We All Lost the Iraq War: Reflections of a Canadian Fulbrighter in America

LIKE MANY CANADIANS, I tuned in on the evening of 17 March 2003 to watch President George W. Bush deliver his much-anticipated ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. Unlike most Canadians, I watched the speech in the US itself--to be precise, from Harvard University. About midway through the speech, I began to surf for some alternative, but encountered the same face--serious, sombre and smirk-free--on channel after channel. Until, that is, I reached the niche public affairs channel, C-SPAN2. Here, to my surprise, I encountered taped coverage of Prime Minister Jean Chretien announcing and defending Canada's decision not to join "the coalition of the willing."Tucked away on C-SPAN2, the Canadian position on the war in Iraq was largely invisible in the US. So, too, was I. Almost no one I encountered knew anything about the Canadian position, and those who did, more often than not, preferred it to their President's bellicosity anyway. William Buckley once famously quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone directory than by 100 Harvard professors. Predictably enough, support for the war was much weaker on campus than in the American population as a whole. Indeed, at the very moment President Bush was appearing on national television to issue his ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, Harvard's daily undergraduate newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, was polling students on their attitudes towards the war. The irony is that, in this respect, Harvard students appeared more like Canadians than Americans. A solid majority of Harvard undergraduates (some 56 per cent) opposed the war(1)--consistent with Anglophone opinion in Canada (including my own, I should add) and clearly out of step with broader, national sentiment in the US.At one level, it was easy for me as a Canadian to watch the war unfold: there were no anti-Canadian protests, no Canadian jokes, and no lectures about the need to support our allies. Yet, for all this, I did feel like an outsider--even in the cocoon that is "the republic of Cambridge." This essay is a personal and somewhat desultory attempt to understand my unease about the war."PEACE IS PATRIOTIC"Lexington, Massachusetts is one of those lovely New England towns that has become a close suburb of Boston--not because urban sprawl created it, but because an expanding population met it. Like so many of Boston's suburbs, it retains its town centre, its common, and its array of white-steepled churches. Lexington (together with its neighbour Concord) stands out, however, for its mythological status as the place where the American Revolution is said to have begun. And, it stands out in my memory, as the place where I first really felt a sort of disquiet about the prospects of war in Iraq. Driving through Lexington one Saturday in late January with my family, I noticed a man standing at a major crossroads holding high a homemade placard for all to see, a revolutionary flag anchored in the snowbank beside him. Judging from the medals on his coat, he was a war veteran; the sign read: "Peace is Patriotic."The man on the Lexington Common understood an important truth about current American foreign policy since 9/11: that it has wrapped itself tightly in the fabric of patriotism. One need only think of the legal centrepiece of homeland security--the Patriot Act--to see how powerful the connection between security and patriotism have become. The slogan "Peace is Patriotic" was a kind of pre-emptive strike against the argument that opposition to the war was unpatriotic. But what of the revolutionary flag? Presumably, the man on the Lexington Common wanted to make the related point that patriotism is more than obedience to a President's orders as Commander in Chief. It is, rather, loyalty to a set of enduring, culturally entrenched principles that have a higher standing than the pronouncements and orders of this or that Commander in Chief. For the man on the Lexington Common, the ideals of the Revolution, symbolized so powerfully by a flag, were the true and original principles of American patriotism against which current foreign policy ought to be judged. …