Good for you, Jean Chretien

Yesterday a friend of mine, Mike Homan, wrote in his blog about the seventh anniversary of the American Invasion of Iraq. Pink dresses notwithstanding, Mike is a well-informed and thoughtful American, and one can sense his utter frustration.










We made a whole lot of jokes about Jean Chretien when he was our Prime Minister. Nevertheless, to me, he is a hero. Despite enormous pressure at home, even from within his own party, and especially from the American Ambassador to Washington to join the 'Coalition of the Willing' and invade Iraq, he decided to keep Canada out of the invasion.

During the autumn of 2002, when I was in Jordan on an archaeological dig, Bush pushed through the UN Resolution 1441, giving the UN head weapons inspector Hans Blix new powers to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. By early 2003, we could all feel the winds of war. Hans Blix's team was unable to find anything, and this only seemed to feed the belligerent rhetoric from Bush and his neo-Cons. Bush held up a 'Wanted' poster with Saddam's face on it, and said "I've been out west...". Yikes.

Sometime in March of 2003, Jeff Lawrence, one of my colleagues at work, asked whether I would be willing to sit on a panel discussion in the College theatre to discuss the issues surrounding the imminent invasion. We were not sure at that point whether Canada was going to take part in an invasion, and so I felt it important to take the opportunity to speak my views publicly. In my presentation I questioned the legality of the invasion, given the fact that the Security Council had not given its sanction. Like so many at that time, I also predicted that the people of Iraq would do everything they could to undermine America's efforts, despite Rumsfeld's assurance that the people would embrace a 'Jeffersonian democracy on the banks of the Euphrates'. Other panelists tried to tease out the 'real' reasons for such an invasion. Although speculation ranged widely, there was general consensus that the invasion was misguided and a huge mistake.

Seven years of war later, Iraq is now a democracy. However, it is fragile, weak, and riven with stresses and cracks. The system of family relationships in Iraq and generally in the Middle East is based on 'segmentary lineages', and people will always vote for someone within their immediate or more distant family in such a system. Such arrangements run counter to the machinery of democracy. Iraq's democracy is ham-strung, ineffective, and virtually unviable.

My prediction in 2003 for the future of Iraq remains the same. Either under a strongman like Saddam Hussein, or the present fatally flawed democracy, the country is doomed to balkanize into three requisite ethnic groups. There will be a Kurdistan in the north, a Sunni middle, and a Shia south. The decision made at Versailles in 1918 to carve this part of the Ottoman Empire into an 'Iraq' was ill-conceived, and perhaps it will come apart before it meets its first century. At that point, all of the lives and treasure the Americans have squandered in this ill-fated mission will have been in vain.

Canada decided not to join America in its 'police action' in Vietnam in the 1960's and 1970's. In 2003, it would have been so easy for Chretien to bend to the will of so many and join in the 'Coalition of the Willing'. However, he did not. Hats off to you, Jean Chretien!