to rescue it economically by breaking the stranglehold of the “metal-eaters’ alliance” (the Soviet version of the military-industrial complex), which was consuming an estimated one-third of the country’s gross domestic product. And it was precisely at this point that the Mulroney government decided it needed to build up the Canadian armed forces to counter the “growing Soviet threat.”
First, however, there was the peculiar episode of Defence Minister Erik Nielsen’s attempt to pull all the Canadian troops out of Germany. Nielsen was actually deputy prime minister, but he was parachuted into the Defence job as well when Mulroney’s first appointment, Robert Coates, was forced to resign after an ill-advised visit to a West German strip club while visiting the Canadian troops in Europe. By chance Nielsen, who had been a bomber pilot in the Second World War and had a healthy disdain for the defence orthodoxy of the time, inherited a chief of defence staff, General Gérard Thériault, who was also something of an iconoclast—and together they came up with the most radical proposal for a new Canadian defence policy of the entire Cold War era. (It may have had something to do with the fact that they both had air force backgrounds, for the proposal would have eliminated the Canadian army’s main justification for staying in the “big leagues,” while leaving the air force’s roles more or less intact.)
Nielsen and Thériault began with the belief, never adequately documented but widely accepted, that Canada’s Mechanized Brigade Group and the Canadian Air Group in Germany, which accounted for only about 8 percent of Canadian Forces’ personnel, were consuming about half of the defence budget in one way or another. Yet in fact (as Thériault later said in public), “Our forces in Central Europe mean next to nothing in military terms.” They were purely symbolic, a token of Canada’s intent to stand by its NATO allies in the event of war. So Nielsen and Thériault began concocting a plan to maintain a token Canadian commitment somewhere else in Europe, while bringing the great majority of Canada’s troops home. The device they hit upon was the Canadian Air Sea Transportable (CAST) Brigade, a commitment dating from 1968 to send Canadian troops in an emergency to reinforce Norway’s northern frontier with Russia.
It was a paper commitment only: the notion that a Canadian brigade and its equipment could be rapidly moved from Canada to Norway in the midst of a NATO-wide panic about an imminent war in Europe was risible. But it gave Nielsen and Thériault something to work with, and in consultation with a selected group of National Defence officials (who were ordered not to report their work to their superiors) they came up with a plan. The Mechanized Brigade Group would come home from Germany, but all its heavy equipment would be moved to northern Norway. The Canadian Air Group would return home too, but in an emergency three squadrons of CF-18s would fly over to Norway, as would the Canadian soldiers who would man the pre-positioned equipment. In normal times, however, there would be no significant number of Canadian troops left in Europe.
It was a bold but quite rational plan, although there was bound to be hell to pay when the Canadian army and the External Affairs Department found out about it. Nielsen even got initial approval from U.S. secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, although he must later have realized that he was simply being sent out to draw fire. When Nielsen travelled on to London and Bonn, however, he ran into a wall of panic and outrage: British defence secretary Michael Heseltine refused even to discuss the proposal, and West German defence minister Manfred Woerner “just went crazy.” They didn’t care about the Canadian forces as such, but they saw the plan as setting a precedent for an American withdrawal from Europe.
Nielsen came home with his tail between his legs, to meet a comparable barrage of condemnation from the defenders of NATO orthodoxy at home. Weinberger, of course, disavowed Nielsen, who was subsequently forced to resign all his government offices and soon afterward left politics entirely. During House of Commons hearings Thériault’s successor as chief of defence staff, General Paul Manson, denied ever having heard of or seen a paper on the “Thériault plan”; it had been consigned to the memory hole. And it was perhaps a minor by-product of the incident that the second broadcast of the television series that the original draft of this book was based on was cancelled by the CBC.
