by David J. Bercuson

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and U.S. President George W. Bush wave to the crowds during Bush’s visit to Kananaskis, Alta., for the G-8 summit in June 2002.

As of late June the failure of the United States to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is causing growing concern in a number of circles in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The prime reason cited by President George W. Bush for the attack on Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction which were ready for use, either by Iraq or by potential enemies of the U.S. ready to form coalitions with Saddam for the sole purpose of killing Americans. That clear and present danger was said to justify a pre-emptive strike.

Whether or not Saddam had weapons of mass destruction anytime recently–and there is strong evidence that he did–he most certainly did not have them on the shelf, unwrapped, and ready for use on March 20 last when the U.S.-led coalition struck. Evidence that such weapons existed somewhere in Iraq on that date may yet be unearthed, but the very fact that nothing was found for the first 90 days after the fall of the Saddam regime indicates that the case for a war waged to preclude imminent Iraqi deployment of these weapons was, to put it in its best light, overstated.

British opponents of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wholehearted backing of the war are engaged in bitter recriminations over that decision. They have accused Blair of either colluding in the trumping up of evidence, or uncritically accepting questionable data shared with him by the U.S. administration. After six British military policemen were gunned down near Basra toward the end of June, the attacks on Blair mounted even further.

In the U.S. the debate has been slower to heat up, particularly in the media afterglow of having liberated Iraq from a truly homicidal maniac. But it most assuredly will as the U.S. begins to head into 2004, a presidential election year, as the U.S. economy continues to languish and the Democrats try to paint Bush as having an overly sensitive trigger finger. In fact, however, Congressional Democrats do have a responsibility to the Armed Forces, if not also to the voters, to find out who knew what, and when, and why the president believed what he did, or said he believed it when the war was launched.

In Canada, most of the people who vainly urged the government to join the Iraq war did so because they believed that the U.S. saw a clear and present danger in the Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction and that Canada’s interests–never mind its responsibility as a close ally of the U.S.–ought to have brought us unequivocally in, no matter how small our contribution might have been.

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was never entirely clear on what Canadian policy was going to be toward a war when that war was hypothetical but when a policy of sorts did begin to jell, it was about the United Nations, and not weapons of mass destruction. Put simply, Chrétien in effect shifted the responsibility for engaging Canadian soldiers in a war to the United Nations Security Council by declaring Canadian policy to be: “If no UN sanction, then no Canadian participation in war, any war, ever.”

In so doing, Chrétien tried to end decades of disagreement between the Department of National Defence and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade over whether Canada’s best course in international diplomacy is to follow a path of “neutrality,” hitching its foreign policy firmly to the UN, or be a strong and reliable ally of its major international partners, the U.S. and Britain, and whoever was willing to join their coalitions of the willing. He plumped for neutrality.

Much of that long debate–and the related debate of the late fall and early spring over the Iraq war–was the playing out of old, well worn, and much-used propositions. Neither the prime minister, nor those of his caucus who backed him, had any idea of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They opposed the war because they hold preconceived views of the U.S.–and especially of the Bush administration–that are essentially malevolent. They always oppose the U.S. They always support Canadian actions intended to divide us from the Americans.

Those who supported the war also did so without any knowledge of the real state Iraqi weaponry. In general, they give the U.S. the benefit of the doubt because their view of the U.S. is that although it is a powerful nation with its own interests, it has been a staunch friend and ally of Canada for a century at least, and a brother in arms in two world wars, the Korean War, and the Cold War. They value American protection so they seek it, and seek to complement it, sometimes too uncritically.

The real debate ought to have been about Canada and the United Nations. It ought to have focused on what Canadian national interests are served by transferring Canada’s war-making powers to the UN Security Council, and about what sort of body the UN Security Council, and the UN itself, are now.

Had that debate happened, Canadians would have heard some hard truths about the disastrous consequences of UN failures in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and more recently, the Congo and about a UN command structure that has often failed Canadian troops, left them vulnerable on so-called peacekeeping missions, even gotten them killed.

The Security Council today is nothing more than three veto-bearing members, France, China and Russia, trying to restrain a fourth–the U.S.–who wears the sheriff’s badge, helped by the Brits, the fifth. The U.S. is the only sheriff in town because no one else wants the job, or is capable of it but someone has to do it lest international chaos reign whenever the bad guys ride into town.

Under those circumstances, Canada has a moral duty, let alone a national interest, to put on a deputy’s badge. In the long run, Chrétien’s decision will not stand.