We All Lost the Iraq War

Abstract

LIKE MANY CANADIANS, I tuned in on evening of 17 March 2003 to watch President George W. Bush deliver his much-anticipated ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. Unlike most Canadians, I watched speech in US itself--to be precise, from Harvard University. About midway through speech, I began to surf for some alternative, but encountered same face--serious, sombre and smirk-free--on channel after channel. Until, that is, I reached niche public affairs channel, C-SPAN2. Here, to my surprise, I encountered taped coverage of Prime Minister Jean Chretien announcing and defending Canada's decision not to join the coalition of willing.Tucked away on C-SPAN2, Canadian position on war in Iraq was largely invisible in US. So, too, was I. Almost no one I encountered knew anything about Canadian position, and those who did, more often than not, preferred it to their President's bellicosity anyway. William Buckley once famously quipped that he would rather be governed by first 100 names in Boston telephone directory than by 100 Harvard professors. Predictably enough, support for war was much weaker on campus than in American population as a whole. Indeed, at very moment President Bush was appearing on national television to issue his ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, Harvard's daily undergraduate newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, was polling students on their attitudes towards war. The irony is that, in this respect, Harvard students appeared more like Canadians than Americans. A solid majority of Harvard undergraduates (some 56 per cent) opposed war(1)--consistent with Anglophone opinion in Canada (including my own, I should add) and clearly out of step with broader, national sentiment in US.At one level, it was easy for me as a Canadian to watch war unfold: there were no anti-Canadian protests, no Canadian jokes, and no lectures about need to support our allies. Yet, for all this, I did feel like an outsider--even in cocoon that is the republic of Cambridge. This essay is a personal and somewhat desultory attempt to understand my unease about war.PEACE IS PATRIOTICLexington, Massachusetts is one of those lovely New England towns that has become a close suburb of Boston--not because urban sprawl created it, but because an expanding population met it. Like so many of Boston's suburbs, it retains its town centre, its common, and its array of white-steepled churches. Lexington (together with its neighbour Concord) stands out, however, for its mythological status as place where American Revolution is said to have begun. And, it stands out in my memory, as place where I first really felt a sort of disquiet about prospects of war in Iraq. Driving through Lexington one Saturday in late January with my family, I noticed a man standing at a major crossroads holding high a homemade placard for all to see, a revolutionary flag anchored in snowbank beside him. Judging from medals on his coat, he was a war veteran; sign read: Peace is Patriotic.The man on Lexington Common understood an important truth about current American foreign policy since 9/11: that it has wrapped itself tightly in fabric of patriotism. One need only think of legal centrepiece of homeland security--the Patriot Act--to see how powerful connection between security and patriotism have become. The slogan Peace is Patriotic was a kind of pre-emptive strike against argument that opposition to war was unpatriotic. But what of revolutionary flag? Presumably, man on Lexington Common wanted to make related point that patriotism is more than obedience to a President's orders as Commander in Chief. It is, rather, loyalty to a set of enduring, culturally entrenched principles that have a higher standing than pronouncements and orders of this or that Commander in Chief. For man on Lexington Common, ideals of Revolution, symbolized so powerfully by a flag, were true and original principles of American patriotism against which current foreign policy ought to be judged. …