By 1986 a new defence minister, Perrin Beatty, was laying plans for a major expansion of the Canadian Forces, including an upgrade of its NATO contribution in Central Europe: he argued that Ottawa should station a full mechanized division in Germany, with another fully equipped mechanized division to be held in Canada as a backup. The reserves would be expanded to forty thousand and integrated more closely with the regulars, and extra maritime reconnaissance aircraft, more CF-18s and patrol frigates, and new EH-101 anti-submarine helicopters were ordered. He even promised the navy a dozen nuclear-powered submarines. The price tag was forecast to be $8 billion ($14 billion in today’s money), but cost overruns would inevitably have pushed that even higher. Assuming that Beatty was not a Soviet agent tasked with turning the “Reagan strategy” against Canada and spending the country into bankruptcy, how could he have got it so wrong?
The answer probably goes like this. During two decades of almost continuous Liberal rule, one of the Conservatives’ main criticisms against the government, regardless of the state of the international environment, was its neglect of the armed forces, so it was hard for the Conservatives to walk away from all their promises to build up the forces even if the Soviet Union was in steep decline by the time they actually got back in power. Moreover, they really didn’t understand just how rapid and terminal the decline was. It should have been obvious to them—I went back to the Soviet Union for a week in 1987 after five years’ absence, and immediately went home and made a deal with the CBC to visit the place every three months and interview all the major players, in order to deliver them a radio series as soon as the crash actually happened—but the Canadian government’s main source of information was, as usual, American intelligence assessments. In those intelligence reports, the Soviet “threat” was always “growing”: in all four decades of the Cold War, the American intelligence services never once issued a report that said the Soviet threat was shrinking. So the apparently sudden collapse of Soviet power in 1989 actually took both the U.S. and the Canadian governments by surprise.
That put paid to Beatty’s grand plans, of course. The personnel strength of the forces continued to grow for a time, peaking at ninety thousand in 1990 before falling back to seventy-one thousand in 1995, but the nuclear submarines vanished at once and the new aircraft were also cancelled. The first of the promised new helicopters (now Sikorsky H-92s, to be known as CH-124s in Canadian service) may be delivered as soon as 2015.
In 1993, after forty years in Europe, the Canadian forces in Germany all came home, and some wondered whether the Canadian armed forces could avoid serious shrinkage now that the only plausible enemy had retired from the confrontation. The NATO alliance that had been created to “contain” the Soviet Union had worked itself out of a job, and many thought it would just fade away. But they all underestimated the resourcefulness and staying power of a very large and experienced bureaucratic organization with powerful allies in the military forces of every member country.
NATO did not fade away; it expanded right up to the borders of the former Soviet Union, taking in former Warsaw Pact members (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria) and even territories that had been part of the Soviet Union itself (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). By the early twenty-first century its easternmost border was only 120 kilometres from Russia’s second city, St Petersburg. This was all in direct contradiction to the promise made by U.S. president George H.W. Bush to the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, that if Moscow were to withdraw its garrisons peacefully from Eastern Europe and accept the reunification of Germany, NATO would not recruit these former Warsaw Pact members to its ranks. But Russia under the leadership of the drunken Boris Yeltsin did not object very loudly in the 1990s, and even when Vladimir Putin took over at the beginning of the twenty-first century he grudgingly accepted the situation. One of the reasons he did so, no doubt, was that NATO had at least been tactful enough not to station foreign troops (i.e., Americans or Germans) on the soil of any of the new members of the alliance who directly bordered on Russian territory.
This brings us to the serious question, first raised in Excursion 1, of whether we are still living in a tightly coupled “critical system” that could pitch us almost randomly into a great war at any time. We and the Soviets certainly began to construct such a system again in the early years of the Cold War, but from the mid-1960s a great deal of effort was expended to move in the other direction: “hot lines” that permitted instant, direct communications between national leaders in a crisis, arms control agreements, early notification of missile launches and military exercises and a variety of “confidence-building” measures whose real purpose was to catch that random pebble before it started the avalanche. It was still an extremely dangerous system, but not a fully-fledged Doomsday Machine. And the post–Cold War relations between the former adversaries have been marked by the same desire to avoid unnecessary escalation and limit confrontations to the lowest possible level.
