How can you tell when the Harperites are behaving like Tea Partiers?

When the crew at Balloon Juice notices.

Welcome to the world stage.

Colossal Fossil of the Year "very comfortable" with waiting on the US

After the United States hammered out an agreement with 19 other major powers at an emergency meeting in Copenhagen to which Canada was not invited, Harper said Canada had been represented by the U.S. and "a group of close allies" :

"What will be most critical for Canada in terms of filling out the details of our regulatory framework will be the regulatory framework being developed in the United States.

The nature of the Canadian economy and the nature of our integrated energy markets is such that Canada and the United States need to be closely harmonized on this. If the Americans don’t act, it will severely limit our ability to act. But if Americans do act, it is absolutely essential that we act in concert with them."

This was Harper's first public statement at the conference. Previously Environment Minister Jim Prentice made a 3 minute speech in the middle of the night which did not mention targets.

Remember Harper's promise to put Canada back on the world stage?
After winning eight Fossil of the Day awards over two weeks at Copenhagen, Canada capped it off by getting the grand Colossal Fossil of the Year Award for being the worst-performing country at the talks and the "the country which has done the most day after day to prevent a climate treaty."

.

Canada repeatedly blocked progress on setting tough targets and committing to international financing for developing countries. While industrialized countries as a group must establish targets 25-40% below 1990 levels according to climate scientists, Canada's greenhouse gas emission reduction targets are the equivalent to 3% below 1990 levels by the year 2020 and even that is apparently negotiable.

.

So now I guess we'll just have to wait and see what the US wants Harper to do on the world stage next.

The way CNN views Harper

Apparently CNN sees Harper for what he is. As Jeff says, Canada's back baby! (Click to enlarge)

Where is the Quid Pro Quo?

The "Campaign Season" in Afghanistan is spreading. An Australian Special Air Service patrol was ambushed after a mission in Oruzgan province. While none of the Aussies were killed, one soldier is in critical condition and eight others were wounded, five of them seriously.

Before anyone shrugs their shoulders and moves off to refill the coffee cup, this report hit the Australian press on Thursday with a certain amount of alarm. This is the largest number of casualties the Australian task force in Afghanistan has taken in a single engagement since they initially deployed... and it immediately raised the ghost of another of Australia's wars.

AUSTRALIA has suffered one of its worst battlefield incidents since the Vietnam War, with one soldier left fighting for his life and eight others wounded in an ambush launched by Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

The lede in the Sydney Morning Herald was similar:

AN ambush of Australian troops in Afghanistan has left nine special forces soldiers injured - including one fighting for his life - in a battle that resulted in more casualties than any encounter since the Vietnam War.

Most other Australian media outlets used the same connection, referring to Australia's military involvement in Vietnam, with at least one giving a brief description of the 21 September, 1971, battle of Nui Le, a 14 hour engagement which left five Aussies dead and 24 wounded just six weeks before Australia ended its combat operations in Vietnam.

It was the reference to Vietnam which raised my curiosity. Not because I was suprised to see it, but because it was so prominent. The Australian involvement in Vietnam ran nearly as long as the United States, starting with the deployment of advisors and eventually reaching a peak of almost 7000 ground troops in 1967 which included a rifle company from New Zealand.

The Australian committment to Vietnam was less mysterious than one might think. Given Australia's proximity to Southeast Asia, weak and unstable governments immediately adjacent to them generate genuine concerns for the safety of their frontiers. Looking into it, I discovered this, sent to the prime minister of Australia from the Australian ambassador to the U.S.:

'Our objective should be ... to achieve such an habitual closeness of relations with the United States and sense of mutual alliance that in our time and need, after we have shown all reasonable restraint and good sense, the United States would have little option but to respond as we would want.'
'The problem of Vietnam is one, it seems, where we could ... pick up a lot of credit with the United States, for this problem is one to which the United States is deeply committed and in which it genuinely feels it is carrying too much of the load, not so much the physical load the bulk of which the United States is prepared to bear, as the moral load.'

So, the question of involvement in Vietnam had less to do with the unstable Diem government at the time and more to do with an opportunity to lever the United States into a position favourable to Australia in the future.

Countries do that. I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine when an itch develops. Mutual alliance.

Unfortunately, Australia's Vietnam history runs close to parallel with that the of U.S. in the same period, including resorting to conscription to fill army ranks and jailing protesters opposed to the war.

But it was the fact that Australia's primary reason for entry into Vietnam had little to do with Vietnam itself. It was to elicit a form of guarantee that Australia could demand U.S. military and political favour, quickly and without question, should the need ever arise. As ugly as it sounds, the Australian government was prepared to, and did, shed the blood of its own people in a conflict in which they had less than serious interest to enhance the relationship with the United States, gain a position under the U.S. military umbrella and develop a level of influence.

It struck me that perhaps a similarity exists now with Canada's involvement in Afghanistan. That Harper is trying to gain leverage with the Bush administration.

Except that Harper is accomplishing the opposite.

Harper is giving it away for free. He's not asking for anything. No ties have been strengthened and no influence has been gained.

Harper, like a six-year old looking for praise, is happy with a pat on the head. Far from attempting to establish a position of sovereign independence he's more than happy to truck anything the Bushies demand to anywhere the Bushies want. In return he is demanding, and getting, zip.

