Tragic Charleston S.C.

Charleston, South Carolina and another tragedy.  Charleston is a beautiful city with such an interesting history.  My family and I lived there in 1974 – 75 on military exchange duty.  You could still see so much of that history in the city and surroundings. 

Charleston was one of the prizes that instigated the southern portion of the American Revolutionary war.  The eventual success of the revolutionists in this theatre led directly to the final defeat of the British at Yorktown.  Charleston was also the site of the first shots of the Civil War, that most tragic event of American history.  The Union forces had been forced out of all of the other military facilities throughout the seceding states, but still hung on to Fort Sumpter, an island fortress in the middle of Charleston harbour.  The new Confederacy had decided that this was as good a place as any to start the fight for secession.  The fort was surrendered after two days of bombardment and Charleston had a couple of years free of warfare except for its place as one of the South’s principal ports for import and export, and for the dispatch of Confederate raiders to the high seas.  The Union Army returned in 1864 and after capturing some of the coastal forts around Charleston, began a long, slow advance that culminated in the capture of the city near war’s end.  When we drove from our house on the south shore of the Ashley River down to the beach on Folly Island, you could look off to the side of the road and still see the indentations from the trenches as they advanced inland.

The other tragic part of Charleston history was the slave trade.  Charleston was a major port of entry for African slaves and you can still see the two block long three story high stone building which was the slave market.  It stands in the middle of the city.  Or you can visit one of the old plantations such as Middleton Gardens which showed up in the early scenes from the movie, Gone with the Wind.  As you drive up the front road to the estate you see the famous twelve oaks lining the way, and behind them the small, brick slave houses.  Plantation owners didn’t hide their slaves from view; they showed them off to indicate their wealth. 

After the Civil War and the 13^th amendment, their came the inevitable racial tension which is obviously alive and well to this day.  Three incidents while we lived there illustrate the way things were in the 1970’s and may still be today.  In the summer of 1974, the command where I worked had been moved from Newport, Rhode Island to Charleston.  One our members was an African American Petty Officer.  I asked him how he felt about moving to the south from New England.  His answer was that at least in Charleston he knew what kind of prejudice to expect.  This was probably also true for our commanding officer, then Rear Admiral Sam Gravely, the first black admiral in the US Navy, who refused to move his wife and son the Charleston. The second incident involved a US Navy Chief Petty Officer who was retiring and wanted to move to a house he had built in another state and was therefore trying to sell his house in Charleston.  The buyer was an African American doctor and his family.  When the neighbours found out, they did everything they could to persuade the Navy man not to sell his house to these people, including harassment and vandalism.  The Navy man held out saying that he fully intended to sell the house to this perfectly respectable couple. One weekend before the sale went through and while the Navy person was out of town, the house was mysteriously burned down.  And the final incident, which may have indicated a slight change in mood, happened one weekend when the Klu Klux Klan decided to hold a rally in a field on the outskirts of town.  It was undoubtedly a fine affair complete with the burning of a large cross.  But the next day, in the Charleston newspaper, there was an article by a regular columnist who called himself Ashley Cooper (a play on the fact that Charleston stands between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers) making fun of the Klan gathering, pointing out how archaic it all seemed in that day and age.  And the newspaper was not even burned down the next day. 

But the racial tension was still there and appears to be to this day.  The shooting at a famous old African American church this past week clearly illustrates that fact.  And this only a few weeks after a white policeman gunned down and killed a black man in North Charleston.  People may ask how a 21 year old man can pick up such violently racial ideas.  But there was a line from a show tune from many years ago that hate had to be taught . . . carefully taught.  So maybe the young man’s father should be standing trial too.  Prejudices are too often picked up as we grow up from the words and examples shown by our parents and their friends.  Nobody is born with prejudices.

So when you think about how you bring up your children and the examples you set, think about the recent tragedies of Charleston, South Carolina.

Thoughts on the Middle East

So, we have extended our military contribution to the fight against the Islamic State (IS) to include air strikes against targets in Syria. Many think that this is a violation of International Law and equivalent to a declaration of war against that country.  They probably have a good case.  “But”, say the apologists, “the U.S. and other countries are doing it.”  To which I say, “So what?  Don’t you remember as a parent telling your children that just because other kids were doing something didn’t mean that they had to do it too?”

But the Middle East and this war is much more serious than all that.  One of the most disturbing things I have heard recently was the statement by our esteemed Defence Minister, Jason Kenney, acknowledging that he did not know what the outcome would be or what would constitute victory or at least closure of the mission.  The most important things you need to determine before going to war, and our Defence Minister doesn’t know the answers.  That is scary.

