March 17, 2003
On March 7, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was interviewed in his Shawinigan home by former Clintonista, George Stephanopolous. The interview was aired the next day on ABC This Week. About the pending war with Iraq, the littlest guy from Shawinigan said:
" In my judgment, it has been won. You know the president has won. I have no doubt about it. He won."
Well, apparently Stephanopolous, along with everyone else, didn’t know that "the president has won" and his follow-up question was "What do you mean by that?" It’s bad enough that we in Canada have a prime minister who sits silently by while MP's like Carolyn Parrish come out with strong anti-American diatribes that, if said against any other group, would constitute a hate crime. But to go on an American television network, especially one of the highly watched Sunday morning news shows, and talk geopolitical gobbledygook, is downright embarrassing. In fact, it’s becoming embarrassing to be a Canadian during these times of heightened world tensions. It seems that the Big Guy was going to great lengths to suck up to the American president. The National Post’s Mark Steyn hit the nail on the head when he compared Chrétien to Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf, out of necessity, has to cozy up to the U.S. while leaving the rest of his underlings and the country free to dance up and down yelling "Death to the Great Satan."
According to Chrétien, Saddam Hussein is now contained. He can’t do anything now because he is surrounded by about 250,000 troops from the U.S., and their closest ally, Great Britain. Chrétien’s reasoning makes absolutely no sense, even for him. The troops, as the sane among us know, can’t stay in the region forever. Who’s going to pay for it if they did? Not Canada. We have day care centers to open and bilingual programs to implement. And if the military buildup was such a wonderful idea, leading to the defeat of a dictatorial regime, where are our troops? The answer to that is obvious. Sending troops to Iraq is getting awfully close to war, and to our present Liberal government, nothing is worth fighting for anymore. Not unless Kofi Annan says it is, and that’s not very likely. To ensure Canada’s depleted military couldn’t deploy troops to Iraq for "what might be a war," Canada sent a new contingent to Afghanistan. Canada can’t be involved in a war -- other people would then decide not to like us. And when they finally come to Canada, that could cost the Liberals votes.
Is Chrétien that ignorant of the world situation that he actually believes that Saddam Hussein has been contained, and there is no necessity to disarm him or take him out? This is the same Jean Chrétien who expressed surprise a couple of weeks ago when he found out that George W. Bush wants a regime change in Iraq; something the U.S. president has made no secret of. Chrétien’s opposition to regime change seems to be that if Bush is allowed to do it in Iraq, it will only be a matter of time before he affects one here. It might be nice if that happened, but we’re too insignificant for the Americans to worry about.
At least the Prime Minister made his position clear. He doesn’t care about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Besides, much like terrorists in Canada, there aren’t any. He doesn’t care about the Iraqi people or Saddam’s human rights abuses. All Chrétien cares about is pleasing his U.N. handlers.
The scary thing is that he might actually believe that the Americans won the war. The sooner he goes, the better.