Resentment mitigates Canada's instincts to help a friend

Prime Minister Jean Chretien dithered for months before deciding Monday on behalf of Canada to sit this war out. For people who value strong, crisp leadership, his protracted waffling was painful to watch. But to be fair, it was an exactly accurate representation of how 30 million Canadians think about this war.

Nobody does ambivalence better than Canadians. And Canada is deeply ambivalent right now, as the first U.S. bombing runs are made over Iraq.

Any number of conflicted Canadian attitudes are bumping into one another in the media, in the coffee shops and in people's hearts.

Neighborly instincts to help a true friend are tempered by simmering resentment about a Canada-U.S. relationship that started running off the rails well before 9/11.

Admiration for American attitudes in general collides with deep-seated misgivings about the core reasons for this war.

Recognition that Iraq is governed by a dangerous thug faces off against honest concerns about the well being of innocent Iraqi children.

And confidence that the United States will win the war is tempered with profound concern about whether it can nurture any sort of peace.

What does this have to do with the World Trade Center? A lot of Canadians don't see a link. Saddam is a ruthless tyrant and a manipulative menace. But if there is a case linking him irrevocably to 9/11, it has not yet been made.

The war on terrorists started on a groundswell of world sympathy 18 months ago. But if it is now going to morph into a war on anyone who threatens U.S. interests, who has hassled the United States in the past or who won't disarm when they are told to, this thing could get bigger than anyone suspected.

So Canada -- the middling, mild bystander to most world events -- is tied up in knots over this war. But if you have to make a call, it appears a majority of the country opposes another war with Iraq. The ambivalence stems from the fact that anyone who sits and thinks about this country for longer than five minutes realizes how closely and irrevocably Canada is tied to the United States.

This country's economy lives or dies by the U.S. economy and all the decision makers in the country know it. So their temptation to embrace the public's natural instinct for peace is tempered by the economic imperative to maintain some semblance of good relations with the all-powerful neighbor and biggest trading partner.

Canadians instinctively want peace. Canadian politicians, with a closer appreciation of how important the U.S. economy is to their own performance measurements, want smooth relations with the United States. So Chretien backed going to war only with a fresh United Nations resolution, knowing that such a thing was impossible by Monday.

Coalition of the willing? Count us out.

Coalition of the dillying? Count us in.

Despite all the concern about maintaining good relations, it hasn't been going very well lately.

Here's a crash course in the recent history of Canada-U.S. relations, taught from the northern side of the border.

Canada landed 200 U.S.-bound airliners and sheltered thousands of people in the panicked hours after the attack, then got left off the "thank you" list in President Bush's address to the world.

Bush welcomed to the White House the president of Mexico, whose U.S. trade is a fraction of Canada's, and says: "The United States has no more important relationship in the world than the one we have with Mexico." (The value of goods shipped at the Detroit-Windsor border crossing alone is worth more than the U.S. trades with any other country in the world.)

Bush spoke to a joint session of Congress after the attack, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair invited, and told the world "America has no truer friend than Great Britain."

Canada discussed the snubs, got over them and sent troops to Afghanistan. Only to see four of them killed and eight wounded in a tragic friendly fire incident triggered when a U.S. fighter pilot bombed them.

A few months later, the prime minister's press secretary -- the same woman who minimized the president's snub by saying Canada's contribution goes without saying -- called the president a "moron" in an unguarded moment with a reporter and had to forfeit her job.

Then one of the prime minister's members of Parliament, a particularly mouthy one, had a similar unguarded moment and said into a microphone, "Damn Americans. Hate those bastards."

Underlying all these episodes is a lumber trade dispute that's starting to look like the 100 Years War, and the fact that Chretien and Bush just don't click. They're not simpatico.

Nonetheless, the war is on. There's not much doubt here about the outcome.

The United States will crush Iraq in fairly short order. Saddam will respond like a cornered rat and either be killed or disappear. There will be atrocities and accidents, but there will be a regime change in fairly short order.

After that, no one knows. Not only is Iraq's future a mystery but so is the future of the Middle East, NATO and the United Nations.

And remarkably enough, after more than a century of friendship so close it was taken for granted, so too is the future of relations at the 49th Parallel.

Les Leyne is a political columnist for the Victoria Times Colonist in British Columbia. His column "On the Ledge" appears four times weekly.

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