How General Hillier has made it respectable to be a soldier again
CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
November 9, 2007 at 11:31 PM EST
It was my Globe and Mail colleague Lawrence Martin who put his finger on it.
He was writing a couple of days ago about Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier, whom he calls the Sun King for what he sees as General Hillier's stubborn refusal to toe the government line on Afghanistan and to be stifled by the powers-that-be in the Prime Minister's Office.
(To be perfectly fair, if I were the CDS, I'd have had trouble following the government line, too, if only because, from time to time, it's been impossible to determine quite what it is.)
Now, Mr. Martin lives and works in Ottawa and is far more familiar with the workings of Parliament Hill and the PMO than I am. Interpreting the verbal droppings of politicians and their anonymous handlers, foes and friends I leave to him and others.
If Mr. Martin et al think there is a push-pull contest going on between Stephen Harper and Gen. Hillier, probably there is; if Mr. Martin says Gen. Hillier is on his way out, then perhaps it's true.
In other words, I absolutely yield to him on this stuff.
But it was in this same piece that Mr. Martin put into words, however inadvertently, the bare-bones truth of what I think really irritates him about this particular soldier and perhaps the lot of them – and, if he's right, may irritate other Canadians as well.
Writing about the potential junking of Gen. Hillier, a prospect that does not appear to fill him with sadness, Mr. Martin said: “But while dropping the engaging Gen. Hillier would anger the military and other constituencies, the public at large might not react so disdainfully.
“Many aren't comfortable with his militaristic view of Canada, his seeming readiness to move the country off its peace-brokering, peacekeeping tradition toward a more American mindset.”
Now that was a powerful paragraph, invoking all at the same time the spectre of militarism and our American neighbours and offering a passing but plaintive reference to the grand old days of Canadian peacekeeping.
Aside from the fact that I wouldn't have thought “militaristic” could be an epithet when applied to a man who has spent his life in the Canadian Forces as a professional soldier – I mean, what ought a leader of soldiers to be? Pacifistic? Delicate? – the evidence that Gen. Hillier is militaristic is pretty scarce.
Surely it was under him that the Forces rearmed after decades of suffering sweeping budget cuts and a bureaucratic mindset that persisted in viewing the military as though it were just another department, like Fisheries and Oceans. But rearmament is not innately militaristic: It is simply giving soldiers the reasonable tools to do what their government assigns them to do.
As for peacekeeping, which still appears to be how some Canadians, Mr. Martin included, prefer to envision their soldiers – in smart blue berets handing out goodies to children – consider what Colonel George Petrolekas, a veteran soldier now on unpaid leave who is also a friend of Gen. Hillier's (and fiercely loyal), has to say about one of the missions Mr. Martin cites, Bosnia.
Col. Petrolekas was there in 1993 as part of the United Nations' protection force.
“The mission was for the delivery of humanitarian aid to villages,” he says, “and thus the rules did not allow the international force to stop abuses of humanity that can only be termed aberrant.
“Early in my tour in 1993, a village of 280 [this was the village of Vares] was butchered and not a word was said, not a thing was done. There were so many such events that I saw soldiers cry at the frustration of not being able to do the right thing.
“If that be keeping the peace, you can have it.”
Other UN peacekeeping missions in which Canadians took part – most infamously, in Rwanda under Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, who later wrote a searing account, Shake Hands with the Devil, of his force's impotence to do much to prevent the genocide of Tutsis and the slaughter of 10 of his peacekeepers – were similarly flawed.
The key reason for the soldiers' impotence was that they were so crippled by their rules of engagement – the same sort of rules Col. Petrolekas was referring to in Bosnia – that they couldn't protect the civilians they were there to help or in some instances even themselves. ROE are part and parcel of a soldier's arsenal, as critical a part as his weaponry, and if Gen. Hillier had anything to do with the more sensible rules under which Canadians now operate in Kandahar, then all credit to him.
The truth is, Gen. Hillier has presided over what amounts to the rebirth of the Canadian military. I don't speak purely in terms of budgets, armaments and missions, either; what he has really done is make it respectable again to be a soldier in this country. Under his leadership, there has been something of a cultural shift such that soldiers are no longer made to feel vaguely ashamed for being soldiers.
It was always an honourable occupation, but that “dark decade” Gen. Hillier often invokes, and which so appears to annoy my colleague Mr. Martin, was absolutely real. The CDS isn't imagining it: National newspapers and magazines ran stories on soldiers so ill-paid they had to resort to food banks, reservists were so starved for funds they ran out of ammunition and invented the so-called “militia bullet” (it meant they literally went “Bang-bang”), and in those post-Somalia years, soldiers were asked and occasionally ordered not to wear their uniforms in public, presumably lest the mere sight of them provoke fear and loathing in the populace.
The forces have come a long way under the blunt Newfoundlander. Maybe he's in a spat with the PM; maybe he's hard to handle; maybe he's even militaristic. Soldiers have waited a long time for a valiant and forthright champion in that office. No wonder they, and those who like soldiers, like him so much.
), I'm sure we'll be in good hands.