A case in point is the recent conflict over Ukraine, which was still unresolved at the time of writing (April 2014). So far, at least, there has been no panic reaction like the one that followed the Communist coup in Prague in 1948, when NATO turned itself into a traditional military alliance in response to the destruction of democracy in a country that had already been abandoned to the Soviet sphere of influence at the Yalta conference three years before. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea has been almost universally interpreted as a crude face-saving action by President Putin, who was humiliated by the overthrow of the pro-Russian government in Kiev, and not as the first step in a Russian project for world conquest. While any further Russian encroachments on Ukrainian sovereignty would undoubtedly lead to a prolonged period of tension between NATO and Russia, the alliance has already made it clear that it has no intention of sending Western troops into Ukraine. There is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the whole notion of a new Cold War, and not simply because today’s Russia, with only half the population of the old Soviet Union and much less than half of the military power, is too weak to hold up its end of it. NATO doesn’t need a new Cold War to justify its continued existence: it has succeeded in finding other things to do.
Traditional peacekeeping operations have continued to occupy some Canadian troops in the post–Cold War world, and the UN-backed operation in Bosnia and Croatia in the mid-1990s saw Canadian troops involved in a considerable amount of actual combat. But the new fashion was for “out-of-area” NATO operations like the bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, and the bombing campaign in Libya in 2011, all of which attracted Canadian participation. The Serbian and Libyan operations only involved the Royal Canadian Air Force and cost no Canadian casualties, but the major Canadian troop commitment to Afghanistan in 2003–2011 peaked at 4,000 soldiers and resulted in 158 fatal casualties—more than half of Canada’s total losses in overseas military commitments in the past sixty years. The way it came about was instructive. In early 2003 U.S. president George W. Bush’s administration in Washington expected Canada to be part of the “coalition of the willing” that he was assembling for the invasion of Iraq—but Prime Minister Jean Chrétien said no.
Over the last few weeks the U.N. Security Council has been unable to agree on a new resolution authorizing military action [against Iraq]. Canada worked very hard to find a compromise to bridge the gap in the Security Council. Unfortunately, we were not successful. If military action proceeds without a new resolution of the Security Council, Canada will not participate.
Jean Chrétien, House of Commons, Ottawa, March 17, 2003
“It was a very difficult decision to make, because it was the first time there was a war where the Americans and the Brits were involved and Canada was not there,” Chrétien told the Huffington Post on March 19, 2013, the tenth anniversary of the invasion. “But my view was there were no weapons of mass destruction, and we’re not in the business of going everywhere and replacing dictators. If we were to do that, we would be fighting every day.” A week earlier, he even boasted that it was “a very important decision for the independence of Canada, because unfortunately a lot of people thought sometimes we were the fifty-first state of America. It was clear that day we were not.”
In reality, Chrétien’s motives were a good deal more complex than that. In his Commons statement, Chrétien explained his decision in terms of international law (since 1945 it has been a crime to invade a sovereign country without the approval of the Security Council), but this was almost certainly not his primary concern. His doubts about the accuracy of the intelligence that the Americans were providing about Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction” were fully justified, but would he have seen that as a sufficient reason, all by itself, to defy and perhaps seriously alienate the Americans? There is reason to believe that another, entirely domestic consideration was the decisive factor in Chrétien’s decision.
In terms of his dedication to upholding the authority of the Security Council, Chrétien’s record was distinctly spotty. Newly chosen as leader of the Liberal Party in 1991, he opposed the invasion of Kuwait in order to push Saddam Hussein’s army out of that conquered country, although the operation had been authorized by the UN Security Council. He even called the planned multinational military action “illegal.” (Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent troops anyway.)
The intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons which the United States produced in order to justify invading Iraq was not only wrong but, in some cases, deliberately fabricated. After it turned out that the “weapons of mass destruction,” the excuse for a war that ultimately killed several hundred thousand people, simply did not exist, there was a concerted attempt by those who had generated the misinformation and equally by their gullible victims to pretend that nobody could have known any better at the time. That’s nonsense. Even without any access to “classified” information, it was obvious to anybody with even a little experience that the intelligence was being cooked. If you were an insider, you would have had to work hard not to know.
I was the [Canadian] ambassador [to the United Nations] in New York, I had access to the reports of the UN weapons inspectors, and it was evident to me that the United States was putting exclamation points in places where they should have been putting question marks, that the evidence really wasn’t persuasive.…
Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, and his people were basically going pretty much where they wanted to go in Iraq, and he wasn’t finding anything, and I went to see him and I said to him, “What’s happening?” He said, “I have asked the United States for the best intelligence they have and what they’ve given me, I go and investigate and I don’t find anything.”
That was one thing; another thing was when the president said in the State of the Union Address that there is uranium material being imported from Africa to Iraq. I have a colleague who worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. It took them one day to show that that was a forgery, yet the United States was building a whole case of going to war, in part, on such evidence. The person who signed the document who was supposed to be authorizing this transfer wasn’t in office at the time the document was supposed to have been signed.
Paul Heinbecker, Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, 2000–04
Heinbecker’s reports from the United Nations were going directly to Prime Minister Chrétien, and he was also in regular touch with him personally: “I told him there was no prospect of UN Security Council approval of a resolution mandating attacking Iraq. It just wasn’t going to happen—nobody in New York was convinced of the necessity of the action.” So Chrétien knew that the “evidence” of Saddam’s WMD was deeply suspect, and he also knew that the Security Council was not going to come up with a resolution that would legitimize what the Americans wanted to do. But what really tipped the scale for Chrétien was Quebec—and his final decision seems to have been made quite late in the day.
As late as December of 2003 Chrétien’s government still had plans for Canada to send up to eight hundred Canadian troops to Iraq if the UN Security Council authorized an attack, and senior Canadian Forces officers were still participating in the Pentagon’s war planning. Back home, however, opinion polls were revealing something quite alarming; Canadians didn’t want to go to war in Iraq without a UN Security Council resolution that made it legal. The numbers were clear: the various opinion polls held in January 2003 showed that only 26 percent of Canadians supported Canadian involvement in an invasion of Iraq without United Nations approval—and only 7 percent of Quebecers did. For a Liberal government facing a national election within a year, and concerned about retaining its share of the Quebec votes, this was bad news.
The Liberal Party’s pollster, Michael Marzolini, chairman and CEO of Pollara, the country’s largest Canadian-owned market research company, told Chrétien that he could get national support for a commitment to Iraq if he worked at it: “A small majority of people outside Quebec were in favour of joining the coalition even though a lot didn’t like the war. We asked if they would support a government decision to participate and 46 percent said yes. About 48 percent said they would support the government if it decided to stay out. This meant we could have sold either position. Both were moveable to 53 percent with selling.” But those were the figures for Canada as a whole. You couldn’t sell it in Quebec, and that mattered a great deal to Chrétien.
The first sign that Chrétien was going to defy the United States came on February 12, 2003, when he responded to a United Nations request for some troops in Afghanistan by announcing in Parliament that Canada would send two thousand troops to that country, which had been occupied by Western forces since late 2001.
It had caught us all completely off-side. We found out about an hour before.… If you had come into the Department of National Defense headquarters after that speech, most of us looked like deer caught in headlights.… We were shocked because we had other projects and this would tap us out. It made Iraq impossible.… I resigned because we were too stretched. It came out of the blue without consultation and without discussion. The minister said in a statement that I was in charge of planning for this deployment in Afghanistan. He was wrong. It was Iraq I was planning for.
