Demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square in February 2011. Photo by Asmaa Waguih (Reuters)

There’s no denying that, in many parts of the world, women’s rights are in a bad state. There are hundreds of organizations and thousands of activists working to change that fact. But the persecution of women throughout certain parts of the world has, in the last decade, been co-opted as a pretext for military occupation, and “saving the women” of these countries has not been the outcome. Women need to be more empowered all over the world; that goal is not going to be accomplished by military invasion.

In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, the United States and its allies began the “war on terror,” invoking the appalling plight of Afghan women as one of the primary reasons for their intervention in Afghanistan, along with the promise of rooting out al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In November, 2001, the U.S. Department of State released a document entitled “The Taliban’s War Against Women.” The document began with the words: “Prior to the rise of the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were protected under law and increasingly afforded rights in Afghan society.” The same day that this document was released, Laura Bush launched a radio debut addressing the plight of Afghan women, in an effort to garner public support for the war. What was overlooked at the time, and continues to be overlooked eleven years later is the fact that the Taliban, in many ways, resembled their predecessors: the fundamentalist Mujahideen whom the United States had supported since the summer of 1979 in its efforts to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Furthermore, what the report and Mrs. Bush failed to mention was the fact that the oppression of Afghan women had begun with the U.S-backed Mujahideen, 20 years before the Taliban emerged, and that the plight of Afghan women would continue to deteriorate with the re-emergence of such individuals two decades later.

Prior to the ascendance of the Mujahideen, Afghanistan’s constitution, written in 1964, guaranteed women basic rights such as universal suffrage and equal pay. Women comprised half of university students, held government jobs and could travel and leave the house without a male escort. Moreover, “women made up 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants. A small number of women even held important political posts as members of Parliament and judges, and most women did not wear the burqa.”

Beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, Afghanistan became the hot battlefield in which Cold War rivalry was fought out. The U.S., solely interested in winning the battle against the Soviet Union, funded the Mujahideen to the tune of $3 billion; Saudi Arabia provided as much and likely more. Neither country appreciated the ramifications of such a decision—especially the effects it would have on women’s rights. When asked about support for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a misogynist figure who became notoriously known for throwing acid on the faces of women who refused to wear the veil, and whose group, Hezb-e-Islami received as much as 50 percent of U.S. aid , a CIA official in Pakistan responded: “fanatics fight better.”

With the end of the Soviet invasion, which had caused the death of countless civilians, and the subsequent withdrawal of Soviet forces, the U.S-supported Mujahideen came to power in the early 1990s. Burhanuddin Rabbani, the president of the Mujahideen Government of the Islamic State of Afghanistan suspended the constitution and issued strict religious decrees in its place. In 1992, Ayatollah Asif Mohseni (the interim governing council spokesman), who is now a close friend of President Karzai and the United States, along with Sayad Ali Javed (now a member of Parliament) publicly announced that they would begin implementing a new set of rules governing the conduct of women, which were referred to as the “Ordinance of the Women’s Veil.” These edicts prevented women from going out without their husband’s permission or talking with men who were not close relatives, and consequently led to the closure of many schools. Yet despite their similarities to the Taliban edicts, edicts collaboratively introduced by Rabbani, Mohseni and Javed received little criticism and the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan was anything but important for U.S. and its allies prior to the 9/11 tragedy.

Today, eleven years after the NATO-led intervention, Human Rights Watch has determined that the situation for Afghan women is “dismal in every area, including health, education, employment, freedom from violence, equality before the law, and political participation.” The same warlords, drug lords and fundamentalists who were in power in the 1990s (whom Ronald Reagan called freedom fighters against the communist threat) have now formed the Northern Alliance. What is most apparent is that the re-empowerment of such individuals and the growth in the militarization of Afghan society have increased, not decreased, violence against women. According to a nationwide survey of 4,700 households carried out by Global Rights in 2008, 87 percent of Afghan women reported that they had experienced at least one form of physical, sexual, or psychological violence or forced marriage. Fearing retaliation and police abuse, victims of violence will not seek help, and the few who do often face hostility and more abuse, while perpetrators of violence receive impunity. In addition, according to Rachel Reid, a Human Rights Watch researcher, since the fall of the Taliban, the percentage of girls who finish school has risen from zero percent to just four percent—a very minor improvement, especially when considering statistics from the pre-Mujahideen era, when girls and women made up half of university students in Kabul. Girls’ access to secondary education, which is by far the most vital for women’s emancipation, is still very low as well. Only 11 percent of secondary school age girls are enrolled in grades 7-9 and a dismal 4 percent in grades 10-12.

