The Mouth That Roared

Since it was officially announced that The Mouth From Massachusetts would be leaving this fair land next month, I've done my best to ignore him. Once I knew that he was a temporary irritant it seemed best to get on with life and try to deal with more constructive matters. But no matter how hard I try to claw my way out, they drag me back in.

For those who haven't been playing along at home, PM the PM announced on Thursday that Canada would be saying ?no? to George Bush's missile defence system, though it still remains to be seen exactly what that means. In the immediate aftermath of that statement, the Mouth That Pretends To Be An Ambassador threw a little public temper tantrum.

Canada's announcement that it won't join the U.S. missile shield provoked an immediate warning that it has relinquished sovereignty over its airspace.

From now on, the U.S. government will control any decision to fire at incoming missiles over Canadian territory, declared the top U.S. envoy to Canada.

"We will deploy. We will defend North America," said Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to Canada.

"We simply cannot understand why Canada would in effect give up its sovereignty - its seat at the table - to decide what to do about a missile that might be coming towards Canada."

Almost immediately on hearing of Cellucci's remarks, I decided that debates about missile trajectories and air space were a red herring. Subsequent reports bear that out (hat tip to Jonathan Dursi).

U.S. officials at the Missile Defence Agency said that under ballistic missile defence, interceptors from launch silos in Alaska and California are aimed out across the Pacific and that their trajectory would take them nowhere near Canada.

Even if it did, the officials said, the interceptors would be out of the atmosphere and, therefore, outside of sovereign airspace within a minute or two of being launched. The actual intercept ? a collision in space ? is designed to occur between 160 and 300 kilometres above the Earth, beyond the atmosphere.

"There's no flying over Canada .....," the intercept is to happen way out over the Pacific as far from North America as possible," Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the agency, said.

In the same way, complaints that Canada is freeloading off the Americans seem like so much noise in the absence of a specific threat assessment which points to exactly what it is Canada is being protected from. The usual justification for the missile defence system is the possibility of attacks from ?rogue nations like North Korea?. That really means North Korea since there currently are no other rogue nations quite like it. While Kim Jong Il has now publicly stated that he has ?the bomb?, no one has yet detected evidence of the kind of tests that would accompany that development and a realistic assessment of his delivery capabilities suggests that he might be able to mount a devastating attack on some part of the Pacific Ocean.

The real point of Cellucci's remarks wasn't air space and missile trajectories, and I would submit that his use of the word ?sovereignty? was calculated ? he knows us well enough to know that it's a hot button that will get the attention of Canadians. His real purpose was to let us know the depth of the displeasure of King George the Incurious and to leave us wondering what kind of repercussions might follow our failure to obey cooperate. Cellucci has taken every opportunity to try and do to us what his government has been trying to do to its own citizens: keep them living in a heightened state of tension and fear. A frightened populace will be far more docile about the fact that its privacy and civil liberties are disappearing while its economy is pillaged for the benefit of the economic aristocracy.

I notice, too, that Cellucci made use of one of Martin's favorite catch-phrases: a seat at the table. As if any amount of cooperation on Canada's part would give us anything more than the opportunity to actually witness Bush doing whatever he damn well pleases rather than finding out about it afterwards. What Bush wanted from us was political cover. As with Iraq, he wants the illusion of a coalition while he continues to act in the interests of his small circle of crony capitalists friends.

You get the behaviour you reward. Bush's pattern of behaviour has been to both exaggerate the threats we face and to contribute to them. If we reward that behaviour with our cooperation then we can expect more of the same. Canada's public rejection of missile defence certainly won't stop Bush. It'll hardly even slow him down. But if it encourages one other country, or even a few more of his own citizens, to dig their heels in a little deeper and refuse to go along to get along, then it may well serve a purpose.

I have no illusions that Martin's announcement had anything to do with any of that. It had to do with preserving his own political skin. Sometimes the right thing happens for the wrong reason.

As for Cellucci, there's no doubt that he went way over the line. If Martin truly had a spine he'd stop disputing Cellucci's comments in the Canadian media, which is really for the benefit of Canadians and not the American government, and send The Mouth back to Washington, D.C. with a formal diplomatic note suggesting that Canada would welcome a representative of the White House who's capable of looking the word ?diplomacy? up in the dictionary and understanding its meaning. But I'll guarandamntee you that ain't gonna happen.

And if anyone is tempted to point to this as another example of irrational, knee-jerk Bush-hatred, I'd suggest that there's a big difference between hating someone for no good reason, and having a profound distrust of someone born of four years spent watching him lie about everything while his actions continually contradict his words.