Canadians Can Thank Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien For This Much – We Didn’t Do The War In Iraq

A Commentary by Doug Draper

This March 19, our American neighbours are marking the 10^th anniversary of the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney-led invasion of Iraq with some grim statistics.

Tony Blair of Britain joins George W. in marching off to the war in Iraq

Those statistics include at least $2.2 trillion in costs to American taxpayers – $$2.2 trillion that could have been invested on domestic energy and other programs aimed at building the United States a continued leadership role in the 21^st century – more than 4,400 American lives lost and more than 30,000 other young Americans wounded, many of them maimed for life. And let’s not forget the more than 120,000 Iraqi lives, most of them innocent civilians, snuffed out in the crossfire.

On this 10^th anniversary of what Bush/Cheney called ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, Canadians should perhaps take a moment to be thankful that Stephen Harper was not prime minister of our country then and that we are not facing equally grim statistics on this side of the Canada/U.S. border.

I have said it once or twice before and I will say it again, lest we forget. I was never much impressed with former Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien, but perhaps one of the only really good things he did while he was PM was to keep Canada from signing on to the Bush/Cheney ‘Coalition of the Willing’ and sending young Canadians off to fight and die in that war.

That is far more than you can say for Harper, who was opposition leader at the time and slammed Chretien for not hoping on the Bush/Cheney war wagon, and for that hawkish dope of a defense minister of his, one Peter Mackay, who was all too ready to spend $10 or more billion extra on overpriced war jets had he not been stopped by and critical government opponents  and media reports, and who would probably be signing us up for an invasion of Iran if Mitt Romney had been elected U.S. president last fall.

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien faces down then-opposition leader Stephen Harper in early 2003 and says no to joining Bush’s Iraq war coalition

Chretien, for whatever else Canadians may have to say about him and the mostly lame and incompetent (if not corrupt) Liberal government he led in the 1990s and up to December, 2003, kept Canada out of the Iraq war mess. 

In a recent interview with The Globe and Mail, said the decision not to get involved in that war was made at the risk of angering the U.S. administration at the time and Canadian companies that did business in the U.S. But he was never convinced by the arguments coming out of the Bush administration that Iraq had nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction it was planning to deploy against the west, and he still believes not joining in the war “was the right decision.”

Indeed, Chretien’s decision to not to join Great Britain’s then-prime minister Tony Blair and other countries in the Bush/Cheney war march made things difficult for Canadians to venture down to America for a while. I will never forget the sneers I got from some Americans passing my car with its Ontario license plates on highways in Maryland and Virginia where I was visiting friends at the time. They would be passing me with bumper stickers on their cars reading; ‘support the troops,’ what ever that slogan meant. It certainly never meant any willingness on their part to pay extra taxes to cover the cost of the war or looking after the troops when they came home, many of whom have had a hell of a time finding a decent job or getting the health care they need, and who have suffered marriage breakups and committed suicide in extraordinary numbers.

As the years dragged on and the casualty count escalated, growing numbers of Americans took to the streets to protest the Bush/Cheney war. However, both Vietnam draft dodgers continued to defend it.

I go back to visit my friends in the U.S. now and most of them say that invading Iraq was a tragic mistake. Some of them have even been generous enough to add that we Canadians were smart not to get involved in it.

I don’t know how smart we Canadians are relative to our American neighbours given some of the governments, we the people, have elected up here over the past 20 or 30 years, but I have to agree with Chretien on that one thing – not joining in the war on Iraq “was the right decision.” 

Last time I travelled down to the states, any further than the Buffalo area, was late last fall where I hardly heard anyone who sounded anxious to launch an invasion against Iran or any other country. Instead, I saw a bumper sticker that read; “I’m already against the next war.” 

As the old folkie Pete Seeger once sang; “When will we ever learn?”

For further information, check out the following video from 10 years ago this winter of Harper going after the then-governing Chretien government to go to war in Iraq at  http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPVOhva_cwI . 

This Friday, March 22 at 9 p.m., the U.S. cable news channel MSNBC (channel 133 on Cogeco in the Niagara, Ontario area) will do a re-broadcast of its recently produced, acclaimed documentary. ‘Hubris; Selling the Iraq War’. You can learn more about it by clicking on  http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/02/17/the-co-author-of-hubris-on-torture-secrets-and-what-we-still-dont-know/ .

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