Furthermore, today, for the first time in Afghan history, women must simultaneously face all the enemies of women’s rights. On the one hand, Mujahideen fundamentalists now comprise the Northern Alliance and are in positions of power, firmly supported by NATO forces; on the other, they must face anti-government insurgents: al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Similarly the invasion of Iraq has not brought about much advancement in the realm of women’s rights. An Oxfam report in 2009 revealed that more than half of the women who had been interviewed had been forced to leave their houses since 2003, either because of violence or to seek employment. The report states that, “Nearly four fifths had stopped attending high school and university and 40 percent of those with children said their children were not going to school.” While sons were kept away from schools due to security reasons, daughters were kept away either because they were forbidden to attend, or because it was “too expensive”. This is a significant regression, considering that even under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein, women were free to work, walk the streets unveiled, and go to school.

The wave of revolutions that swept the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 have provided a different narrative, though it remains an ambiguous one. Women formed a key constituency of the Tahrir Square protests that brought down Hosni Mubarak’s government in Egypt, but whether the revolution will produce an improvement in women’s rights remains to be seen, in Egypt and elsewhere. For instance, a few months after Mubarak’s ouster, army police broke up demonstrations in Tahrir Square and arrested seventeen women, assaulted them, and later threatened to charge them with prostitution. Human Rights Watch conducted interviews with two women who revealed that they were forced to undergo virginity examinations. One of the women who filed a lawsuit against the military has received death threats. The predominance of the Muslim Brotherhood—which, for all its reformist policies, is still very conservative about the role of women in society—in Egypt’s November elections also raises concerns about the future of the women’s rights movement in that country.

But there have been promising developments as well. Following the toppling of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s electoral commission adopted a gender parity law, and in August, Tunisia became the first Arab country to withdraw its main reservations on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

The examples of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate that the toppling of tyrants and western invasions are not sufficient ingredients for the advancement of women’s rights. In fact, the situation for women has grown steadily worse in both countries. The Arab Spring demonstrates that—while there are no guarantees—popular civil uprisings, and not “nation-building” invasions, stand a much better chance of instituting the kind of radical change that makes improvements in the status of women possible.

Ava Emaz is a pseudonym. We agreed to withhold her name to prevent harassment by Iranian authorities. She is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

Did Michael Ignatieff's pro-Iraq war stance doom the Liberals? Creative Commons photo by Flickr user WmPitcher.

Listening to Michael Ignatieff address his few remaining dispirited supporters on election night, I couldn’t help but picture the room dotted with the ghosts of Baghdad. I wonder whether Ignatieff saw them too, like so many Banquos’ ghosts in the room that night as he took responsibility for his party’s dismal showing in the 2011 federal election.

Having since resigned his leadership, it may seem to rude to kick him now that he’s down. But the colossal scale of the Liberal defeat in this election can’t be fully understood unless we talk honestly about Michael Ignatieff’s career as an intellectual and politician—and the Iraq War remains central to both.

Ignatieff’s career as a Canadian politician is bound up in the war: he was first courted by backroom Liberals in the spring of 2004, as an iconic “serious” small-L liberal. (American liberalism was entering what would be years of toxic, self-destructive debate about whether “good liberals” could oppose the war.) For this type of centrist liberal, supporting the invasion of Iraq was the “serious” choice, contrasted with the dreamy foolishness of pacifism.

Paul Martin’s government, terrified that the brief moment of spine Jean Chrétien had shown by avoiding direct Canadian involvement in the war, was terrified about the state of relations with the Bush government. Ignatieff’s recruitment was a signal to the Americans and the Canadian elite that the Liberal Party could still be trusted, despite Chrétien’s heresy. It was more about distancing the Liberals from left-wing policies than the war itself.