I would suggest that the west has never really understood the Middle East.  It mostly ignored it for many centuries after the Crusades where it represented a different religion and culture.  It was considered exotic but not very important.  Meanwhile the west went through many years of internal warfare and western expansion into the Americas.  The Middle East was finally “rediscovered” after the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.  Suddenly there was a need to map out “spheres of influence” in the region, with France and Great Britain vying for spheres and buffers depending upon their strategic and economic interests.  Whereas in Europe, with the defeat of Germany and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the people were able to determine to some extent, their own fate thanks to the Wilsonian idea of self-determination, in the Middle East, the people were given no such option.  So you ended up with borders that took no account of ethnic or religious difference.  Thus you have countries like Iraq with Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish peoples and too frequently leaders who came from one of the minority groups.  All the while, the western countries tried to influence the political shape of each country.  If you didn’t like the current king/president/prime minister, just arrange a coup to get the one you want.  The U.S. joined this game after the Second World War when the area’s oil became so attractive.  But as long as there were strong men in power and the west kept a lid on things, tensions in each country could be kept in check. 

Even the First Gulf War didn’t disturb the status quo very much, largely because the west had a specific goal, namely get Iraq out of Kuwait, and they stuck to it. For that we have to thank President George H.W. Bush for not being goaded into something more wide-spread.  But then came the Iraq War, the brainchild of Bush the younger (but certainly not the wiser).  The U.S. and its allies thought that this was just going to be a nice surgical little war to oust Sadam Hussein and instantly make the country a democracy.  Thus there was no specific war planning or, more importantly, peace planning.  The US forces started making mistakes right off the bat.  For the first year, the military and civilian authorities hardly spoke to each other.  Each side had a different approach to the problem.  After the first couple of months the land battle had supposedly ended. President Bush the younger told us that under a “Mission Accomplished” banner while aboard an aircraft carrier sailing off San Diego on May 1, 2003. Then the real war, the insurgency, got started.  The coalition forces, except for a few insightful people, did not recognize this.  They still thought of themselves as liberators and just occupying the country until a peaceful turnover could take place. Plans were well under way before the end of 2003 for a major drawdown of forces.  It didn’t work.  The insurgency got worse and worse and the allied forces didn’t know how to deal with it.  Some allies fell by the wayside recognizing that this was not what they had signed up for.  So the U.S. had to send more and more troops, both to replace allied forces but also to deal with the growing insurgency.  As we now know, the last U.S. combat forces left Iraq less than two years ago and now they are back.

One of the problems that arose during the Iraq War was the question of what kind of war it was:  a conventional war; a civil war; or an insurgency.  You may ask what the difference is; a war is a war.  But the kind of war it is really guides how you deal with it.  In a conventional war you are trying to take territory and defeat an opposing army.  Western armies are good at that, and train and equip themselves accordingly.  That was what Iraq was supposed to be.  If it is a civil war, as an outsider, you probably don’t want to be there in the first place.  Civil wars tend to be bloody and cruel affairs, and any outside interference is going to be deeply resented by one or both sides.  Even a civilized nation like the United States took fifteen or more years to recover from its Civil War.  In a counter insurgency, however, you are not trying to gain land or defeat armies; you are trying to win people.  It calls for a very different approach by civilian and military leaders.  It must ensure security for the people you are trying to win over, not solely you own forces.  It involves infrastructure and making the people’s lives better.  And it must be done with the whole-hearted support of the leaders of the community you are trying to win over.  

Going back to Minister Kenny’s admission that the government does not know the strategy or end game of the current war against the IS, I think you can see the problem.  We don’t know what kind of war we are expected to fight there.  They say it is to cripple the IS, but how do you do that?  Just bombing and killing IS fighters is likely to get you more fighters, and if IS goes, there will be another group to follow. 

In his excellent book about the first three years of the Iraq War, “Fiasco” (The Penguin Press, 2006) Thomas E. Ricks postulates four scenarios about where that war could go after 2006.  In the best case scenario, the author cites the example of the Philippines where the insurgency following the Spanish American war was successfully put down after three years, but it then required the presence of US troops until after the Second World War, a period of 47 years.  The middling scenario uses the example of France in Algeria and Israel in Lebanon, both of which ended in success for the insurgents but unsatisfactorily for the occupying country.  In his worse scenario, the author (remember this was written in 2006) postulates civil war, partition and even regional war in and around Iraq.  What we are seeing now is the “worse” scenario with what amounts to a civil war encompassing two countries in the region, Iraq and Syria.  Oh, by the way, the fourth scenario was called the nightmare scenario and involved nuclear, biological and chemical warfare.

