Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

This past Saturday, The Globe and Mail ran a story on hapless, pathetic, alleged pedophile, Chris Neil; replete with effeminate sunglasses, a cartoon-like striped tee-shirt, a Vancouver Canucks cap and with his chicken chest and dangly spaghetti arms he appeared, long-faced and unshaven, on the front page.

Why? Why the front page?  There is nothing so insignificant as a pedophile, or an alleged pedophile. How bad can you be to be arrested in Bangkok for molesting children? The entire city of Bangkok was built as a sexual amusement part by diddlers, for diddlers.

Meantime, in the front section of The Chronicle Herald, there is a lovely Associated Press story of a man who was jailed for urinating on a disabled, dying woman; on the next page, in the “World” section, there is another AP story about a female nutcase from Missouri who killed a pregnant mother, cut the baby from the womb, and presented the baby to her friends as her child.

So what? How does that affect my life? Who cares other than the victims and their families?

Other annoying media predilections include mainstream television obsessing over the disappearance of white, young, blond girls. And, in the year 2001, prior to September 11, there was a departure — a departure from media mania over missing blond girls. Soon, we had married Congressman Gary Condit dominating the headlines due to the disappearance of his twenty-something paramour, Chandra Levy (you see, she was a brunette).

All of the Chandra Levy mania in the U.S. occurred during the very same summer where the “hard news” headlines here in Canada were dominated by the intricacies and character complexities of the reality TV show Survivor (I wish I was kidding).

The granddaddy of bullshit stories is, of course, 1995’s O.J. Simpson trial. I have tried to reconcile the bizarre societal focus of it all by trying to understand the social/cultural undercurrents of the event of which the O.J. Simpson trial itself became a kind of metaphorical shorthand –  shorthand for police prejudice, racial tension, Hollywood dysfunction, trophy wives, obsessive control, mixed marriages, the LA police department as a whole, drug use and wealthy, lost people.

Politically, the most egregious example of titillation as news, and as political content, was the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

It was a very tight election between Gore and Bush – one that was so close the Supreme Court called it. Erase that scandal and Al Gore wins his home state of Tennessee, the moral majority doesn’t back flip, Clinton (the best campaigner in two generations) gets to campaign with Al Gore, and, in all likelihood, Gore handily defeats Bush.

Can you imagine if there was a world without George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, whom he empowered? A Gore Presidency would have ensured that political exile.

Counter-factual history (the study of “what ifs”), would have meant that, under Gore, there would be more focus on environmental laws, no Iraq invasion; a proper prosecution of the Afghanistan war without the reconsolidation of the Taliban that occurred as a result of the very distraction of the Iraq invasion; a strategically stronger Israel; a weaker Iran – oh, and no upcoming war with Iran either (mark my words on that one).

For all of this, crazily, you can blame the oral sex applied by Monica Lewinsky — despite the fact that Hillary has forgiven him and they have both moved on (it is their marriage after all).

When it comes to news cycles and analysis, the impending war with Iran (from the folks who brought you Iraq), and the near future inevitability of nuclear weapons application, rarely passes by our radar. Instead, we wish for the pratfalls of others, the blood in someone else’s eye; a focus dominated by life’s losers, the inane and insane murderers, the grotesqueries that appear in Circus side-shows known as news with the bearded lady and the dwarf.

I have come to the conclusion that we are not better than the titillating and the trivial. It is what shapes us; what we talk about; what consumes us; it is what we know and what we want.

And what we are.

Voter apathy is not at an all-time high, yet, or should I say low? In the most recent Ontario provincial election, turnout was abysmal. Perhaps, enthusiasm for apathy is high?

Really, low voter turnout is not so much an expression of a lack of interest as it is a passive-aggressive expression of disaffection with a political and economic system that is increasingly seen through.