Ignatieff wasted no time. His landmark speech to the Liberal Party in 2005 was full of rhetorical slaps at the left, but here’s my favourite, in retrospect:

“…many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.”

The following are the countries that supported the amendment (79): Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Botswana, Brunei Dar-Sala, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Comoros, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Republic of Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

The countries that abstained (17): Antigua-Barbuda, Barbados, Belarus, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Colombia, Fiji, Mauritius, Mongolia, Papau New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

The countries that were absent (26): Albania, Bolivia, Central African Republic, Chad, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Marshall Island, Mauritania, Nauru, Nicaragua, Palau, Sao Tome Principe, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Togo, Tonga, Turkey, Turkmenistan.

Julian Stallabrass

Dear George Bush,

I’ve been following the press coverage of your forthcoming book, Decision Points, with considerable interest. Just the other day you sat down with Matt Lauer of NBC to pre-tape an interview and, I must say, some of the pre-released quotations are real gems.

One, however, stands out: recalling Kanye West’s remarks at the Katrina telethon (“George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”) you said:

That [means] ‘he’s a racist…’ And I didn’t appreciate it then. I don’t appreciate it now. … I resent it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency.

One of the most disgusting moments of your presidency? Really? Why don’t you take a walk with me down memory lane.

The Iraq War! Now that was disgusting. I know that your people don’t have an accurate idea of  the number of Iraqis killed, so maybe you don’t know this, but the best guesses put the absolute minumum number of civilian casualties between 98,000 and 108,000. That is, simply, a slaughter. Nor should we forget that the whole reason for going to war—weapons of mass destruction—turned out to be a fiction.

Recession! Yeah, that happened on your watch. To be fair, the policies, and economic system, the guaranteed collapse itself, weren’t enacted or supported exclusively by you. But you were one helluva a cheerleader for deregulation, for the free movement of capital (but, I might add, not people) and allowing corporations to act with impunity.

Hurricane Katrina! Your response to this man-made (yes, man-made) disaster was abysmal. First, amongst many others, you allowed critical infrastructure to deteriorate and did nothing to militate against the disastrous consequences that were all but inevitable. And should we even bring up FEMA? No, there’s no need.

My point: Kanye West implying you were a racist, that was not one of the most disgusting points of your presidency. I know you don’t care to listen to the critics, given that you’ve written “Whatever the verdict on my presidency, I’m comfortable with the fact that I won’t be around to hear it.”

Know, though, that I care and as far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in.

Sincerely,

Simon Wallace

Bassam and Zahra's studio in Damascus.

In one room of their tiny apartment in a suburb of Damascus, Iraqi artists Bassam and Zahra have set up their studio. It has all the necessary trappings scattered around in a colourful mess: sketches, wooden easels, tubes of pigment, paint brushes soaking in plastic buckets filled with water.

Some of Bassam and Zahra’s finished paintings decorate their apartment walls, some are for sale at a Greekowned gallery in Souq Al-Hamadiyye, and some are for sale at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The couple are refugees who fled to Syria to escape the war in Iraq. They scrape together a living by selling their paintings to tourists. It’s much cheaper to live in Damascus than it is in Baghdad, but even so, they can’t get by without occasional gifts from relatives to make ends meet.

When the war broke out in Iraq in 2003 and work was hard to come by, Bassam began painting portraits for American soldiers. After his neighbourhood was occupied by the Mahdi Army, a Shia militia, he quickly became a suspect. A friend of Bassam’s who ran a bootleg liquor store was killed. After his death, Bassam says life in Baghdad became “like being in a movie, no life and no feeling.” Terrified of the violence, Zahra did not set foot outside of their home for three months.

Paint brushes in Bassam and Zahra's Damascus studio.

As the situation in Baghdad deteriorated, educated, middle-class individuals and students—Zahra’s father, now 75, graduated from Oxford University and was a successful engineer; Bassam’s mother was an accountant—were in danger, either of kidnapping for ransom or of being perceived as collaborating with the American military. So, in 2006, like many other Iraqis, Bassam and Zahra made the difficult decision to leave their families and escape across the border to Syria. Bassam describes a huge sense of relief when they passed into Syrian territory, like he could finally breathe again.