The idea that the west can somehow impose western style liberal democracy on the Middle East must be considered the height or arrogance.  Recent history must show even the most optimistic that that region is just not ready for it.  It took Western Europe hundreds of years to come to grips with its linguistic, ethnic and religious difference, and to then learn how to manage it all through democracies.  The US seems to think it is easy because it was handed democracy on a silver platter by the writings and examples of the British.  According to them, everyone should just be able to write a constitution at a convention and jump right into a functioning democracy.  It is hard to overcome the hundreds of years of autocratic governments and colonial powers that have ruled the Middle Eastern countries throughout their histories.  It will take time and will, but it must be instigated and embraced by the people themselves, not be outside powers.  That is the tragedy of the Middle East.  It is a region looking desperately for its own path, and all the while it is being attacked, invaded and interfered with by outsiders who just do not understand the area and its history.

I don’t know what the final answer to the Middle East’s problems is, but I’m almost positive it does not involve the “conventional” war approach that the west, including Canada, has embarked upon.

If you want to read further into this situation, I strongly recommend the book “Fiasco” that I mentioned above.  To see the Iraq War (should we now be calling it the First Iraq War?) from a closer perspective, I also recommend the book “The Good Soldiers” by David Finkel (Douglas and McIntyre Publishing, 2009).  This book follows the 15 month deployment of a US Army battalion in Baghdad in 2007 – 08 as part of George W. Bush’s surge.  It is the very personal story of the battalion commander and his men and is noteworthy to Canadian because of the many deaths and injuries caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) just as the Canadian Army faced in Afghanistan.  For a thorough background leading up to the current troubles,  I further recommend the book “Fields of Blood” by Karen Armstrong (sorry, no publishing information, but the book is still widely available), a writer I have admired for some time.  Ms. Armstrong’s book covers the long history of the interaction between religion and warfare.  It shows how various religions came into being and what their attitudes have been toward violence throughout their histories.  It clearly states how the current state of affairs in the Middle East came about.  And finally, if you want to understand the partitioning of the Middle East by European powers after the First World War, there is Canadian born historian Margaret MacMillan’s excellent book “Paris 1919” (Random House, 2001). 

Unpublished Letters

I have the bad habit of writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper.  Some get printed but many do not.  Some of these unpublished letters I thought were worth sharing, so here are three.

The first letter called “War or Peace” was written in response to an article about Stephen Harper’s apparent resolve to get us involved further in the war on ISIL.

“I could not agree more with Joseph Heath’s article (Stephen Harper, warmonger, Ottawa Citizen, March 21, 2015) when it comes to Stephen Harper’s view of war.  However, I would suggest that Mr. Harper’s conduct of current deployments amounts to tokenism.  A few planes here and a few there, plus a handful of special forces troops, but only in a training role, are but tokens to use as political pawns to “trap” opposition parties.  But this is to be expected in view of the Conservatives who seem to consider the military nothing more than a political prop. 

How else do you consider their bungling attempts at military procurement?  The only real results that they can point to are the procurement of transport aircraft and helicopters as a result of sole source contracts.  Every attempt at a competitive bidding process has been fraught with delays, rebids and failure.  The truth is, despite Conservative propaganda, that the Liberals have a much better record of starting and executing military procurement projects over the last 40 years than any of the so called ‘military friendly’ Conservative governments.

How else do you consider the fact that they have spent time trying to clothe our troops to look more like their Second World War contemporaries than they have to real military problems?  The reintroduction of the executive curl to Navy uniforms, and pips and crowns, not to mention the staff officers’ emblem on the collar, on army uniforms, has cost money with no discernable improvement to military readiness. The truth is that no current member of the Canadian Forces had previously had any experience with these baubles before they were announced with great fanfare. It reminds me of President Richard Nixon’s desire to have special fancy uniforms introduced for the White House military detail.  All show and no go.

The Conservative government under Mr. Harper seems to prove to the adage that old men (and now women) start wars, but young men (and now women) die in them.”

The second letter titled “When will he be ready” was in response to yet another article declaring that Justin Trudeau was not experienced enough to be Prime Minister.