Major-General Cameron Ross, director general of International Security Policy, National Defence Headquarters, 2003
It only became clear in retrospect how this served Chrétien’s purposes. By sending most of the available Canadian combat troops to Afghanistan he had effectively emptied the bank, leaving nothing for Iraq, and yet it would let him claim that he was doing something to help the United States elsewhere. That would mollify the Americans and the English Canadians—and the French Canadians wouldn’t mind because Afghanistan was a perfectly legal, UN-approved operation in which there were, at this stage, very few casualties. He would already have been worried that a decision to join the United States in invading Iraq would damage the Quebec Liberal Party’s hopes of unseating the PQ in the next provincial election in Quebec, but the massive anti-war demonstration in Montreal on March 12 confirmed it. A quarter-million people marched in the city, while only a tenth as many marched in big English Canadian cities.
The Parti Québécois, facing likely defeat at the hands of the Quebec Liberal Party in the next provincial election, sensed an opportunity to campaign against an unpopular federally condoned war and called a snap election on March 14. That just confirmed Chrétien in his conviction that Iraq was a war to avoid, and on March 17 he made his statement in Parliament. On March 19, 2003 the invasion went ahead without Canada. Most Canadians were happy about that—and nobody else seemed very upset about it. Not even the Americans.
President Bush cancelled a state visit to Ottawa that had been scheduled for May, and some Americans boycotted Quebec maple syrup, but it was not renamed “freedom syrup.” Even the White House was not really feeling vengeful. When Chrétien ran into Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, at a wedding a few weeks later, Card told him: “You have been very clear with us [about not going into Iraq without a Security Council Resolution]. You did not double-cross us. We were disappointed, but we knew that you had said that.” As Chrétien reflected with some smugness: “Some of [the Americans] thought ‘at end of day you will come along anyway,’ and they were a bit surprised that I did not come along anyway. But they could not complain about the clarity of my position.”
At home, Chrétien’s decision was the catalyst that crystallized public opinion against the war: 70 percent of Canadians approved of it. The opposition in Parliament condemned his decision, with opposition leader Stephen Harper comparing it to the failure to confront Nazi Germany in the 1930s. (Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches unity—and whoever first mentions the Nazis automatically loses the argument.) But even Harper came around eventually: in 2008 he conceded that his support for the American war in Iraq had been a mistake.
In terms of Canadian casualties, Chrétien’s decision probably didn’t make much difference. If Canadian troops had been sent to Iraq instead, they would almost certainly have been based around Basra in the south of the country with the British army. The British lost 179 killed in Iraq, out of a force that totalled 43,000 during the invasion but rapidly dropped thereafter to 8,000 or less. Canada lost almost that many soldiers killed in Afghanistan, out of a force that was at all times significantly smaller than the British contingent in Iraq—but it should be noted that only four Canadian soldiers were killed in the ISAF operation before the force was moved from Kabul to Kandahar in late 2005. That decision was taken by Prime Minister Paul Martin, Defence Minister Bill Graham and the chief of defence staff, General Rick Hillier, long after Chrétien had left office.
And while the Afghanistan operation was authorized by the United Nations, in contrast to the lawless American invasion of Iraq, it was just as pointless and futile. Even within the broader lunacy of using regular armies to fight a “war on terror,” both those wars made no strategic or political sense. This was more obvious in the case of Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had no contact whatever with the al-Qaeda terrorists and was indeed one of the Arab rulers whom they hoped to overthrow, whereas there actually were several hundred al-Qaeda members, mostly Arabs, in Afghanistan as guests of the Taliban regime before the 9/11 attacks on the United States. However, no Taliban member has ever been involved in terrorist attacks abroad (except in Pakistan), and it is very much to be doubted that Osama bin Laden told the Taliban leaders that he was planning to launch the 9/11 attacks. It would have been a dangerous breach of security, and, more important, it would have alarmed his hosts, who would rightly have anticipated that they would be blamed for the attacks and invaded by American forces. A brief military incursion to destroy the al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan might have made sense, but the continued military occupation of the entire country for thirteen years after the surviving al-Qaeda members had fled across the border into Pakistan, a much better base for their operations, was an expensive irrelevance. But Canadians still don’t do their own strategic thinking, and there is no evidence that any senior officer in National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa ever seriously questioned the absurd notion, dominant in the United States, that large conventional military forces were an appropriate instrument for dealing with a rather modest terrorist threat.
