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Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

While responsible U.S. leaders struggle with the profound question of how to contain dangerous threats from well-armed madmen, including Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, Parrish and company are free to engage in the facile stereotyping of their politically correct upside-down world. The fashionable parlour game of the moment is “bash the Americans” while turning a blind eye to real threats.

But while Parrish enjoys her 15 minutes of fame, as she rehearses her next soundbite, she might consider dipping into her parliamentary expense account to visit the neighbour whose people she damned. Let her contemplate the security at Dorval and La Guardia airports and wonder who are the real “bastards” who mass-produce fear by living among us, abusing our freedoms, and turning airplanes into weapons of mass destruction.

Let her first fly over, then visit, Ground Zero, and see firsthand the scale of the devastation, then try opening her heart to grieve with the tens of thousands of people deprived of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, colleagues, friends. “Sept. 11” may feel like an overplayed news story north of the border, but in so many U.S. homes it remains the day when thousands were executed for the simple crime of being American “bastards,” or merely working next to them.

Once in New York, let her speak to the “bastards,” leftists and rightists, those in favour of confronting Saddam and those opposed, who just spent two weeks fearing another terrorist attack. Anxious people stocked up on food, water, and batteries; reasonable people who have already once learned the danger of failing to prepare for the worst, thought of escape routes and sealed rooms.

No one deserves to live with such fear, let alone people who are as sure of their commitment to doing right in the world as Canadians are of theirs. Americans are not just the “bastards” who helped perfect the gifts of mass democracy and mass middle-class prosperity for the world – patents Canadians have often followed. Americans are not just the “bastards” who helped defeat the two greatest scourges of the 20^th century – Nazism and Communism. Americans are also the “bastards” to whom the world turned when Kuwait needed saving from Saddam Hussein, when Europeans and Canadians could not clean up the mess in Bosnia or Kosovo, when the Taliban tried to turn all of Afghanistan into a medieval prison. 

The debate about how to balance out the risk of action versus the risk of inaction vis a vis Saddam Hussein need not begin with a litany of all of America’s good works. No people are perfect, no state is ideal. The debate does, however, begin with the new world disorder Americans recognized after Sept. 11

Only fools or fanatics can speak with absolute assurance about the possible war. Fighting Iraq is a calculated risk, balancing the dangers of acting now, before Saddam goes nuclear, versus the dangers of having to react later. So far, for all the carping among sophisticates, Bush’s strategy has worked. After 12 years of dithering, only the threat of massive retaliation has forced Saddam Hussein to begin accounting for the weapons Iraq has kept in violation of the Gulf War ceasefire and repeated UN Security Council resolutions. With any luck, the pressure – imposed by the United States despite the delicate sensibilities of Parrish and company – will force Saddam’s regime to implode, and Saddam will end up exiled somewhere. Barring that happy ending, Saddams’ longstanding and aggressive expansionism and Americans’ new sense of vulnerability make a confrontation all but inevitable

Americans, like Canadians, did not seek these new challenges. Americans, like Canadians, spent years ignoring the growing dangers of terrorism and rogue states. Americans have been forced to confront this new reality. The least Canadians can do, even if they disagree with U.S. policy, is respect their neighbours enough to engage in vigorous and constructive debate rather than vicious and destructive calumnies.

We have seen and experienced the impact of anti-Americanism in the world. It starts with hateful speech but the demonization resulted on Sept. 11, 2001, in lethal fireballs in Pennsylvania, in Washington, in the North Tower and the South Tower. Contrary to the growing conventional wisdom, any of us trying, in our own imperfect ways, to prevent another catastrophe is not being “pro-war,” but pro-peace. Perhaps it is time to wish “those bastards” who are poised to write a new chapter of history good luck and godspeed.

Gil Troy teaches history at McGill University.