Unlike the halcyon days of the 1950s, when cultural conformity was at its zenith, and, with it, confidence in authority, progress, politics and politicians; where Boy Scout Troops dominantly formed; where Church groups were community anchors, and where North American mono-culturalism reigned; today we see behind The Wizard of Oz curtain to come to understand the ugly backstage — the fallacy of political faith, political integrity and the ever-present grit or irony.

There wasn’t much irony in the fifties — people wern’t looking for it either.

Why are we not “into politics” when it comes to actually voting? It is because we know better. I  believe one of the reasons that we, collectively, believed more in the system then, is also due to a palpable understanding of wealth distribution — the system in the 1950s and early sixties had more to say to the middle class. It was larger. It was healthier. No wonder there was more conformity.

There were fewer millionaires and far fewer billionaires 50 years ago. It wasn’t so much a case of “moral clarity,” although that was there too, it was a case of financial clarity. The middle class had more money, families were larger, and divorces were not reflexive.

Today, two people work in the family and have less money than did one person working fifty years ago; during the apex of Western Liberal democracy with roller skate drive-in restaurants, car fins, and Buddy Holly, it was always about the money — about the money for a middle class that today barely exists as it once did.

The Canadian version of the American mid-century cultural and economic experience reached its apogee of optimistic expression during Expo ’67 in Montreal. It was a time of high National optimism and confidence: The middle class was strong, political populism with Trudeau as its expression ascendant, and the Vietnam War an American convulsion that only affirmed our own middle power virtues.

Soon, the American assassinations of the sixties, and the exhausted vexations of our American brother that attended them, and the political and corporate corruption that followed, ate away at us too. While they had their Enron, we had our Bre X; while they had Ken Lay, we have Conrad Black; today, they have Iraq, and we have the less morally troubling, but still muddled, Afghanistan.

Another aspect of our political world that has turned people off is the tyranny of special interest group lobbying. It has driven many, both north and south of the border, insane when it comes to faith in the system. Politics today has become the stuff of O.J. trials: If you have money, you get your way. Fifty years ago it was hidden — today it is openly flaunted, competed for, bragged about and justified in newspaper editorials by lobby members who write the cheques.

A recent example of this is the American Armenian lobby that pressured Capitol Hill in Washington to acknowledge the Armenian genocide that occurred almost 100 years ago by the Turks. With Turkey straddling both East and West, secular modernism with traditional Islam, I cannot think of a more foolish fixation than to alienate such a culturally and geographically strategic player. Yet, there it is, because money talks — but it talks for fewer people.

Our politics these days is not about prudence or common sense. It is about the expression of power by fewer and fewer people, by the movement of money into fewer and fewer hands (all economic indices show this), and corporate concentration, globalized economies, displaced manufacturing sectors with an attenuated, eroded, middle class as a consequence.

We know this. We are not happy. Voting increasingly seems to be an exercise in futility (whether this is true or not in Canada that is the prevailing perception).

As a public we are hip to advertising, spin, manipulations, and outright lies that are sold to us by coiffed, perfumed salesman smiling and with a straight face.

Voter apathy?

The tree of knowledge bears bitter fruit.

A nation of doubters, of cynics, of conspiracies; it doesn’t matter whether we are in Los Angeles or Cleveland, or Halifax, or Toronto; it is now always the same. According to a large number of people, and people who call in, we are in Afghanistan because of undeclared intentions: oil and oil politics; pipelines to the Caspian Sea — never mind al-Qaeda, Osama, 9/11 or the Taliban.

In Fahrenheit 911 a few years ago, filmmaker Michael Moore showed the Bush Whitehouse links to the House of Saud, The Taliban and anyone who might assist oil development, no matter how unsavory. The polemical documentary thankfully stopped short of blaming Bush for 9/11, instead it showed him to be stupid and slow and an administration that was anxious to ratchet up the fear factor in order to mobilize the state in support of the American invasion of Iraq. Indeed, the U.S. government couldn’t wait to get out of Afghanistan and leave a token force there so they could focus on Iraq for no good reason (other than oil). There is no oil in Afghanistan.