Neither of them have been back to Baghdad since 2006— nor do they want to return. The couple says life before the war was like being “choked.” Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime was oppressive, but stable. Today, sectarian violence is rampant, and neither Zahra nor Bassam believes the situation in Baghdad will improve any time soon.

Some of Bassam's comics.

As refugees in Damascus, they live in perpetual fear of being kicked out of the country and having to return to Iraq. Both of them continue to harbour the dreams they shared when they met at art college: Bassam hopes to have an exhibition of his paintings and perfect his work as a comic artist; Zahra, who laughs easily and is seldom seen out of her Converse sneakers, smiles at the thought of having children. But both are too worried about deportation to consider a family right now.

A phone call from the UNHCR with the promise of resettlement to a Western country is their best chance at finding a normal, stable life. However, they have no illusions that it will happen soon—Syria is home to an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi refugees just like them.

Irving Howe (the New York socialist) once wrote “Blessed New York Times! What would radical journalism in America do without it?” The newspaper was, to be sure, a tool of the bourgeois but a tool that reported the news with unequalled comprehensiveness. Read it and, ideology aside, you became the possessor of a full range of facts, dates and events. I had a similar feeling this weekend reading the Times coverage of the Afghanistan war.

Journalism is changing—this we know—but on the eve of (depending who you talk to) a cataclysm for old journalism or its reinvigoration the American paper-of-record still puts out an impressively thorough and relatively exhaustive edition, if politically problematic for a progressive. Contrast this to the newly redesigned Globe and Mail whose editor, John Stackhouse, told Toronto Life that “it’s fine for a typical news story to be 600 to 800 words… Most readers aren’t going to read more than that.” Anyway, I digress. This is supposed to be about Afghanistan.

It’s shocking how little we actually know, and how little what we do know tells us. Journalists, or should I say the organizations that employ them, have largely abdicated their responsibility to report the war in ways that allow readers to secure a nuanced understanding of what exactly it is that Western militaries are doing in south-central Asia. The Swat valley, Provincial Reconstruction teams, human interest stories all make an appearance in the Canadian press but little effort is made to draw connections or attempt some sort of synthesis. If there ever were a time for bold reporting, this is it. There are, of course, bright spots. Re-enter the Times.

First, if you have time, read this article. It deals with one aspect of the war that is, I think, neglected: namely the strategy that NATO is pursuing. In short, Western forces are adopting a hyper-aggressive posture to demoralize anti-occupation forces prior to NATO’s withdrawal. Knowing this, in addition to what we already know (that free societies cannot be ushered in under the aegis of an imperialist gun, etc.), will perhaps allow us, like Irving Howe, to develop more incisive, accurate and compelling critiques that will inspire dramatic democratic change. Here are five important points to note about the conflict in Afghanistan today, noted by the Times and Wired:

1) The current strategy. Canada, amongst other nations, is in the process of evacuating its military personnel from the region having declared that a decade-long commitment to the war is sufficient. The United States, the main antagonist in the war, has thus been required to shoulder more of the burdens of occupation. It, too, however, is maneuvering for an endgame. The Times:

“Since early last year, when President Obama took office, the overriding objective of American policy has been to persuade the Taliban to abandon any hope of victory. It was to make that point that 30,000 additional troops were sent here…the strategy has been to break the Taliban’s will, to break up the movement, and to settle with as many leaders as are willing to deal.”

2) The way to effect that victory

“In the past several months, General Petraeus has loosed an extraordinary amount of firepower on the Taliban insurgency. Special operations forces are now operating at a tempo five times that of a year ago, killing and capturing hundreds of insurgents each month. In the same period, the number of bombs and missiles aimed at insurgents has grown by half. And General Petraeus has launched a series of operations to clear insurgents from the southern city of Kandahar.”

3) This was done before.

