saudi arabia

NewsPolitics

It happened. Justin Trudeau has gone from the Selfie Prime Minister to the Photobombing PM. At least that’s what it seemed like yesterday.

He was speaking (and I use that term liberally, he really didn’t get to talk much) at a Youth Labour Forum in Ottawa. Most of the assembled crowd, though, seemed less interested in Trudeau’s platitudes then they were in speaking up on his inaction or potentially wrong action on several fronts.

They were upset over what his signing onto the Trans-Pacific Partnership would mean for their job prospects and the effects of “precarious work” which Trudeau said is now a fact of life. They also challenged Trudeau on his broken election promises, saying “we don’t have dialogue with liars.”

At one point, a group of attendees literally turned their backs on the PM because they felt he had turned his back on them. This led to the image you see at the top where it looks very much like Trudeau is an unwanted part of the photo.

Overall, it hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for Trudeau. On Monday, about 200 protesters showed up on Parliament Hill upset with the prospect of our Prime Minister approving the Kinder-Morgan Pipeline. Close to 100 of them were arrested.

Last week, just after celebrating one year in office, Trudeau made the argument that the fact that he won the last election meant electoral reform was no longer urgently needed. The irony of this stance wasn’t lost on many, including Hill Times cartoonist Michael De Adder:

trudeau-rigged-system-trump-cartoon

Trudeau Had a Long Honeymoon

Up until a few weeks ago, things had been running real smoothly for our PM. Sure, there were attacks, but most of the ones which garnered major media attention came from the right and were over ridiculous things like him posing for shirtless selfies or progressive things like an MP (who has since passed away) trying to make the lyrics to O Canada gender-neutral.

The only time the NDP made a go at him that garnered mass coverage, it failed. It was supposed to be about his strongarm political tactics, but it ended up being about the physical movements of his actual arm, or elbow, when in Parliament.

That’s not to say there weren’t valid progressive reasons to criticize Trudeau over the past year. This self-proclaimed feminist let the previous Harper Government’s arms sale to Saudi Arabia go through and even relaxed our policy to make it possible.

Meanwhile, the Trudeau Government’s attempts to “modernize” the National Energy Board have amounted to nothing more than committees studying problems with no concrete action. The NEB, of course being the organization that Harper had chosen to evaluate pipeline proposals after abolishing the Environmental Assessment Agency.

So, progressive criticisms of Trudeau, until recently, have been focused on Harper policies that the Liberal Government has been ineffective in getting rid of. Not nearly enough to ruin Trudeau’s mainstream progressive cred at home, given the fact that his government has made some significant improvements on what the previous administration was doing.

It also hasn’t been anywhere close to something that could spoil his rep abroad. I constantly see Facebook friends living in the US and other countries as well as foreign progressive media jealously praising our Prime Minister and wishing he could be their head of state.

I always want to burst the bubble, but then think better of it, because at least his rhetoric is better than what 90% of politicians they have to deal with spout. Fortunately, Jesse Chase wasn’t as cautious when he wrote about Canada and our superstar PM in The Guardian.

While I don’t think Trudeau’s honeymoon with the world will end anytime soon, especially given the nastiness in the US Presidential Election, his sunny ways love-in with progressive Canadians may be about to come to an end. The downfall started when when he clearly stated that a $15/hr minimum wage was not a currrent goal of his administration.

Think about that for a second. This is now part of the official Democratic Party platform in the US. Sure, Bernie Sanders forced the issue and pushed Hillary Clinton in that direction, and there’s no proof that she will actually fight for it if elected. But if a corporate centrist running to be leader of a centre-right country can be cajoled into running on a $15/hr minimum wage, then what business does the self-billed progressive global heartthrob leader of a centre-left country have in rejecting it?

It was a long honeymoon for Trudeau, but is it now really over, or at least ending? Does the Emperor now really have no clothes, and not in a fun shirtless selfie kinda way? Maybe.

Dear Mr. Prime Minister

Now, I’d like to shift gears and speak directly to our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

Take a look around you, sir. The people turning their back (literally) on you and the people being arrested for getting a little too close to your place of business aren’t Conservatives. They aren’t even jaded lefties like me who vote NDP, sometimes while holding our noses because the leader is not progressive enough.

These are your people. People who voted for you in hopes that you would change things. They wanted to get rid of Harper and his rhetoric, which you have done, but, most importantly, they wanted to throw his policies away, too, and you, sir, have failed to do that.

