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Re: “When to Say Enough”, by Gar Pardy, Ottawa Citizen, Nov 16.

This offensive article is not yet available to link from the Thursday issue of the Citizen. When it is on line, I will provide the link - stand by!

Upon reading this fatuous piece of nonsense today I decided it is time to say "enough is enough".

Our soldiers in Afghanistan deserve a strong rebuttal to the defeatist, leftist pap and I know that they are constrained from participating openly in the public dialogue. As a civilian retiree from National Defence and a member of Course 41 at the National Defence College, Fort Frontenac, Kingston, Ontario, as well as being the first civilian Director at the College, I feel it my duty and privilege to speak up against this ill informed mumble.

So, here we go. This article has as well been submitted to the Ottawa Citizen for consideration as an op ed piece.

After his disastrous handling of both the William Sampson case and the Maher Arar affair while head of Canadian consular matters, Mr. Pardy is in no position to tell anybody anything. His failure of responsibility and judgment and that of his colleague Mr. Franco Pillarella (in the M. Arar case) are now well known and condemned by Justice O'Connor. Both Mr. Sampson and Mr. Arar suffered enormously in Saudi Arabian and Syrian prisons because of this incompetent bureaucrat.

Here is a rather telling excerpt from the testimony of Mr. Sampson to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Nov 6, 2003 :

“Certainly the handling by the Department of Foreign Affairs officials here in Canada of my family during this rather difficult situation for us was again less than adequate.

To give an example of this, it would appear that the Department of Foreign Affairs operated from the earliest stages as if I were guilty, long before I even had a trial, a trial that turned out to be nothing more than a farce, a trial at which I was brought before three judges without representation, without witnesses to the event other than those provided by the Saudi Arabian government. Even before that, I had received indications from the embassy officials that they considered me to be guilty, and my father in March 2000 had an embassy official in Riyadh actually state to him that they considered my situation to be very similar to that of the Hell's Angels in Montreal who themselves had been involved in turf wars.

To have members of the Canadian embassy making statements like that at those times was contrary to my best interests and contrary, certainly, to the best interests of my family. Subsequent to those statements my father asked for clarification on these points and received the most cursory and off-hand comments that one could imagine from Department of Foreign Affairs officials such as Gar Pardy.”

In just one of the many egregious statements in his flawed Citizen article, he says this about the US policy in Asia at the time of the Vietnamese War: “The cost of withdrawal for Vietnam and Asia – except for the people of South Vietnam (my italics) – was short lived, and today it is difficult to understand why millions of people had to die.“

Hum, those who were "short lived" were the poor South Vietnamese but no matter for Mr. Pardy. It is this warm attitude that allowed Mr. Sampson to rot in a Saudi Arabian prison for two years.

To further demonstrate his complete confusion and lack of understanding he claims, “Unlike Korea, the geography of Indochina allowed the North to initiate and sustain a war in the South…” This absurdity comes after he first tells us that the North Vietnamese had the will (my italics) to achieve their objective of a united Vietnam . I wonder if he is even aware of the critical role played by China in the Korean conflict. And by the way, last I looked, the North Koreans  have about a million soldiers massed  at or near the North/South demarcation line established in 1953.

His biggest whopper is to cite none other than William Jefferson Clinton to support his whine that we get out of Afghanistan .

Here is the reference in full. “Although Iraq is not Vietnam and 2006 is not 1968, the public policy issue is the same. As Bill Clinton recently reminded us, when you are in a hole stop digging”

Coming from a disgraced President whose best defence against his accusers was to ask, “that depends on what your definition of is is”, Mr. Pardy’s choice of references to bolster his viewpoint is priceless and pathetic.

However, there is some truth in his view that determined national liberation movements cannot be defeated by a foreign state at a price the foreign state is prepared to pay. This is particularly true when the foreign state is a democracy, but the ‘price to pay’ argument also applied to the USSR in its Afghan campaign.

Of course to complete the picture fairly, Mr. Pardy should have noted that the motivation of the USSR was the control and subjugation of the Afghan state; conversely our Canadian objective in Afghanistan is to create conditions in which the Afghan people can freely determine what government will lead them. Those opposing our Canadian and NATO objective there are warlords protecting their lucrative poppy trade and the misogynist, religious fanatics of the Taliban. Not what you would normally call ‘national liberators’.

Unfortunately as well for Mr. Pardy’s thesis, those currently causing the horrific situation in Iraq are as far from ‘national liberators’ as you can get. They are rather a mix of Islamic jihadists, sectarian extremists and those hoping to return to the power they held under the murderous reign of Mr. Saddam Hussein.

I am sure that Mr. Pardy believes the Islamic cry that it is all about chasing the US ‘occupiers’ away. Yea, right. Then tell me how come Iraqi’s ‘national liberators’ are killing each other in huge numbers rather than focusing on the occupiers?

In another unsupported take on world history as he sees it, he posits this: “In Iraq there are at least three such ‘national’ liberation movements trying to emerge from the callous decisions made in Paris in 1919”. No, wrong. Any fair reading of the recent Iraqi elections and constitutional agreement would conclude that it is the voters who are the true national liberators trying to rid themselves of the religious zealots and back to power seeking Baathists.

Amazingly, Mr. Pardy tries to rewrite a near universal concept about war and policy. In the minds of most experts, war is simply the last stop in a linear expression of vital and strategic national interests. In other words, war is the next step after “jaw, jaw” fails. For Mr. Pardy however, war is not part of the policy continuum – “it is a world unto itself”. He says that its support is not to be measured in the same way as other policies on say, clean air or taxes. That’s fine, it should not be considered in the same way but it must nevertheless be considered. That consideration is generally expressed by reference to our highest sense of national consciousness. Simply put, at the end of the day, what is it that we stand for?

He is simply wrong to postulate that war is isolated and separated from all other decisions made by governments. But just how he imagines it does work in this isolated bubble he fails to say. The position is logically indefensible.

War decisions are at the top of the hierarchy because they embody a determination of the vital national and strategic interests of the country. He may disagree with the decision - that is his right in our democratic system - but to argue as he does that the Afghan war is as a result of “the hubris of some politicians” exposes why the best thing Mr. Pardy has done recently is to retire from the Foreign Service. At least his ability to cause harm is now limited.

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