I have given up trying to forecast how many years it will be before the majority of the Canadian public realizes that we are not a “peacekeeping nation” and, quite frankly, never were (protestations from the likes of Lloyd Axworthy notwithstanding). Sean Maloney and Tom Fennell’s article (“Soldiers, Not Peacekeepers,” March) contributes to a long-overdue and badly needed education process regarding our overseas military roles.
During the Cold War, starting with the Suez crisis of 1956, successive governments perpetuated the myth that Canadians were peacekeepers. At the height of our United Nations deployments during the Cold War, our country never had more than 2,000 lightly armed soldiers wearing the blue beret in places like Cyprus, Egypt, and the Golan Heights. During this same period, Canada had up to 12,000 troops stationed on nato’s Central Front in Germany, armed with nuclear weapons (I’m not making this up). Peacekeeping was a sideline activity.
But for a few special cases, Canadian peacekeeping has been relegated to the history books since the end of the Cold War. In order to qualify as a peacekeeping mission, an international force and the soldiers from each of the participating nations have to be invited by the belligerents. The force must be impartial and use deadly force only in cases of self-defence. In Afghanistan, Canada’s role is certainly not impartial, and we use deadly force against the enemy. The mission fails all the qualifying criteria for peacekeeping, yet this past week I was asked to do numerous media interviews regarding our “peacekeeping” role in Afghanistan.
It would be nice to solve the world’s security problems with insightful thoughts provided by Canada while others do the heavy lifting. Nice, but also humiliating, and insulting to the generations who went before us. Canadian soldiers are rightly offended when they are portrayed as social workers with guns.
Canada has a proud tradition of peacekeeping, but the demand for that kind of mission has dried up. Today’s bad guys don’t recognize the authority of the blue beret, so we have replaced it with a camouflaged Kevlar helmet. Still, the Canadian public has yet to acknowledge our new role. Maloney and Fennell’s article certainly helps to dispel the peacekeeping myth. For that, I’m confident our soldiers will thank the magazine.
Lewis MacKenzie, O.Ont., M.S.C., C.D.
Major-General (ret’d)
Bracebridge, Ontario
Soldiering is peacekeeping and peacekeeping is soldiering. Canadians who lament the passing of what they thought peacekeeping was probably never understood it in the first place. To understand peacekeeping, one should first know the difference between the soldier and the warrior. Peacekeeping is about using soldiers to keep warriors under control.
Both the soldier and the warrior are ready to inflict violence, something that is easy to do once one has some basic weapons-skills and the will to kill. The critical difference is threefold: The soldier is prepared to receive violence if he must, while the warrior will always avoid it. The soldier must always be responsible to an accountable political authority, while the warrior only sometimes is. Finally, the soldier is much more likely to be a professional who fights when he is directed to.
The issue isn’t one of courage—some warriors are very brave. However, they are not the sort of men who will climb out of a trench into concentrated machine-gun fire or fly straight and level for thirty seconds in a torrent of flak or stand impassively on the quarterdeck in a barrage of artillery.
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