From the Great White North

I'm reading Paul William Roberts' A War Against Truth, his account of the US invasion of Iraq. Roberts is a Canadian journalist with long experience in Iraq, including interviews with Saddam Hussein, so he knows the country. His account is raw, brutal and intimate. Not the "All is Well, Stay the Course" presentation so prevalent in the the US media. I'm about half way through so far.

After a confrontation with a pistol-wielding Iraqi angry at the American invasion, Williams writes:

"...[O]ddly enough, you don't care you don't care much why someone is going to kill you--and no cause having your death among its goals seems like a good one. It did occur to me, however, that being killed because because you were mistaken for an American would be the worst of all possible deaths. To steady my nerves, I handed out maple-leaf pins to everyone. I had over twenty of them.

'Maybe you all want one of these to wear...Eh?'

American journalists would seek me out to beg for these little lifesavers. The world is not a safe place for Americans any more, and they know why. A sense of shame pervades the language of decent Americans, the ones who know that the War on Terror will be no more successful than other wars waged against abstract nouns--hunger, drugs, sutpidity. A Canadian, on the other hand, now walks tall and safe through the alleys of hell, acknowldged gratefully by all as Friend to the Friendless, Refuge of the Refugee, Resort of Last Resort. Such was the genius of Jean Chretien that no one knew where Canada really stood on the issue of thei war, yet everyone thought we were on his side. This, I often told myeslf, is diplomacy!

Canada's actual role in the world, however, is what it always has been since the Korean War: to act as the conscience of America. It's a full-time job, a dirty job--but someone who speaks English has to do it. It is much like having a violent drunk for an older brother: you are ultimately the only one who can talk him down from his latest bender and the crunchy beating he is about to adminster for no reason he will remember tomorrow."

(emphasis in original)