Warring with peace

Every year in early November I buy another plastic poppy, pin it to my lapel, lose it, buy another one, maybe buy a third one, then the moment Remembrance Day passes hope I remember where I put it for next November. I never remember, so I buy another one, and so on. And I hardly ever wonder why that is the sum total of my commitment to our fallen soldiers. I pay taxes that put a quarter-tank of gas in the military engine. I buy raffle tickets any time the Royal Canadian Legion raps on the door. I drive past the local chapter and watch the elderly gentlemen — they’re always men — pitching horseshoes on the lawn, sharing a beer and a smoke, and as I watch them I never consider what bound them originally as I watch them, bound now by age, deteriorating health and fading memories.

Occasionally I get cranky at their crankiness, at their incessant call for respect and honour and recompense, and for the life of me I don’t understand why I begrudge them so. I had to take stock recently of why I didn’t care more about this. After all, my mother and stepfather were veterans, as were almost all my aunts and uncles and their mothers and fathers. My generation in the family has contributed a handful of men to the military. But the involvement remains an abstract and distant concept, no clearer to me than if my relatives were in neuroscience or botany. We don’t discuss that endeavour. It is almost a taboo, certainly a secondary subject in our primary lives. But I’ve come to believe there should be something more tangibly reverent and celebratory about the sacrifice.

When I visit America, I can barely walk a city block or drive a country mile without some testimony to the veterans. It is just what America is. I know, I know, America is the world’s policeman, the mightiest of fighting forces ever, and trumpeting the Armed Forces is rather like rooting for a great sports team. While Canada has had our missions and successes, we just don’t have the same substantive war history, or one of international leadership, or the masses to win the day in the modern age. Maybe America is the true exception, not the rule in the world, but when I visit Europe I have the same sense of solemn honour and tribute to the fallen.

When we stayed out of Iraq, we sent a mixed message. True, in hindsight it looks as if Americans were misled into accepting the notion that Iraq harboured weapons of mass destruction. More precisely, all that happened was mass destruction by weapons. Saddam Hussein was a convenient villain, and America didn’t want to wait a few more months for the UN to confirm or deny the apprehension of nuclear or biological weaponry. The season of oppressive heat and sandstorms was about to arrive, and the war would have been less winnable quickly in that event. So, away it went to war, without many other countries along for the ride and a great many important ones sitting on the sidelines or in harsh judgment. Much as I didn’t in the end come to agree with the war — at first I bought hook, line and sinker into the Iraqi menace spin — I also thought we needn’t have so distanced ourselves from the campaign.

If we believe in our country, if we believe in our ability to whisper into the ear of Americans and be their confidants, then we owed it to ourselves and our neighbours to stand shoulder to shoulder. The British did. They influenced the campaign, provided counsel to the Bush team, and in the end emerged as America’s truest friend in need. We watched 9/11 from the closest perch possible but it didn’t seem to us that our neighbour’s house was burning, so we stayed home when it came time to fight the fire. We lost our pole position as advisors. We didn’t have better intelligence than the Americans about Saddam, we just got lucky that they had bad intelligence. We shouldn’t be proud of this. We should just admit our good fortune in choosing to stay out of the fray. It made us look smarter than we were, and it might have turned out to be our darkest hour with an ally we will need forever.

When I reflected on Remembrance Day this year, it wasn’t with great pride in our accomplishment; rather it was with some embarrassment. We also missed our opportunity in this conflict to reach a new understanding of all conflict. We didn’t have a national debate. We didn’t bring the issue to our children, to our meeting halls, to our places of worship, to our Starbucks and Tim Hortons and Wendy’s. And this might be why I can admire America in this respect: It has debated war endlessly and ceaselessly and made it every bit the defining characteristic of nationhood. We got squeamish and expeditious when it came time to determine if we were going to support war this year. Our Prime Minister lectured the Americans a few times on their economy and their attitudes to the world, then spent little time galvanizing the land at a time we could have used a great national discussion. Instead, we almost mumbled our response to the call to arms. Polls suggested support for our national stand, but I think leadership in either direction would have won over public opinion.

Instead, we gave great comfort to anti-Americanism and did little or nothing to quell it once the military invasion took control of the country. And in the process, we dishonoured those of other generations who had fought for their country. We didn’t air our views and reach a decision. We didn’t look to our leadership for inspiration, or receive it when the pronouncement came that we wouldn’t align our meagre military with their monstrous one. We just stayed home, quiet as a mouse. And since then, all we have done is continue to discredit the concept of military service. We spend scandalously on the absurd and starve our soldiers. We hitch their lives to ancient equipment. We do not tout military life as a calling; indeed, we do little more than make it seem a repository of troubled or underachieving youth. We have no course of action to restore our capacity to play a role. We promise very little, because we can deliver almost nothing.

Our peacekeeping forces are stretched. Our future as a meaningful middle power might be jeopardized, because America’s trust might be in doubt. All we have is history. What we lack is destiny. Michael Moore is atop the bestseller list as America’s new anti-war icon for a reason. He has scooped with him almost everyone under the age of 35 without a parent of war. He has tapped into my children’s generation’s belief that war is wrong so no war can be right. I wonder if we might have earned my children’s respect if we had taught them more about the history of war, the nobility of sacrifice, and the understanding of alliances. I worry it’s a lost cause now.