Art's blog

Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird and Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty visited the Middle East this week – or what is left of it. They assure the Israelis that Israel has no greater friend than Canada (Bit cheeky this. What will the U.S. think?) Baird then chastises Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Maliki and says that Canada views the Palestinian initiative (to have their territory recognized as a state by the United Nations) as profoundly wrong. (Really!) Unilateral action such as this is shocking and beyond reasonable, he said. Palestine must go back to the negotiating table without preconditions, but for what compelling reason? Hasn’t Canada enough problems of its own without sticking its oar in elsewhere? What about their failure to accommodate their own First Nations, to settle their differences with Quebec, with building more prisons for declining crime, spending billions on fighter aircraft to protect Canadian borders, which have yet to be attacked except by the States (besides, the U.S. is doing that for them, but against what?), rescinding a registry of long guns, telling the Canadian public what a marvellous job their doing? Who’s going to get the Israelis to the table without preconditions? They must love this international attention. Anyway, they’re too busy getting ready to thump Iran for running a nuclear programme. Oh yes, the very gall of it all seems beyond belief.

Let us raise a toast to any politician of a single party in a single country who creates a single job without access to the public purse. The public purse is what governments jingle with the taxes they collect – or fail to collect as the word has it in the case of Greece, Spain and Portugal. We are teetering on the brink, whatever that is, from failure of the financial system. What lies below? Jagged rocks and crashing surf? Crushing debt is the lot of nations stretching from Europe to North America. The reason? Governments that take more from the trough than comes into it. Politicians and public servants of every stripe with hair-brained schemes who award themselves fat salaries, indexed pensions and unlimited expense accounts cause national strife. The fat cats of the banking sector have been long enough at the trough.

Republican contestants for nomination in the coming presidential election have been so busy denigrating Cuba, someone has to leap to its defence. Work permits, see here, were essential in the olden days – for most people anyway. More than that, assignment to a work gang was the norm. Work Gang 69 was a swinging crew to which yours truly was assigned at the José Marti Airport. Not to infuriate expatriate Cubans or to consternate their politicians, hard work had its privileges as in the United States. Cuba has two kinds of workers: those at the bottom of the heap who work and those above who direct. Both categories are civilised. There were those who ate from battered aluminum plates and drank out of mugs of the same metal in the cafeteria. The privileged few ate in a Cuban-style Delmonico’s, feasting off bone china and having double-damask dinner napkins. Moved from the cafeteria to this elegant restaurant for exemplary work done it was no joke being returned in disgrace to the work gang – all for confessing to a journalistic assignment and asking for an interview with the President. Journalists were anathema to Cuban high society.

Readers of Arabic will recognize this press card and note that it is for Yemen, which at the time of its issue in 1978 was known as North Yemen. That distressed land was then busy having a furious donnybrook with South Yemen. To meet and interview the then President of that volatile land, this one-time reporter had to pass through an iron curtain security. Briefcase, pockets and personal possessions were intensely scrutinised and only then did the interview proceed. Six weeks later, President Abdul al Gashmi of North Yemen was blown to kingdom come by a bomb brought by an emissary from South Yemen, who accompanied the President on his journey. The present brought was gift-wrapped. The emissary would otherwise never have passed through the iron-clad security barrier. To correct an historical misconception, Al Gashmi was not blown up by a suitcase bomb as now reported. As the only journalist ever to have interviewed this mercurial dictator, and familiar with the scene in that quarter, I stick by my opinion relating to the means used to assassinate him.

With the exception of Dr Ron Paul, dubbed a libertarian, contenders for the Republican nomination in last Monday night’s debate in Florida blithely discussed taking out Iran’s nuclear installations with the assistance of Israel. This idea is ludicrous with or without Israeli involvement. The U.S. has had enough wars and armed conflicts since the Second World War to last a lifetime. As Ron Paul said, going to war over control of the Strait of Hormuz, gateway to the Persian Gulf, is easily avoided by discussing the matter with the Iranians. Why not? The Iranians are believed to speak English as a second language well. As has already been said, ‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war’. It has taken ten years of fighting to speak to the Taliban. The U.S. should try the same thing with the Iranians before starting a slugfest. It is not necessary to send in the Marines every time to sort out the ruffians.

