Naomi Klein's Latest Cause

In today's Globe and Mail essay Naomi Klein, doyenne of the left, is perched high on her soap-box megaphone in hand and calling for Canada to declare the U.S. guilty of war crimes for its pursuit of the war in Iraq. She contends this is how Canada could assert real power and “strut upon the world stage” along with France and Germany. That she sees herself at the forefront of the sans-culotters who would strut victorious should such a result be forthcoming, is obvious to anyone who reads Ms. Klein's anti-American screed.

The apparatus by which Ms. Klein claims Canada should assert its power is our Immigration and Refugee Board. According to its website the IRB's mission is "to make well-reasoned decisions on immigration and refugee matters, efficiently, fairly, and in accordance with the law." Thankfully, the government intervened and reminded the IRB of its mission, resulting in a ruling that the legality or illegality of the Iraqi war was not relevant to the case before it.

The case is that of U.S. army deserter Jeremy Hinzman who seeks refugee status to avoid his forced return to the U.S. to face a court martial. He now asserts in the alternative that he is entitled to refugee status because the U.S. is guilty of “systemic” violations of International law. Ms. Klein enthusiastically supports his cause and claims that Mr. Hinzman's star witness, a former Marine Sergeant named Jimmy Massey and the New York Times coverage of Abu Ghraib will present ample proof of U.S. guilt in these war crimes.

She laments the fact these “crimes” may never be tried because the U.S. refuses to subject itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. She seeks to further bolster Mr. Hinzman’s case for refugee status by endorsing his argument that the Iraq war is illegal because it did not have U.N. sanction. Apparently no fan of the presumption of innocence with respect to anything to do with the American administration or its policies, Ms. Klein's article throughout assumes the proof of these crimes and even accuses Canada of moral duplicity for not taking a stronger stand on this "illegal war".

To augment the rebarbative nature of Ms. Klein’s commentary (she knows no other style of commentary when it comes to the Americans), the editors of the Globe and Mail chose to accompany the text with a cartoon by Jenkins of a colony of beavers surrounding a flagpole upon which is flying the Stars and Stripes. Two are chewing on the flag and one is chomping on the flagpole. How clever, how neighbourly!

The New York Times or Washington Post would be forgiven if tomorrow they displayed a cartoon of the American Eagle gleefully landing in her nest with a plaintive pleading beaver in her talons, her hungry chicks eagerly awaiting the feast. Thankfully, the American administration and its supporters will pay as little attention to Ms. Klein is does the elephant to a gnat. The same can't be said for Ms. Klein's many followers in the U.S. media and the self-professed intelligentsia of the American and Canadian left.

Ms. Klein’s stated goal is to end the war in Iraq, but it is obvious she has a much bigger agenda. In her sub-text she adjures her followers to seek the humiliation and utter defeat of the U.S. in Iraq where she claims so indelicately it is already “hemorrhaging (coalition) members”. She remains, as always, mute with regard to what semblance of order would fill the vacuum should the U.S. pull out tomorrow, and offers no insight into how the Iraqi people would be better off if Saddam loyalists returned to power (or better still Saddam, since if the war was illegal surely his arrest and confinement is illegal and he should be returned to power and given access to the billions he and his U.N. friends stole from Canada and all the other contributors to the Oil for Food Program).

Her hope is that a desperate attempt by a cowardly deserter to avoid the consequences of his cowardice (he did after all volunteer for the Army, and armies are known to have to fight from time to time),by pleading for refugee status before a Canadian tribunal made up of Liberal political appointees, might open the floodgates to other cowardly U.S. soldiers who don’t want to fight to seek refuge in Canada.

She ends with the vision of Canada once again becoming a “haven for war resisters” and thus doing something major to help end the war.Too young to have jostled through the picket lines of Vietnam protests, Ms. Klein is eager to make Iraq its doppelganger and to bring the U.S. to its well deserved Gotterdammerung.

Ms. Klein may have hit on something here. A cursory review of Canadian Immigration Appeal Board rulings would reveal much more bizarre decisions than the finding Ms. Klein hopes for. Is there a more confused department of government than Immigration, as the recent and spreading revelations of our official policy toward the urgent need to fill the many stripper bars of Canada with poor Rumanian women surely attest?

Is there a country that reveres the role of the U.N. more than Canada despite overwhelming evidence of the corruption and amorality which grips that body? This same UN “whose very raison d'etre rises from the ruins of Auschwitz and Belsen, and has never produced a single resolution dedicated to combating anti-Semitism or a report devoted to this devastating global phenomenon.” Should any of us be surprised if the Board ruled in Hinzman’s favour?

To the left, Ms. Klein is a bright and shining star. She was proudly marching today alongside folks sporting placards of great erudition such as: Bush/Hitler and a swastika, Fuck Bush, and Bush – War Criminal. She and her followers would revel at the sight of George Bush in the docket alongside Saddam Hussein and Milosevic, an earnest Louise Arbour as the prosecutor.

To this Canadian, Ms. Klein and her comrades are an embarrassment we must tolerate as proof of our belief in democracy and the freedom of speech. The lamentable reality is that any American who watches Canadian television or reads Canadian newspapers with the occasional exception of the National Post, will conclude that the vast majority of Canadians must agree with Ms.Klein. The even more depressing possibility is that they may be right!

Meanwhile the suicide bombings, the kidnappings, and the beheadings continue. The small band of heavily armed and fanatical terrorists persists in their assault on the Iraqis who seek to create a stable environment in which to hold elections. In the face of these realities Ms. Klein and her followers stand like the three monkeys. Instead they don their ballaclavas and dance around their jungle fire of protest chanting incantations against the evil American empire, while their favoured arbiter of international justice, the U.N., fulminates against the U.S. and Israel, and obfuscates in response to efforts of investigators to uncover the identity of the beneficiaries of the Oil-For-Food scam.

This all reminds me David Stove's theory that "after the 2nd World War, any possibility of resistance to communist expansion rested almost entirely upon America: no other country possessed both the requisite military capacity and the willingness to use it. But the outcome of the Vietnam war showed that, while America's capacity for such resistance remained intact, her willingness did not. For that war was lost, not through defeat of American soldiers in the field, nor yet through treachery among them, but through a massive sedition at home."

The Bin-Ladens, Zarqawhi's and Iranian mullahs are counting on history repeating itself with Iraq, and Naomi Klein is one of their greatest allies.