The shadow cast by the invasion of Iraq upon a false predicate (weapons of mass destruction) now falls upon every single event in international relations. No one now believes a thing the authorities say — be they American, British or Canadian.

For many, there is always a hidden agenda, an oil interest, a government-coddled corporation like Halliburton that is ready to profit. People now conflate Afghanistan and Iraq into one and the same where we Canadians have Afghanistan, and America has Iraq (with Afghanistan as a side-show).

Today we learned that while America has the private security firm Blackwater, a firm severely profiting from the Iraq war, and whose owner is a friend of Bush’s and whose company, according to the Iraqi puppet government, is responsible for outrageous behaviour involving innocent civilian deaths, we in Canada have Saladin – a British firm the Canadian government has secretly hired to defend diplomats. Why are private security firms there in the first place to defend government property and interests?

Clearly, both the evolution of private security firms such as Blackwater and Saladin are symptomatic examples of the merging of Big Business and Big government along defense department lines — growing outward from big defense contractors like Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, GE, and Northrop to now include big oil developers (Halliburton) and others in the high tech and security and financial fields.

When the “big lie” about Iraq was as big as it was, and the whole of the American media was high-jacked into cowed compliance, and where not a dissenting voice was heard, it seems logical now that the public is just plain disbelieving about everything.

Last week we were told about a poll in Afghanistan that showed how much the Canadian forces are welcomed there, and what a good job we are doing. Unfortunately, about 70 per cent of them had no idea that Canadians were actually fighting the Taliban. Moreover, the countryside was not polled; these were folks in our areas of control, dependent upon us too. People tend to say nice things about you when they need you and you have guns and they don’t.

In Vietnam, in the early seventies, you could have asked anyone in Saigon about how much love there was for the U.S. and they would have nodded — the countryside, however, and the north, had a different idea.

Vietnam and Afghanistan: winning hearts and minds in the countryside. One has rice paddies and the other has poppy fields. And with Pakistan (the Taliban’s benefactor) on the verge of a civil war and in even less control of the tribal regions now than ever, the chances of NATO cutting off supply lines to the Taliban and Pashtun tribesman is ever more remote.

So, now, no one believes the state when it talks about “success” in Afghanistan anymore than people in America bought that the Vietnam War was being won after North Vietnam’s 1968 Tet offensive; like Vietnam, and like Iraq, the rest of it was the slow roll of inevitability.

Afghanistan is no different. History is a good teacher.

The sad part is that Canadians stumbled into the Afghan war, according to international relations Professor Janice Gross Stein, at the opportunistic urging of defense Chief Rick Hillier as outlined in her new book with Eugene Lang The Unexpected War. The sadder part is Canadians are really dying this time. The saddest part is many of us don’t believe why.

The Afghanistan poll conducted recently by Environics for the CBC and the Globe and Mail and La Presse, which says Afghanis like us being there is highly suspect or is irrelevant. On Monday, I will tell you why and I will blog about it.

Canadians seem to think they are impervious to propaganda, either overt or unacknowledged. We gloated over the high-jacking of the American media during the 2003 build up to the Iraq invasion, and yes, at least Canadians have more public discourse —  but that doesn’t mean we don’t propagandize or have cultural pressure to accept the government line.

Also next week we will be looking at Parliament to see if we will ever ratify the changes to the Atlantic Accord; and if Parliament gets defeated before that – then the gloves are off in the Maritimes!

Federal Liberal Justice critic Marlene Jennings says Harper is trying to load up the Supreme Court with social Conservatives as evidenced by the appointment of ant-abortion crusader Lawerence O’Neil. She will join me Monday.

Peter C. Newman will also stop by next week to drop a few bombs on Brian Mulroney. Newman got the jump on Muldoon’s book that he’s currently touring Halifax with when Newman released his own, “The Secret Mulroney Tapes”, two years ago. The book had old Brian spitting up his cereal and calling his lawyer with a shaking hand.