“Once again, we have the now tired diatribe that Justin Trudeau “is not ready” to be Prime Minister (“Trudeau-esque” leader is not ready – Ottawa Citizen Letters, March 13, 2015).  It is becoming quite annoying to keep hearing this constant chant.  The question arises, when will he be ready in the minds of these people?  Would 10 years, or 20 years in Parliament be enough?  Must he go and run a corporation?  Or perhaps he must go back to school to become an economist (as if that has proven a winning strategy).  However, I suspect that none of the above would be enough to satisfy the politicians and their adherents of the grumpy old men . . . er, Conservative Party.  They have found a label and they will stick to it no matter what happens.

The truth is that Mr. Trudeau has impressed a major political party enough to win their leadership, he has brought a harmony to that party that it had not seen in several years, and he has prepared that party to contest the next federal election.  Oh, and he also won the support of almost 40% of voters.  If this is not enough, please tell me what else he must do to be taken seriously.”

The final offering concerns stories that HMCS Fredericton, while deployed with other NATO units in the Black Sea, was “buzzed” by Russian warplanes and shadowed by Russian warships.

“Keeping tabs on other nations’ ships is nothing new.  If Russian warships were to sail into Hudson Bay or the Gulf of Mexico, you would certainly expect to find the Canadian or American Navies shadowing them.  You would also expect our surveillance aircraft to fly by and probably take lots of pictures.  Russia sees the Black Sea in a similar light; international waters but close to home.  Such things have been going for years and were certainly a feature of the Cold War.  During my naval career I witnessed Russia, the US and Canada do the very same thing.  Sometimes ships got very close in what sometimes seemed like a game of chicken. This happened to one of the ships I served aboard.  While crossing the North Sea with a Canadian task group, a Soviet destroyer tried to impede our way.  The two ships came within a few hundred yards of each other at high speed before the other ship veered away.  Close encounters were so common in the Mediterranean between the US and Soviet Navies that they had to work out a series of rules and signals to avoid serious accidents.

Compared to this, the incidents in the Black Sea last week seem quite tame, a normal interaction.”

Hope you enjoy these letters and find them thought provoking.

Gord’s Update on the World

Here are few comments on the state of the world as seen by yours truly.

The war on ISIL

The government wants to extend and expand the war against the Islamic State and are now stating that anyone who opposes their position “lacks Canadian values”.  That’s a pretty blatant saying to the ones of who have served in the military of Canada and who do, in fact, oppose their view of this war.  To extend the war was probably not a surprise.  But the thing that bothers me is the expansion of the war into Syria.  Imagine if you will that some other country, in what they think is a legitimate cause, were to bomb Canada.  Would we not now believe that we were at war with that country?  Would we not expect our country to declare war on that other nation?  Would we not go to the United Nations and demand that they take action on the premise that the other country had broken international law?  So what makes us think that we are now above international law?  Should Syria now take action against us in some form or another, we would have nobody to blame but ourselves.

It surprises me that so many Canadians are, supposedly, behind this extension, or at least the government tells us so.  The assertion is somewhat borne out by the letters in the local paper.  But I wonder how many of these people have served in the military?  How many of these people have ever been in a war zone?  How many of these people know how much devastation one of the so-called “smart bombs” can cause?  How much collateral damage a 500 or 1000 pound can cause?  It all sounds so easy . . . smart bombs, precisely laid, hitting only the targeted people or things.  I wonder?  My memories of war are the two little boys I played with as a youngster in England after World War 2.  Of the three of us, we had three good eyes, and I had two of them.  The other three eyes had been destroyed by bomb blast.  Collateral damage indeed.

This Year’s Election

This year’s federal election, should it actually be held, is already being fought by all of the parties.  I say “if it is actually held” because technically, by ignoring their own law, the governing party could delay the election until the five year mark, which would be May 2016.  However, let us assume that the election is held as promised.  I see that the government is already trying to “buy” the election by timing the introduction of an expanded family daycare allowance to start three months before the election.  Isn’t this something the Reform/Conservative parties argued against a few years ago?

US Politics

Man, if we think politics is bad in Canada, we only have to look to the US.  The most recent indecent act must be the letter that 47 Republican senators signed and sent to Iran saying that any agreement reached on nuclear control in that country could or would be torn up after the Republicans win the next election.  Boy, you talk about hubris.  Several countries, not just the US, have been working on such an agreement for years, and now the rug has just been pulled out from under them in one dumb move.  The Republicans who signed the letter don’t even know what the final agreement will look like.  They have given Iran just cause to complain and to blame the US for failure to reach agreement.  It has to be the biggest propaganda coup that Iran has ever been presented on a silver platter.  Not only that, but it makes every other country wonder if any agreement with the US is worth anything.