I fear we Canadians are ill-suited to this Afghanistan mission. We lack the mindset. Let me illustrate the mindset needed. U.S. President George Bush is under pressure over Iraq, with grisly slaughters daily and his own Baker commission telling him to urgently act. So he announces he is postponing action till next year. U.S. midterms and polls show a mass desire to pull forces out. So both parties talk about “surging” troops, i.e., adding more.

Instead of taking responsibility for a “grave” and “deteriorating” situation, they blame Iraqis. “We should put the responsibility for Iraq’s future squarely where it belongs — on the Iraqis,” said Democratic Senator Carl Levin.

Those Iraqi slackers, meanwhile, want U.S. troops out, soon, by huge majorities. Sixty-one per cent support attacks on U.S. soldiers. Fifty-eight per cent say a withdrawal soon would lessen violence. So the U.S. threatens to leave unless Iraqis “pull up their socks” (fired defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld).

It makes no sense: You threaten to do what they want, i.e., leave, but you plan to stay. All in the holy name of building democracy? How do you learn to think that way? Where do they, at least their leaders, get the chutzpah?

Yale professor Immanuel Wallerstein says the leaders of both parties believe the U.S. is “the centre of the world, the font of wisdom, the great defender of world freedom.” That is the true mentality of empire, with a long past and massive power to back it up. The pairing of real might with certainty of being right leads to Iraq, again and again.

That was UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s point, more or less, in his farewell speech this week, when he criticized the U.S. for neglecting human rights and abandoning America’s own principles. “He’s being a bit harsh,” said one of the “American Voices” in The Onion, “We were never that principled to begin with.”

But what about us? Canadians don’t really get it, including our leaders. When the NDP called for talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which is becoming our Iraq, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay scoffed, “Is it next going to be tea with Osama bin Laden?” — proving again that he was the dumb blond in the relationship with Belinda.

United Kingdom Foreign Minister Kim Howells needed to visit Ottawa to explain: “It’s what we had to do in Northern Ireland. We had to talk to people who … were terrorists … If you don’t do it … you won’t succeed.” That’s the voice of experienced empire.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper went to a NATO meeting in Riga to demand more support but didn’t get it, especially from the players with imperial experience: France, Germany, Italy. Why not? Well, it’s the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Could they have found Kabul a bit distant? Besides, NATO currently has 31,000 troops there, a fifth of what the Soviets had, when they got run out of town. Maybe they’re wiser about rushing in and getting stuck than Stephen Harper is.

This week Canadian forces in Kandahar killed another Afghan on a motorbike. It’s been reported that he wasn’t young and clueless; he was 90 (or possibly 106) and a local celeb. He was on his way to see his former pupil, President Karzai! Afghan troops waved him through, but the anxious Canadians say they tried to warn him and wound up shooting him dead. If you’re going to withstand that kind of catastrophic gaffe, you’d better be loaded with ego and ammo, like the U.S. Otherwise, you back off, like the Europeans, knowing it’s a situation that’s bound to go wrong.

We will remain tarred with the American imperial brush in Afghanistan. We went in behind their need to attack someone after 9/11 and their frantic “hunt for bin Laden,” in the course of which they bomb wedding parties (and our troops) and don’t fret much over it. They are the U.S.

What I don’t get is what was wrong with our earlier military roles, despite the scepticism of Generals Rick Hillier and Lewis MacKenzie. Since Canadian Major Paeta Derek Hess-von Kruedener died on a Lebanese hilltop as a UN truce observer in Lebanon during the war last summer, we’ve rarely heard of him. Yet he was a model soldier and hero. He stuck to his post, did his duty, and there was nothing imperial about it.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.