Act I: Where young Peter assails the virtue of the gentle fox in the first question period of the fall session of Parliament

Peter MacKay’s nasty verbal onslaught upon poor, old, excommunicated Nova Scotia M.P. Bill Casey in the House of Commons didn’t sit well with either old Tories or many Nova Scotians. The verbal volcanism, from a piqued Peter, occurred when old Bill asked a simple question about whether or not the “new” Atlantic Accord agreement, hammered out the other week and broadcast on national TV before a bemused and cherubic Premier Rodney MacDonald and a triumphant (dare I say Chamberlainesque?)  Peter Mackay was going to be committed to paper, to a signed contract.

When Mackay deflected, Casey said that “this is a $25-billion contract and if that doesn’t qualify for a signed contract then I don’t know what does.” 

Angrily, Mackay replied to the House: “I know he (Bill Casey) is very concerned about the details and also very concerned about his own personal situation. We just wish that he would work a little bit more productively in the interests of Nova Scotians and put his own personal crusade aside and accept what is good for this province.”

Nova Scotia Liberal MP Scott Brison echoed the view of many of my radio show callers when he countered that “It is Peter Mackay, not Bill Casey, who has put his personal interest ahead of Nova Scotia.”

What are the facts? Well, Peter has his job, his party, his portfolio, and his staff and Bill Casey has a sign hanging over his doorway and has to print his own business cards. Personal motivation is the last thing that motivated Bill Casey.

It is this element of mean-spiritedness with Stephen Harper squinting into the cameras like Clint Eastwood when discussing Bill Casey and Peter Mackay’s performance yesterday that seem odd, almost something beyond the Conservatives own self-restraint – that they cannot help themselves.

What Casey’s foes fail to realize is that the more they demonize him, act like jilted lovers, and look to destroy him and cast aspersions upon his straight-forward country logic and unassailable character, the greater is his standing and his cause – his David to the Tory Goliath.

As I have mentioned in a previous blog posting, trying to diminish Bill Casey is a zero-sum game. In fact, you lose points when you pick on him.

For some reason, no one gets it – or the Tory indignant sense is too great.

It’s only going to get worse; soon Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams will be campaigning in support of Bill Casey in his riding to annoy the Conservatives; he may even support Green Party Leader Elizabeth May against Peter Mackay himself in the riding of Central Nova (you’ve read it hear first). Politics makes strange bedfellows. And our relationship with Peter Mackay, here in Nova Scotia, is an odd one.

While Peter is married to Nova Scotia, Stephen Harper, according to many, seems to be his mistress. And she gets all the candy.

Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald will have his head served to him on a stick by the electorate soon. There is no escape, no reprieve, and no uncertainty. Any goodwill the Premier of Nova Scotia accrued by brokering a deal with Harper over off-shore oil revenues and redressing the amendments of the Atlantic Accord have been spent when he sided with Stephen Harper over Bill Casey.

Casey, the genteel and obstreperous Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit M.P. who voted against Harper’s budget for its erosive approach to the Atlantic Accord — and who was subsequently kicked in the caucus — is an even larger figure now as an exiled independent than he was as a Conservative.

When Premier Macdonald announced that when it came to supporting Casey in the upcoming Federal election he is a Conservative first, and that he would be supporting the Conservative party ahead of Casey the independent, he gave up any chance of staying on as Premier.

Simply put, Bill Casey is considered the conscience of Nova Scotia. He lost his job over principle. Casey, and the vociferously acid Premier Danny Williams, was the “bad cop” to Rodney MacDonald’s “good cop” during the whole Atlantic Accord crisis. In reaching a deal, the goal for Harper was as much about showing up Casey and Williams as it was about recovering Maritime votes.

