The Cairo Clique: Anti-Zionism and the Canadian Left
By this time, Stephen Harper, the leader of a newly-minted conservative party, was at the helm of a minority parliament in Ottawa. One of the most America-friendly prime ministers in Canadian history and, more recently, Israel's most outspoken defender at the UN alongside the US, Harper proved wholly inadequate to the task of defending the Afghanistan mission in the kind of multilateralist, humanitarian language that Canadians had long spoken and understood.
The Liberals, meanwhile, had elected a new leader, Stephane Dion, who had no particular interest in advancing or defending the Afghan cause. From the traditionally isolationist province of Quebec, Dion was intent upon distancing himself from the policies of his Liberal predecessors, and he also had to keep an eye out on the nominally socialist New Democratic Party, which was intent on replacing the Liberals as the official opposition.
By 2006, public support for the mission was waning. Its rising death toll had become associated with Prime Minister Harper, whose Conservative Party aimed for closer ties with the White House. There were few liberal-left voices willing to make the progressive case for Afghanistan.
In these ways, the path was cleared for an unequivocal "troops out" position to emerge from the margins of Canadian politics, as much by default as by design.
The NDP, which has traditionally opposed Canadian military and foreign-policy alliances with the United States, set out to capture the "anti-war" vote as its own. At the NDP's September, 2006 convention, delegates adopted a position that could have been lifted straight off a placard from an American demonstration against the war in Iraq: "Support Our Troops. Bring Them Home".
NDP leader Jack Layton, a media-savvy Toronto politician, roused delegates with these words: "Canadians are not warmongers. Canada does not commit its soldiers to war just because that will get our prime minister in good with an administration of a certain sort in Washington." [6]
There were other forces at play, however, that allowed something more than mere pacifist isolationism to loom over the politics of the liberal-left in Canada.
By 2001, the NDP, the trade unions, the university faculties, and a variety of national "activist" organizations were firmly in the hands of a generation that had come of age in the heady days of the 1960s New Left, and the deeply rooted social-justice traditions of the Canadian left had been nearly eclipsed by the kind of counterculture politics with which Americans are more familiar.
Class solidarity had been traded in for identity politics, and universalism was exchanged for cultural relativism. As the Canadian philosophers Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath put it, counterculture ideas eventually became "the conceptual template" for all leftist politics. [7]
Down the road not taken by the Canadian left lay a range of progressive analyses of the Afghanistan question. The intervention was sanctioned by the United Nations, after all, and consisted of a multinational effort by soldiers from nearly 40 countries in aid of a fledgling democracy, and against an array of obscurantist, anti-modern, viciously misogynistic and violent gangsters.
Just one progressive analysis available was the kind articulated by Fred Halliday, who compares the campaign in Afghanistan to the struggle against fascism in Spain during the 1930s, [8] but the more utilitarian doctrine of the "Responsibility to Protect" was especially well-suited to the Canadian disposition. Canada had championed the doctrine through the United Nations, and one of its architects was Michael Ignatieff, the former Harvard University human rights scholar who had returned to Canada to stake out a centre-left position in the Liberal Party.[9] But when it came to Afghanistan, the Canadian left tended to succumb to the reflexive habits of the counterculture, and the beckoning appeal of the transgressive. So, to make sense of 9/11 and everything that followed, a residual conception of Third World resistance to American hegemony was close to hand, and it flowered like the new buds of spring. Across Canada, there were marches and parades, and die-ins and teach-ins. It was just like the 1960s again, but for two big differences.
