Grits’ peacekeeping view touts crater-sized holes

There is a planet, considerably closer to earth than Proxima Centauri B, where the spirit of red-shirted, Stephen-Harper-hating partisania lives on, undimmed by last year’s change of power. It is a land that time forgot, mystical and unsullied. It is a land of — oh heck, it’s at One Yonge Street, the editorial boardroom of the Toronto Star.

In this ineffable high country of the mind, the Canada of 30, 40 and 50 years ago lives on, as though locked in amber. Lester B. Pearson, jovial and stolid, bestrides a convention stage next to the electric young patrician, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Peacekeeping, Canada’s singular contribution to planetary justice, bestrides the world like a colossus.

Why, we had 3,300 soldiers in Cyprus, the Golan Heights, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia “in 1993 alone,” the

Star’s editorial enthused Sunday, as it celebrated Canada’s imminent return to its blue-helmeted United Nations supporting past.

But, could trouble be afoot? “Peacekeeping is more complicated now,” the editorial continues, with a world-weary droop to its rhetorical shoulders, “requiring a combination of military, political, humanitarian and development skills.”

The Star’s editorial writer gets tough on the former federal government, the one not currently sending any Canadian soldiers anywhere. “It’s wise to re-engage carefully, especially given Canada’s record of relative inaction in peace operations under former prime minister Stephen Harper.” This is, in a word, nonsense. A briefing book provided to Foreign Affairs minister Stephane Dion obtained by Postmedia’s David Akin via access to information, outlined the status quo ante — peacekeeping at the close of the Harper era.

There were five small Canadian “peace-support” missions then under way, under UN auspices, in October of 2015 — in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Haiti, Cyprus and Israel/Lebanon. Canada ranked 68th among 124 countries in troops contributions to UN operations and was the ninth-largest contributor, worldwide, to the UN’s annual peacekeeping budget, with an annual outlay just shy of US$240-million.

Additionally, Canadian soldiers were contributing in small numbers to the Multinational Force and Observers mission in the Sinai, the Office of the U.S. Security Co-ordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the NATO Kosovo Force, as well as European Union support operations in the West Bank and Ukraine. Hardly neglect. More importantly, this portrayal of Canadian military history contains bomb-crater-sized holes. It airbrushes the laudable peace-building aspects of the Afghan mission from 2002 to 2014, as well as the failures of peacekeeping in Somalia and Rwanda.

It was a Liberal government, that of Jean Chretien, that exacerbated the Somalia debacle with its shoddy handling of the aftermath, and its wrong-headed disbanding of the Airborne Regiment. The same government presided over the catastrophic failures of the Rwanda mission. It was also a Liberal government that launched the Afghan mission, both in its post-9/11 initial phase in 2002 and its more robust humanitarian and combat phase beginning in late 2005. Liberals backed the Afghan mission — until Stephen Harper took power in 2006, after which they began bashing it. The Prime Minister and foreign ministers are not to blame for a bad editorial. But they do share responsibility for perpetuating a false construct of a glorious peacekeeping past that hasn’t matched the reality of the past 25 years.

Should the coming deployments be ramshackle, rules of engagement prohibitive, these ministers will take the blame. And they will deserve it, having had ample occasion to learn from their predecessors’ mistakes — or talk to a few veteran sergeants, and hear them tell the reality of peacekeeping, versus the rosy myth.