Here in Nova Scotia, the public has a problem with Rodney. His “go softly” approach over the Atlantic Accords dispute process frustrated many who yearned for a rambunctious, spirited, defense of  the Province in the wake of weasel economics by the Feds: You’ve heard of the Charlottetown Accord, this is the “Charlatan Accord” — and Maritimers know it. And until the deal was reached last week with Harper seemingly caving, many felt Rodney’s approach was wrong, and his mettle weak.

Now it is a case of too little, too late. Many voters just don’t believe the Feds anymore and don’t understand the mechanics of Atlantic Accord economic policy or economic formulas. Why should they?

The fact that Rodney MacDonald has appeared too timid to upset Harper and too willing to please, has been, and is, the image problem. Remember, it was the Premier of Nova Scotia that phoned Bill Casey when he was locked in a room with Tories surrounding him before the vote to allegedly urge him to support Harper, to support the government, to stay in line. Rodney was being a good boy and doing what he was told – that was the impression; that was/is the image.

So, now that he has everything he wants from Harper by reaching an agreement and announcing it, why the suck up? Why support Harper over Bill Casey? Harper is going to cost him votes, not gain them. What is Rodney doing? Instead of being consistent, he should act like a politician.

Rodney is not Peter Mackay. Mackay has to listen to the boss – Rodney doesn’t. Just look at the “Conservative” Danny Williams! He sounds like a Green party member at a Dow Chemical parade. Brand loyalty with Danny Williams doesn’t have a place anymore than it does with provincial governments in Quebec or Ontario – they may be, or have been, Liberal, but they fought both Martin and Chrétien when they needed to for their Province knowing that the party brand means nothing — it is about getting elected. The Feds and the Province have huge separations, no matter the political stripe. Even fundraising is separate in many instances.

Yet, the bodaciously incorrigible columnist for the Chronicle Herald, one Stephen Maher, said on my broadcast today that Rodney sounds like he thinks Harper is his boss. And that is the impression. In politics, it is all about impressions.

Rodney wasn’t angry enough during the Atlantic Accord process according to lot of voters, but he claimed his sugar over vinegar approach (remember Rodney showed earnestness and concern, not anger, not a get-evenness; the Maritimes is about being proud and indignant when wronged, not acting like a lawyer who looks for an angle and who avoids exposure) was working.

Here’s what works politically here: guts; a display of guts — risk, and intestinal fortitude, crassly characterized as “balls.”

Bill Casey bestrides the Province of Nova Scotia like a colossus; a scarecrow. “Don’t go here Tories”, the scarecrow says. “Don’t go here.”

As the Greek myth goes, King Minos of Crete had a maze built by the architect Daedalus to hold the half-man, half-bull creature known as the Minotaur. The Minotaur was eventually killed by the heroic Theseus. Coincidentally, the ill-fated Atlantic Accord monster seems half man and all bull.

First, you have to negotiate the labyrinth before you can negotiate with the Monster, and with the Ottawa Conservatives recent declaration of an accord over that disputatious Atlantic Accord, everything old is new again! The deal is back (sort of) and the end of it all is where we began apparently, and where we began is now the end —  a labyrinth — a maze not unlike the actual ledgers and Accord spread sheets

Say what you will, and say what they say, there was no reason in the first place for this issue to have even been raised, re-jigged, fooled with, or fiddled; a waste of time.

Provincial fiscal imbalance restitution was, apparently, the reason for messing with a signed deal in the first place and the historical restitution of this signed deal was the role and goal of the opposing Provincial side.

So, what do we have now? The same thing: only with no one saying that Ottawa blinked and backtracked, flip-flopped or caved. Stephen Harper is a proud and a stubborn man, it wasn’t easy for Peter Mackay, Nova Scotia Premier Rodney Macdonald (with honorable mention to Conservative Gerald Keddy) to get the government to re-engineer things and save face.