When General James Wolfe captured Quebec City in 1759 and added Canada to the British empire, his army was only 4,800 men. The Marquis de Montcalm’s army was about the same size, and the battle on the Plains of Abraham caused only 260 British and French deaths (including those of both commanders). It was quite typical of pre-modern wars, in that the returns on a successful war more than justified the cost in money and lives in the eyes of the participants. In those days, nobody saw the institution of warfare as a “problem,” and even losing a war was generally just a setback, not an irreversible catastrophe.
The advent of fully industrialized warfare in the early twentieth century changed this situation for good. In the First World War, the cost in lives and resources was so great (eleven million dead, and the equivalent of at least two years’ national income for all the main participants) that it was a disaster even for the victors. All the governments on the losing side and one on the winning side (Russia’s) were overthrown, and two empires that had existed for centuries were carved up and destroyed. Communism and fascism, radical political doctrines that had previously been marginal, gained power in great states like Russia and Germany.
Twenty years later, the Second World War killed at least four times as many people as the first, and left half the cities of the developed world in ruins. Canada, the United States and Britain had a relatively easy time of it, since their armies were only involved in major ground combat at the very end of the war and the North American countries were not even bombed, but in the last month of the war, nuclear weapons were used on cities for the first time. After the fighting ended, many of the surviving leaders of the defeated powers were tried and executed as criminals, and both Germany and Japan were occupied by foreign military forces for a decade.
We were all climbing a steep learning curve about industrialized total war, Canada no less than the great powers, and the initial response in almost every country was the same: to define the struggle as good against evil, for how else could the scale of the losses be justified? By the end of the First World War, Canadians genuinely believed they were defending democracy against tyranny. They even believed it at the end of the Second World War, although the biggest winner was our great ally, the Soviet Union. It was the right side of the brain, full of hate and hurt and righteous wrath, that wrote the vengeful peace treaty with Germany after the First World War and made the Second World War almost inevitable. But even in 1918 the left brain was also engaged, and its analysis of the problem of war (everybody now agreed that it was a problem) was very different.
The very same people who wrote the Treaty of Versailles also founded the League of Nations, which was a more or less rational attempt to fix a faulty international system. The fix was not well thought out, and the League of Nations fell at the first hurdle, but the underlying analysis was quite correct: it was a system problem. The traditional right of every sovereign state to wage war against any other sovereign state made militarization inevitable and wars very likely. That had been acceptable when wars were small-scale events that did little damage to civilian society, but now great-power wars had become intolerably destructive, so sovereignty had somehow to be restrained. These two ideas—the notion that war is a crusade against evil, and the hypothesis that it is actually a system problem—are mutually incompatible, of course, but that didn’t stop intelligent people from believing them both.
The same bipolar vision prevailed after the Second World War: yes, the fascist dictators had been a particularly nasty set of men, who could fairly be described as evil. But it was also obvious that wars between the great powers would continue to occur, with or without fascist dictators, until the international rules were changed. But changed in what way?
Canada played a minimal role in this debate after the First World War, when it was mainly concerned with establishing itself as an independent country in the eyes of the world, and it was positively destructive in the 1920s, when it succeeded in establishing the principle that safer countries like itself (the “fireproof house”) had the right to abstain from collective military action to enforce international law. But after the Second World War it played a different and quite useful role. Although we had a much easier time in that war, Canadian politicians and diplomats were well aware that the existence of nuclear weapons had made it even more urgent to create an institution and a set of rules that would lessen the danger of a Third World War—and in 1945, for the one time in its history, Canada was almost a great power. It was a transitory status, due solely to the fact that most of the real great powers were temporarily flat on their backs because of war damage, but we used our fleeting power well. Canadian diplomats played an important role in writing the Charter of the United Nations, which has served us far better than most people recognize.