Even in Afghanistan the rotating command, which saw Canada in charge of operations in its AO every six out of eighteen months, is about to evaporate. Future U.S. plans include placing Canadian forces under U.S. or British command.

When Harper went with Bush to Bucharest whining for more troops from the NATO allies the response was predicatable. The long established European NATO members view every such U.S. plea with great skepticism. They know all too well that favours are seldom returned in such cases and particularly from the current U.S. administration. The NATO members that did offer to increase their committment were the newer ones. There is every reason to believe that the backroom session was not a negotiation but a reminder: We got you into this alliance, it's good for you and now you owe us. Cough up.

Harper's leverage wasn't there. His position on his beloved "world stage" was wholly dependent on the presence of his divine hero. If the Bush administration position had been different, Harper would have found himself several rows back in the audience, the major European allies being at odds with his demands.

Where the Australians were clearly looking for a way to enhance their national security and international influence by supporting the United States (Vietnam was a "fill-in-the-blank" conduit), Harper is out to stroke his own ego. Canada is little more than an instrument to sate his thirst for validation from something or someone he views as greater.

Harper is embarrassing this country.

It was difficult enough in the past to get the average European or Asian to believe there was a difference between the U.S. and Canada on any level. It took some convincing to get most to believe that Canada pursued an independent foreign policy and, aside from the well-known mutual defence alliances, cautiously engaged countries the United States shunned.

Since the arrival of Harper the independence of Canadian foreign policy has started to wither away. Where Canada once had international leverage it is now viewed as uncharacteristically tied to the U.S. The greatest evidence of this is Canada's apparent adhesion to U.S. positions taken at various United Nations conferences and on issues before the UN.

Harper hasn't earned Canada any new position on the "world stage" at all. We used to have a well-respected, albeit quiet, place all along. What Harper has gained is a place for himself among his American neo-con brethren on the "American stage" and given the degree to which the U.S. is now loathed internationally, it is not only the wrong place to be, it is, at absolute best, temporary.

What is even more incomprehensible is that Harper does not seem to understand that his position as a player on the American stage is so obviously insignificant. His ego won't allow him that self-examination or that self-awareness.

Australia, during Vietnam at least, expected something in return for their support of U.S. foreign policy. Whether that actually worked for them or not is open to considerable debate. Whether Harper's similar behaviour has resulted in anything but a pillaging of Canada's resources, the co-opting of our military and a loss of international favour, is not.

==============

Only slightly related to topic is this little piece from Australia. It seems the Australian army is also being scrutinized for their treatment of prisoners.

Brace yourself for the stage hook, Steve.

As we endure the continuing bombardment of Canada's Back from Steve and his band of amateurs and as they continue to slaver quixotically over some fancifully perceived position on the World Stage, we must also suffer the effects of having sunshine blown up our collective asses. Speaker after speaker from National Defence and Foreign Affairs, both uniformed and civilian, when they provide any information at all on the Afghanistan mission, tell us of the wonderful progress being made - with no supporting metrics.

How great are things really? This great.

The United States is planning to take control of all military operations in Afghanistan next year with an Iraq-style troop surge after becoming frustrated at Nato’s failure to defeat the Taliban.

Plans are being drawn up to send as many as 15,000 extra troops to Afghanistan with a single US general always in command, as in Iraq, defence sources said.

The Pentagon is also pushing for a permanent “unified command” in the south of the country that would sideline the Dutch and the Canadians.

At present, control of the south is rotated between the British, Dutch and Canadians, the three countries that provide the bulk of the troops.

From October next year, when the UK will take over from the Dutch, command of the south is expected to alternate between the British and the Americans.

That would be an international demotion in the grand scheme of things and, given that the Harperites' limited view of the World Stage is confined to something of a military performance venue, that would be something of a kick in Stevie's nuts?

What will this do for Harper's quest for a leading position in the parade? You know, the glorious victory parade where the leaders of the masses stand on the stage, feed their narcissistic egos and compare penises. Because it must never be forgotten that despite Harper's quacking on about any number of reasons for being in Afghanistan, his real reason is to find validation for himself among his southern conservative brethren.

Despite the fact that Americans won't willingly serve under any other national command, a good deal of why plans are being made to sideline Canadian leadership may rest with the Canadian leadership itself. If there had truly been progress made in southern Afghanistan while forces were under Canadian command the Pentagon would be insane to eliminate a rotation of Canadian leadership. This plan could easily be read to suggest that Canadian military leadership on the ground was left wanting. It also didn't help matters when General Walter Natynczyk, as the newly minted Chief of Defence Staff, started painting a totally unsupported rosy picture while everyone else was stating clearly that the security situation in Afghanistan was rapidly deteriorating.

Let's not forget one other very salient fact: NATO was lied to by the Bush administration as to the security situation in Afghanistan when it took over military leadership. When ISAF took over command of the Afghanistan theatre NATO had been advised that it was primarily a bolstered peacekeeping operation. The result was too few troops, ill-equipped forces and a belief that the primary role of the occupying forces would be to train the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police. The US had advised NATO that al-Qaeda was no longer a threat and the Taliban had been essentially neutralized.

In any case, brace yourself Harper. You're about to get yanked.

Hat tip Buckdog