The impatience, glowering, and hot anger in Harper’s eyes over dissenting M.P. Bill Casey burned through the TV screens during Harper’s announcement; it let everyone know, without his echoing words which he spit, that Casey is loathed for his impertinence when he voted against his party and brought this entire Atlantic Accord regional firestorm upon the Conservatives with a Wagnerian incandescence.

With another bit lip, Harper wished his Newfoundland nemesis, Danny Williams well for his thundering electoral success even as Danny taunted Harper from his election night victory dais.

Here’s the real deal:  99.9 per cent of us know nothing about the Atlantic Accord. It is a complex economic formula that makes anyone’s eyes glaze over except economists who view such things as their baby and, therefore, beautiful.

Since none of us mother such formulas, I have a problem: it is an ugly baby, as ugly as a tax form, obtuse; too abstract for most of us to understand; the economic and technical nuances of the deal and what it means, or does not mean, for Nova Scotia is over our heads — or we are just numbed… In fact, many seasoned journalists with whom I have spoken admit that they don’t really understand the Accords either. Who has seen the Atlantic Accord documents except the main players?

In the end, was it a good deal for Nova Scotia? This is the question.

What I do know is that Stephen Harper gets even. “Get even Stephen” is his nick-name. There is huge personal incentive for Harper to show-up maverick M.P. Bill Casey (who voted against the last budget and the amended Atlantic Accords and was subsequently kicked out of caucus) and to show up hyper Harper detractor Premier Danny Williams, as well as to actually show support for loyalists Mackay, Keddy, and the diplomatic Nova Scotia Premier, Rodney MacDonald, by actually doing the deal — and showing up with the money.

Chronicle Herald Ottawa bureau Chief Stephen Maher told me today that he feels that the deal cobbled together by Mackay/MacDonald and company is a good one for Nova Scotia. And most, at the very least, say it is the best that Harper was prepared to give. The pot was even sweetened by another yawn-inducing piece of finance department detail known as “the Crown share” of offshore revenues — something frozen in the amber rock of disputatiousness going back to the mid-eighties and just unlocked and where Stephen is writing another cheque to us!

It sounds to me that Nova Scotia did, indeed, do well, that the “New Atlantic Accords” will be helpful. We have to wait for the oil though. We were always going to have to wait for the oil. Playwright Samuel Beckett would be proud.

The self-induced Accord problem by Harper has run its course. It seems ironic that what was perceived as a stab in the back will, in the end, see the most Provincial benefit in the deal’s back end.

The recent rumors circulating around the termination of Defense Chief Hillier came from ousted Defense Minister Gordon O’Connor’s camp. The rift between O’Connor and Hillier is legendary and the open enmity between these two a thing to behold.

The other day, some clown from O’Connor’s camp dropped a dime on gullible CTV reporter Robert Fife who promptly parroted the planted rumor/wish-fantasy on Lloyd Robertson’s national news. The story had nothing to it. Soon, the Tories circled their wagons in support of the General they politically own. Hillier is family.

The Afghan detainee scandal, the musings regarding the duration of the Afghanistan deployment; the issue of Hillier “pulling focus” and media attention, all were grist for the Hillier ego-mill/O’Connor rift. Hillier loved making his “civie” boss look bad too.

Hillier loves combat, even with civilians.

As I have said before, actual military combat operations empower senior soldiers who gain prestige, increased social status, increased political power, and increased budgets. Senior soldiers, more often than not, want war – and Hillier wants Afghanistan on his “to-do” list.

Stephen Harper, sensing victory before the election is called, has now “qualified” his position on the length of the Afghanistan deployment saying that “he meant to say that, given the minority situation, that the government needed to find enough opposition support to pass its future goals for the mission.” And with regard to opposition leader Dion, Harper said yesterday in a rare press conference, “you don’t turn around and say we want the government to make a decision on the next deployment two years in advance before we have any “facts.” Facts? We already know enough, don’t we? Asking for “facts” about Afghanistan and the nature of the mission is like Iranian President Mamoud Ahmadinejad asking for more research on the Holocaust.