Nobody in San Francisco truly believed that the United Nations could stop all the wars in the world. Its real purpose was to prevent any more wars between the great powers, for that kind of war was already killing in the tens of millions, and another time it would probably be in the hundreds of millions. Unfortunately, no matter what kind of new rules you write for the conduct of international affairs, the great powers cannot be forced to obey those rules, for there are by definition no greater powers. So the drafters of the Charter did the best they could, making it illegal for any country to use military force against another country no matter what the excuse unless it was explicitly authorized by the Security Council—and that turned out to be enough. No great power has fought any other great power for sixty-nine years now. That is around three times as long as ever before.
Smaller countries can fight each other, and many have. The Security Council does have the authority to use force against an aggressor in such cases, but it has only twice managed to agree to do so: when North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, and when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Great powers can still attack lesser countries with impunity—the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the American invasion of Iraq, for example. But the great powers do not fight each other any more.
This self-restraint is not really due to some newfound respect for international law on their part. They genuinely do not want to fight each other any more, no matter what the provocation, because they are acutely aware of the probability that any open warfare between nuclear-armed great powers could quickly escalate into mutual nuclear destruction. Nevertheless, their leaders still operate in a domestic political context where “backing down” and failing to defend “vital national interests” will expose them to savage criticism and quite possibly loss of power. What they need, therefore, is some means of backing away from a dangerous confrontation that will not result in accusations that they have betrayed the national interest.
The United Nations provides that means. Rather than give in to the threats of a rival great power and suffer an unacceptable loss of face, a national leader can draw back from the brink out of respect for international law and the (imaginary) authority of the United Nations. It seems a very slender reed on which to base the world’s hopes of avoiding another, even more devastating great-power war, but it has already saved us several times, most notably in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
There is, of course, no guarantee that this flimsy barrier against a return to the great wars of the past century will hold forever. Whether it does will depend to a large extent on a fear of great-power war that has been acquired through the experience of two such wars with modern weapons, and it is not certain that emerging, non-Western great powers that do not have that terrible history will be equally and adequately frightened of the consequences of not backing away from a confrontation. But the founders of the United Nations did the best they could, and they did better work than they knew.
And then, having done our best to end the cycle of great alliance wars, we panicked in the late 1940s and created another great alliance to stop the Russians (who weren’t coming). Canada took a leading role in the panic, being one of the two countries that persuaded the United States to go down the road that led to the foundation of NATO, and we devoted most of our military efforts to the Cold War for the next forty years, doing peacekeeping on the side to assuage our nagging suspicion that we had taken the wrong road. After the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we even went along with the conversion of NATO into a sort of freelance world police force, there being no longer any rival great power to put a brake on our ambitions. Some of the small wars we took part in could be justified in humanitarian terms, and we did manage to dodge the most flagrantly illegal one, in Iraq, but the pretense that “coalitions of the willing” or the “international community” (aka NATO) had the right to use force unilaterally undermined the always shaky authority of the United Nations. However, the declining enthusiasm of the United States for such wars may put an end to this policy before it does irreparable damage to the international rules of conduct that we worked so hard to devise and entrench.
It is a distinctly mixed record, and the best that can be said is that so far we have got away with it. When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget that your original aim was to drain the swamp. But that is the job we embarked on almost a hundred years ago, and it’s still very much a work in progress.
However deficient in many ways the United Nations may be, I think it’s an absolutely essential organization. There is no way in which ths effort cannot be made—it has to be made—knowing perfectly well that you’re pushing an enormous boulder up a very steep hill. There will be slips and it will come back on you from time to time, but you have to go on pushing. Because if you don’t do that, you simply give in to the notion that you’re going to go into another global war again at some point, this time with nuclear weapons.
Brian Urquhart, former undersecretary-general, United Nations
Amen to that.