Former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney seeking the Republican nomination for President of the United States released his tax returns today. Vultures of the news media pounced to wallow in the detail. Rounded off, Romney’s income for one year is $21 million. Of this he paid 15 per cent in taxes and invested the rest, having first given away $7 million to charitable organisations. Journalists, commentators and his opponents blame him for being rich. But what’s wrong with that? He earned his wealth by hard work and need apologise to no one. On the same news report, a basketball player is stated to have signed a contract that guarantees him $25 million a year. Whether the player has a university degree, experience in commerce or industry or knows anything beyond basketball was not revealed. The contrast is revealing. It should make you think.

Question period in the Canadian House of Commons is unlike question and answer time in any other national assembly. With the possible exception of Prime Minister Harper, who is confident enough to speak off the cuff – he is, after all, answerable only to himself – members of the government answer questions from the opposition by reading from hand-held notes, probably typed in large letters by their assistants to make sure they read the message as written. Regretfully, the art of rhetoric is likely lost forever. Ministers of the crown, their deputies and stand-ins mumble and stumble their way through question period like shipwrecked sailors floundering through the surf to shore and shelter. This sad state of the quality of eloquence reflects miserably the worth of public discourse. Before members of parliament are elevated to high office the very least they can do is learn to speak extemporaneously and with confidence.

There is no logical reason to deny Iran the right to operate a nuclear programme, for peaceful purposes as its leaders claim or otherwise. Iran’s neighbours have nuclear arsenals: Pakistan, India, Israel and, a little further afield, China, Russia and North Korea. Israel didn’t seek permission of the IAEA or publicise its nuclear weaponry plans. Why should Iran? Why are the U.S.A., Israel and their flunkies, including Canada, so bent on preventing Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons? Such a dog in the manger attitude is bad for business and international relations. Iran merely wants to join the nuclear club, which is little enough to ask. The brutish and outright thuggery of assassinating Iranian scientists is no better than the drug gang slaughter in Mexico. The simple answer is for the U.S.A. to send Iran half a dozen nuclear bombs from its own overstocked arsenal. Do this, save the Iranians the effort, and oil from the Middle East will flow again without let or hindrance. We will then all settle down, sleep better in our beds and the Israelis can go on building their settlements on the West Bank undisturbed.

Sergeant Ryan Russell, a Toronto police officer, was struck and killed by a snow plough driven by a rampaging driver. As one who spent a modest three years on the beat and the parent of a daughter who served in the RCMP for 20 years and died on the job, I well understand and sympathise with the anguish suffered by Sergeant Russell’s family and the grief felt by his fellow officers. An estimated 4,000 uniformed police and fire-fighters from Canada and the United States attended the funeral, marching to the lamenting music provided by massed pipers and drummers while untold numbers of onlookers lined the sidewalks.

Necessary as respect and homage to the fallen may be one has to count the cost of food, transportation, and accommodation for so large a contingent of mourners. What purpose did so large a demonstration of sanctioned grief serve? And was the expenditure of so large an exhibition of sorrow borne from the public purse or did the police and fire fighting fraternities, their unions, societies or alliances bear the cost?

These are questions worth asking. With the brouhaha of the recent Toronto municipal election and the emphasis on need for fiscal prudence in mind, one would hardly call pageantry of the funeral parade modest and restrained.

Given the handling of protesters at last year’s G20 summit by the security forces, some might suspect the laying to rest of a slain police sergeant an opportune means of raising the public image of Toronto’s finest. One wonders.

According to the Harper government, a little under a thousand Canadian soldiers will stay on in Afghanistan to train the Afghan Army. Yet according to the usual unreliable sources, only 14 per cent of the Afghan Army is literate. It enjoys an attrition rate of about 3 per cent a month, which means that, to create an additional 28,000 soldiers, which is the plan, the Afghan government will have to recruit another 80,000 Afghans willing to serve. There’s an even greater problem never mentioned.

If only 14 per cent can read and write, how many have learned to speak English or how many of Canada’s training force of 850 soldiers can speak Pashtu (35%), Persian (Dari) or one of the other 35 languages of the country? Canadian bilingualism is no match for the Afghani multilingualism. The instructors will have to rely on interpreters.

How weird can military training get? In addition to the language obstacle, 850 Canadian soldiers training require a horde of support personnel to make sure they’re fed, clothed, paid, accommodated, entertained, get medical care and dosed with their spiritual uplift by the God squad – as anyone who has ever done military service well knows.

Military training is more than teaching soldiers on the firing range how to spread their legs to fire at targets against a sand bank, which is all we see in the news clips of military training. What is the real game plan? What purpose is being served? It’s enough to make anyone who’s ever worn a khaki uniform despair.