The real fact is, Stephen Harper wants the Afghan mission to continue well beyond its 2009 mandate and he wants to further empower General Hillier as Defense Chief with the same culture of co-option that he played with the Liberal party that initiated the Afghan deployment in the first place. Indeed, Harper seeks, and has succeeded in co-opting, the whole military as part of the Conservative “brand”; Hillier, himself, is the face of the Conservative government’s image.

It is interesting to note that Hillier owes much of his military background and education to the U.S. military and his experiences there. Harper’s own intellectual libertarianism, owes its economic philosophical origins to the United States as well.

And while the Pentagon is still undergoing the “revolution in military affairs” begun by former Secretary of War, Donald Rumsfeld, Hillier concurrently conducted his own revamping of the military, the main result of which is a Machiavellian bureaucratic power grab; there is now more power consolidated in Hillier’s office.  

The history of successful democracies is often marked by cultural opposition to accrued military power. American historical examples include Kennedy saying no to crazy Strategic Air Command’s Curtis LeMay during the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis (LeMay wanted a nuclear war with the Soviets and was subsequently parodied in American culture by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick in “Dr. Strangelove”), to President Truman’s sacking of General Douglas Macarthur when he wanted to drop a nuke down China’s pants during the Korean War.

Only rarely, does a soldier-statesman come along like Eisenhower. While the American President Ike liked power, he didn’t like war. General Patton, whom Ike had to reign-in frequently and basically sacked, loved blood and guts. So does Hillier. So does Harper.

Patton was lost without war. So will be Hillier. And Hillier is not half the man, or half as bad.

When NDP leader Jack Layton declared that negotiations should occur with the Taliban in Afghanistan, critics at the time called him “an appeaser”, “a Chamberlain,” “soft” on terrorism, and so on. Jack Layton was called “Taliban Jack.”

The recent discussions undertaken by Western-appointed Afghanistan leader Hamid Karzai with the Taliban are interesting as much for the reaction in the West as they are for the nature of the peace talks themselves.

Defense Minister Peter Mackay reacted very astutely, and with poise, when he said that “as long as there was a renunciation of violence and that there was a respect for NATO presence” were negotiations a good idea — predicated on these successful foundations. MacKay’s recent pronouncements from Halifax showed the positive effects of his experience with the Foreign Affairs portfolio. Negotiation is an option. Gone is the simplistic, “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” mantra enjoyed by many on the far right.

But who is calling Peter Mackay “Taliban Mackay”? Where are they? And where is the credit to Jack Layton for calling for a diplomatic front before anyone else?

Hamid Karzai has succeeded in splitting the Taliban (Pashtun tribesman) with regard to their approach. There is now in-fighting within Taliban enemy ranks, something that has been, so far, pretty muted.

This strategy of diplomatic engagement, and playing upon tribal self-interest (Karzai is offering the Taliban governmental positions of power), is exactly the strategy that the entire West must subscribe to when it comes to the whole of the Islamic world.

However, the “divide and conquer” approach has many who oppose it. Others wish to collectivize Islam and Muslims and “terrorists” into a hoard of one. The fact is tremendous divisions exist within the Arab and Muslim world. These divisions need to be recognized and exploited, not the opposite.

But the opposite approach persists. There are powerful interest groups in the U.S. today, led by the Neo Con “intellectual” Norman Podhoretz, whose book, “WWIV, The Long Struggle Against Islamic-Fascism” promotes this flawed notion of grouping all Arabs and Muslims and terrorists into a single collectivity; how curious it is to note that terrorism is, itself, a tactic and hence “waging war against terrorism” is absurd, for you cannot wage war against a tactic.

Podhoretz, for his own narrow geopolitical interests, wants to see the whole Middle East cowed by the West and Israel. But since that isn’t going to happen, we better start talking.