Does your feminism include arms sales to Saudi Arabia because it’s 2016? Are Kinder-Morgan and Harper’s NEB part of your sunny ways? Have you given up on improving the condition of workers in this country? Can you really use your government’s popularity as an excuse to backpedal on electoral reform when that popularity seems to be waning, or rather plummeting, among former ardent supporters?

I’ll admit I was skeptical of you from the start and I’m sad to report that you have justified my skepticism. I’m a lost cause for you, but it’s not too late, though, for you to win back your former voters and live up to the false impression many have of you. It’s not that hard, either.

Just make your policies match your rhetoric and you can continue the honeymoon until the next election. Otherwise, the honeymoon’s over and things are gonna be kinda awkward before they’re downright unpleasant.

NewsPolitics

Canada’s arms deal with Saudi Arabia was a breach of its own military export policies. Thanks to a few tweaks in a document from the Department of Global Affairs, it’s not anymore.

The government recently released the 2014 and 2015 versions of the Report on Exports of Military Goods for Canada. On Monday, the Globe and Mail  revealed that they contain a few relevant edits, findings which were later confirmed by the Canadian Press and Le Devoir. It’s only three small changes in wording of a relatively obscure Global Affairs document, but they are indicative of the dangerous direction our arms trade policies are taking.

The section clarifying the goals of the control on exports of military equipment has been altered in two places.

Previous versions said that controls intended to ensure that military exports would not be “diverted to ends that could threaten the security of Canada, its allies or other countries or people.” Mentions of “other countries or people” have been edited out as it now only refers to “Canada, its allies or civilians.”

Yemen, for example, is another country, but not an ally. Therefore, the matter of Saudi Arabia using Canadian military equipment for shady operations in Yemen is officially none of Ottawa’s business.

The only sentence explicitly allowing Ottawa to restrict military exports has also been erased.  Hence, export controls are no longer meant to “regulate and impose certain restrictions” but to “balance the economic and commercial interests (with Canada’s) national interests.”

Furthermore, where it previously stipulated that “wide-ranging consultations are held” as a mandatory step, it now only mentions that they “may be included.”

The document still includes a general rationale for the control of military exports, in which the notions of ethics and concern for human rights remain untouched, but with no practical mandate tied to them. The power of regulating or restricting shipments of military goods to that effect has been edited out. In fact, there is no mention of restricting or regulating exports anywhere in the entire document.

The report still reads like a spirited commitment to ensuring that exports of Canadian arms do not threaten peace, security or human rights. This little rewriting just deprived it of any teeth.

Still, the authors did not dare to keep claiming that “Canada has some of the strongest export controls in the world;” which was the opening statement of previous versions. The sentence was substituted by the assertion that Canada’s export controls were “rigorous” and “in line with our allies.”

“For Clarity”

The liberals maintain that the edits were made only for “clarity, length and exactitude.”  The fact that all of them also serve to legitimize the massive sale of armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia is probably just a happy coincidence.

Trudeau’s government authorized the $15 million deal in April, despite strong popular and political opposition.  Saudi Arabia’s lousy human rights record and its unsanctioned military intervention in Yemen should have disqualified it from the global arms trade. Both the International Arms Trade Agreement and the Directives of Exports of Military Goods of Canada – at the very least- implied as much.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Stéphane Dion pleaded that the armoured vehicles were to be used to fight off ISIS and not against Saudi or Yemeni civilians. If the contrary was reliably demonstrated, Canada could rescind the deal, he promised.

Footage of Canadian equipment used in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is accused of breaching international law, apparently, was not considered substantial proof.  In June, Canadian-made tactical gear was used in a violent house raid in a neighbourhood mainly inhabited by Saudi Arabia’s oppressed Shia community. The debate over the arms deal had mostly died down by then and although it received moderate coverage, there was no political response.

If it wasn’t before, it is now clear that the Trudeau government never had any intention of backing off on its arms trade with Saudi Arabia. In fact, they seem committed to moving the country on its path to becoming one of the world’s biggest arms dealers.

Canada’s exports of military goods (outside the US) rose by 89% during the Harper years and the $15 million deal with Saudi Arabia further increased this number. Canada is now the most important arms exporter in the Middle East, after the United-States. The path might have been set by the Conservatives, but the Liberals are running down it at full speed.

