New Yorker writers Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik, both Canadian ex-pats, went head-to-head at the University of Toronto in a debate sponsored by Maclean's and moderated by one of the magazine's columnists, Andrew Coyne. The question to be resolved was Canada: Nation or Notion?
I didn't know much about Gopnik, but had read Gladwell's books The Tipping Point and Blink and couldn't wait to hear his mind at work in a live setting. But despite having the benefit of greater celebrity on his side, Gladwell was pretty soundly trounced by Gopnik, who handled the "notion" side of the argument. Gladwell was a fine storyteller, weaving elliptically through seemingly unrelated stories and examples in an attempt to illustrate that Canada's relatively small population defined it as a nation. According to Gladwell, this lack of size, combined with the country's connections to the greater Western world, gave Canada unique diplomatic power and the opportunity to be a major voice on the world stage.
While Gladwell focused on the image that Canada presents to outsiders, Gopnik looked inward, focusing on the ties that bind Canadians to each other. He argued that it was precisely Canada's lack of a single, coherent national identity that was its greatest strength - that its malleable nature, its ability to flow with shifts in culture and ethnic makeup - was the reason that it was largely a successful state.
The question - Nation or Notion - was a little too vague, and didn't allow for enough disagreement between Gladwell and Gopnik. The crusty Coyne the best provocateur (he clearly disagreed with both combatants on many points), but even he couldn't stir up much feistiness in a question and answer period dominated by Gopnik's blistering logic and insightful observations. For the most part, Gladwell was limited to silent nods of agreement.
One of Gopnik's most interesting points came in response to a question from Coyne, who wondered if the U.S. wasn't a shining example of a country that had developed strong national identity in spite of its many internal contradictions and problems, and thus a model for what Canada could be. Gopnik suggested that the fierce patriotism characteristic of the U.S., while mostly admirable in peacetime, could all too easily be twisted and disfigured by politicians, as evidenced by the Iraq war and America's post-9/11 militarism in general.
Which brings me to Stop-Loss, my MTV-flavoured nightcap. The movie (wisely) did not focus on the larger political questions surrounding the Iraq war, but rather narrowed in on the specific injustice of U.S. soldiers being dragged back into service after completing their contracts, due to a lack of military manpower. But if the movie wasn't explicitly asking those larger questions, they certainly loomed large in my mind after it was over.
Iraq is a tricky issue. There were good reasons, human-rights and social justice reasons, to depose Saddam. So I can't quite bring myself to throw my weight behind the anti-war movement. But I definitely can't consider myself pro-war, either, because the "good" reasons for an invasion were not the reasons laid out by the Bush Administration, and the obvious lack of post-invasion planning suggests a callous disregard for the lives of both Iraqi citizens and American soldiers. There may have been a right way to do this, everything about how it's been done has been wrong.
But what is the Western world's obligation now? Whether with good intentions or not, we've screwed up the situation to the point that staying will drag out what is already a disaster, but leaving may create an even worse one.
The pro-war side, with its obstinate refusal to acknowledge the reality of the situation, is easy to rail against. But I find myself also irritated with a certain element of the anti-war side. Specifically, I wonder whom they believe they are serving by demanding a withdrawal of troops. Are they thinking only of protecting the lives of U.S. soldiers, who are dying for what seems to be a pointless cause? Or do they genuinely believe that the Iraqi people would be better off without Coalition troops in their country?
If it's the second one, I really have to question the anti-war side's links to reality. If the troops leave, the shaky and temporary allegiances that have produced relative calm over the past year or so are almost certain to dissolve, and the country will be abandoned to competing militias bombing and shooting each other until a situation not unlike Saddam's Iraq (or, in a worst-case scenario, another Somalia) emerges. I can't imagine that the same people who argue for intervention in Darfur would have such disregard for innocent Iraqis, but it sometimes seems like this is the case.
My own fence-sitting, of course, is part of the problem. But I feel like asking a lot of the anti-war crowd just why they are anti-war, and whether it's a blanket pacifism that extends to all conflicts in the world. Because the sad and frustrating fact is that in this reality, the international enforcement of justice often demands military action. Which means killing and dying.
It's possible to be anti-war for nationalist reasons - let's keep our troops out of conflicts that don't directly involve us and leave the rest of the world to sort out their own problems, even if that means turning a blind eye to the worst crimes against humanity. And it's possible to be anti-war for humanitarian reasons - the Iraq war has made life there worse than under Saddam. And for for ideological reasons - war is always and everywhere wrong.
I understand the rationale for all of these. But when I read an article or hear of a rally urging the U.S. to get out of Iraq, I wonder what camp the writers or protesters represent. And I wonder whether they have truly asked themselves what would happen to that country if the U.S. left.
If they fail to ask, and answer, this question, the anti-war crowd has no more claim to the moral high ground than Dick Cheney.
