A win for Steve?
Federal politics, when they’re not a battle of Titans, are more like a protracted chess game. Or, for those in government, five chess games played at once while trying to amuse and retain an audience. Not for the faint of heart, the inattentive, or the dull-witted.
Like chess, it’s not always clear who is winning and who is being set up for delicious defeat, what taking or losing a piece in one move sets up or makes impossible a number of moves away. Chess, like politics, has its hidden agendas.
Canadians worry that Steve too has a hidden agenda and it’s this belief that has kept him short of a majority. What is starting to dawn on some of us is that the Conservative hidden agenda is not just down the road, kept largely out of play by minority government, but is being played successfully right in front of our noses.
One Conservative “hidden” agenda has been the major shift in federal spending priorities to the military from spending on the municipalities, social welfare, First Nations and social justice. And it is in this context that we should assess Liberal response to the government’s Afghanistan policy.
Stéphane Dion, under pressure from Iggy and those in the party who still defer to Mr. Manley’s international “insight” and his friendliness to the Bush Administration, has given Steven Harper pretty much all he wanted on the war.
Our troops will be committed until 2011, not 2009 as is our current commitment. And while, according to Liberals, the work of our troops will be a lot less about engaging the enemy in an attempt to defeat the Taliban, it allows the degree and nature of engagement to be defined not by policy, but by the judgment of military commanders.
This is capitulation
That this is capitulation rather than sound oppositional work by the Liberals is revealed by the fact they apparently bought the goofy argument that the only way Afghani troops could be trained properly is in battle.
How exactly have our Canadian troops been readied for their current engagement? Was there a war over the past number of decades that someone forgot to tell us about, where our men and women became the fine force they are?
So while it may look like teamwork to those in the Liberal caucus, to the rest of us it looks just like what Conservatives have been saying for years; Dion is no leader. We knew he was no leader in the sense valued by Steve Harper, George Bush and Michael Ignatieff, taking us where they think we should go.
But Stéphane runs the risk now of failing as a (democratic) leader by not leading us where we wish to go, out of combat Afghanistan in 2009, having done more than our share. This sure looks like a victory for Iggy, for John (Hey I’m) Manley (Too), and for Bob (I’m No New Democrat) Rae, and especially for Steve.
Not only have Stephen and Peter got exactly what they wanted - an extension of the mission - but they gave their hidden agenda, significantly greater military budgets over time, a real boost. Chalk one up for the boys.
A deeper strategy?
Now one might suppose that the Liberals are subtler than they appear to be in the chess game leading up to the next election. They may think that by controlling the language of the bill that will extend our engagement in Afghanistan they have subtly sifted our foreign policy from its current orientation to more training, less engagement and then back to peacekeeping.
It may be that they think giving the Conservatives what they want will end up hurting them, when Peter proves unable to talk other NATO countries to the front lines. Or they might think that this shift allows them to choose the central issues of the next campaign rather than have the election be about foreign policy.
Perhaps. But the real winners last week have been the NDP. While their policy of just going home may seem a bit naïve, they do understand that this war is not where Canadians wish to be and that we don’t wish to have ever-increasing shares of federal budgets turned over to military spending, where the real winners are those who sell military hardware.