* Featured image taken by Staff Sgt Christine Jones, Wiki Creative Commons

News

This past Sunday, with the backdrop of the escalating events in Iraq, Tony Blair, former British prime minister and prominent supporter of the 2003 Iraq invasion, set out on a crusade on his blog to justify a second western intervention in Iraq, just eleven years after the first bullets were fired in March 2003.

In his blog post, faithful to himself and his blatant intellectual dishonesty, Blair made the case that the current situation of Iraq had little, if not nothing at all, to do with the nine year occupation of the country by the “coalition of the willing”. This of course was spearheaded none other than himself and his American partner in crime, former President of the United States of America George W. Bush.

It appeared clearly through Blair’s lyrical rendition, that if fault for the current unrest in Iraq laid with anyone, it was certainly with Iraq’s political elite and the Islamic fundamentalists under the banner of Islamic state in Iraq and the Sham —aka ISIS. Later during the week, this statement was echoed by current American President Barrack Obama, who stated on CNN that the west — read here the United States and the United Kingdom — had given Iraq “the chance to have an inclusive democracy” and that the only form of American intervention on the table was a strategic one to “protect national interests.”

As the events unfold at a velocious pace in the current Middle East geopolitical context, it is very important to pause and replace these statements in a historical perspective that encompasses the dominant foreign policy lines that have guided western intervention in the region since the end of the Second World War.

Eisenhower and Nixon at Dinner with King Saud
(l-r) Dwight D. Eisenhower, King Saud and Richard Nixon

The major historical element that is disregarded too often, and without which an understanding of western invention is always incomplete, is the Eisenhower Doctrine. The special message to the Congress on the situation in the Middle East is – until this day – the backbone of American interventionism in the Middle East and the foundation of American foreign policy with regards to Middle Eastern politics.

In many ways, the Doctrine is more of a strategic alliance with the Saudi strain of Wahhabism, which is an ultra-orthodox reading of the teachings of Islam, against the mounting influence of Nasserite socialism and Ba’athlism, pan-Arab socialism that was a major threat to American domination of the region in the mid twentieth century. In many ways it was the continuation of the divide and conquer  strategy which was espoused by both British and French colonial regimes after the First World War. The objective to split the Arab world into various fractions, and playing these fractions against one another, thus assuring the paramount position of western influence in the region, and the foiling of any pan-Arabist dream.

The reason behind the Eisenhower Doctrine and the emphasis that French and British colonial regimes instigated pseudo ethnic, tribal and religious division was to protect their national interests, the most important being of course the control of the primordial natural resource: petrol.

In the name of natural security and democracy, democratically elected governments were toppled such as the Iranian government of Mossaddegh  in 1953 when his administration made the bold move to nationalize the petroleum industry, or when Islamist extremist militant groups were funded to make the case for right-wing autocratic dictatorships which seated their power on being the final rampart against the Islamists.

But all in all, the gurus of American foreign policy fancied more the chances of advancing their agenda and “protecting their national interests” with the help of Islamist fundamentalists and autocratic regimes than with socialist ones, or left-wing movements be they religious or secular. This is why America has always openly supported the most backwards regime in the region, Saudi Arabia.

waronterror_Frank151It’s a known fact that Saudi Arabia has financed extremist Islamist groups. A current example is their unequivocal support for Islamist forces in the ongoing Syrian conflict. Not only do the Saudis offer financial support to such organizations, but also offer them with logistical support and cover.

The current situation in Iraq and Syria is but another chapter in a covert operation to maintain a managed form of chaos in the region that benefits none other than big western oil companies and corrupt oil drunk dynasties, all which promote extreme Islamist theories outside of their borders and repress them within. The War on Terror of which the Iraq War was a part, a war which was called by its main instigators a war against fear for freedom and democracy (and whatever other amalgamation of buzzwords that fit in sound bites) is anything but a war against terror.

Quite to the contrary, in fact, The War on Terror resulted in utter chaos and the destruction of a strong and viable pan-Arab movement which would have fostered an alternative to the Western colonial and neo-colonial domination of the region and the Saudi reactionary agenda. The War on Terror served an interest: the interest of those that first sowed the seeds of terror within the Middle East and whom without terror would cease to hold such a firm grasp on the petroleum reserves and the cash flow that coincides.

On the 30th of July, 762 (Christian calendar) while all of the “western” world was still engulfed in the dark ages, the city of Baghdad was built, a magnificent place of knowledge and architectural resplendence. Today Baghdad and the magnificent city of Damascus are piles of rubble, ruins, shadows of their former selves. The real terrorists aren’t the ones you might be afraid of.

A luta continua.