Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

It doesn’t matter who is governing, or even if his immediate Boss, Peter Mackay, as Defense Minister, supports him as no other, General Rick Hillier, our Defense Chief, appears to not miss an opportunity to undermine, or grandstand, or steal the limelight from his political masters whom he so obviously, and so unrepentantly, disdains.

No one has been a bigger supporter of the General than Mackay – and he looks foolish for doing so and now reveals what little control he exercises over his own Defense portfolio. Even if he wears the T-shirt, Mackay cannot get the General to shut up. Mackay has been relegated to a “yes man”, and shows no force of will at all.

It is Mackay as Hillier’s little salesman.

Rick Hillier’s recent comments at the Conference of Defense Associations where he stated that democratic debate back home represented a “window of extreme vulnerability” (in other words, debate leads to Taliban attacks), with his utterly incorrect suggestion that a recent suicide bombing was related to, or motivated by, domestic debate, was pure politics. Hillier’s behavior is what Don Cherry would call a “show boat”, or a “hot dog”.

The separation of church and state, and the division of powers between the civilian and the military, where civilians rule, are not principles embraced by the Taliban or, for that matter, Rick Hillier — at least when it comes to the latter.

For the Taliban, who are guided by a religious theocracy and tribal impulses, secular, civilian rule is the Devil. For Hillier, the Devil seems to be some form of Jack Layton and democratic public discourse. Moreover, Hillier has gone back in his rhetoric to the old canard of conflating the mission and policy with “support for the troops” — which is unpardonable; that kind of rhetoric leads to the political polarization of our military.

But Hillier does not care.

Despite the fact that a party with 30 percent of the vote can form a majority, and that most of the Tory votes are rural and most people live in cities, and that most military members do not come from cities or larger urban centers, there are natural fault lines with regard to culture, outlook, and politics. What Hillier is doing is selfish and ultimately counter-productive, and divisive.

When Hillier says that debate emboldens the enemy, and that Parliament must vote “overwhelmingly to support the troops”, he is playing politics with the military – the very thing he condemns in “civvies”.

No General should ever tell Parliament how to vote. It is a basic rule of our culture and it is one of the reasons why we fought and died in WW2. For Hillier, however, it is about military convenience and military expediency.

Democracy and public discourse is something to be barely tolerated for Rick Hillier who, time and again, has shown his disregard for Ottawa when it disagreed with him or has shown equivocation.

A democracy isn’t something that only counts when it agrees with you.

For some military types, a compliant dictatorship is preferable to a dissenting democracy. Another General, Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned of such people.

And they have the nerve to call Layton “Taliban Jack.”