“That strategy looks a lot like the one that brought General Petraeus success in Iraq in 2007 and 2008. With Iraq engulfed in apocalyptic violence, American field commanders reached out to nationalist-minded guerrilla leaders and found many of them exhausted by war and willing to make peace. About 100,000 Iraqis, many of them insurgents, came on the American payroll: The Americans were working both ends of the insurgency. As they made peace with some insurgent leaders, they intensified their efforts to kill the holdouts and fanatics. The violence, beginning in late 2007, dropped precipitously.”

4) With long term success?

“Awakening leaders and security officials [in Iraq] say that since the spring, as many as several thousand Awakening fighters have quit, been fired, stopped showing up for duty, or ceased picking up paychecks. During the past four months, the atmosphere has become particularly charged as the Awakening members find themselves squeezed between Iraqi security forces, who have arrested hundreds of current and former members accused of acts of recent terrorism, and Al Qaeda’s brutal recruitment techniques.”

5) The return of shock and awe?

“Last month, NATO attack planes dropped their bombs and fired their guns on 700 separate missions, according to U.S. Air Force statistics. That’s more than double the 257 attack sorties they flew in September 2009, and one of the highest single-month totals of the entire nine-year Afghan campaign.”

Some of these Canadians are not like the others. Left to right: Brenda Martin, James Loney, Omar Khadr, Maher Arar, Suaad Hagi Mohamud.

In November 2005, I travelled to Iraq in violation of a Foreign Affairs travel advisory. It was my third trip. Four members of an international delegation, including myself, were kidnapped and held by Iraqi insurgents for four months. One member of our group, an American named Tom Fox, was killed two weeks before we were released.

We knew the risks. The organization I belong to, Christian Peacemaker Teams, routinely sends people into dangerous no-go zones. It’s what we do: train international teams in the disciplines of non-violent, direct action to work with grassroots communities affected by violence.

Our work in Iraq included drawing attention to and documenting the arbitrary detention and torture of Iraqis, and supporting and training a Muslim Peacemaker Team. In the event of a kidnapping, CPT policy is very clear: no ransom will be paid and we will not accept or resort to using any kind of physical force to save our lives.

Thus, I expected nothing of the Canadian government when we were kidnapped. If we were released it would be through the non-violent efforts of CPT. If we were tortured or killed it would be our sharing in the terrible cost soldiers are routinely asked to pay in the course of serving their country.

I was astonished, then, to discover upon our release—a military rescue led by British special forces—that a team sent to Baghdad by the federal government had been working around the clock to secure our release, and Foreign Affairs and the RCMP had been in constant communication with my partner and family. The Canadian Forces sent a Hercules aircraft to fly me and my colleague Harmeet Singh Sooden out of Baghdad. Prime Minister Stephen Harper called to wish us well.

I couldn’t believe it. They came for me! Me, of all Canadians—an anarchist, a conscientious objector who had deliberately earned below the taxable income and not filed an income tax return for 10 years to avoid filling the military’s coffers. A government I would never vote for and completely disagreed with reached beyond politics to claim me.

Brenda Martin is another Canadian who knows what it’s like to be claimed. She was arrested in Mexico in 2006 and charged with participating in laundering and criminal conspiracy related to an online investment scam. She was found guilty on April 22, 2008, and sentenced to five years in jail. The Canadian government paid her $3,700 fine and flew her home in a chartered plane on May 1, at a cost of $82,727.

I am glad Brenda Martin was eventually helped by the federal government, just as I’m eternally grateful for the assistance provided to me and my family. But there’s a long list of Canadians in trouble abroad whom the Canadian government has either abandoned, ignored, or simply not seen.

There’s Omar Khadr, now 23, detained and tortured in Guantanamo from the age of 15, interrogated by CSIS, the only Western citizen who has not been repatriated. The government is appealing a court order requiring him to be brought home. There’s Abousfian Abdelrazik, detained and tortured by Sudan at Canada’s request, also interrogated by CSIS, and subjected to a six-year exile until a court order forced the government to let him come home. There’s Suaad Hagi Mohamud, stranded in Kenya for three months after immigration offi cials rejected her Canadian passport because her lips were “too thick.”

There’s Abdihakim Mohamed, a 25-year-old man with autism languishing in Kenya for the past three years because the government says he doesn’t match his passport photo. There’s Sacha Bond, a 24-year-old man with bipolar disorder, convicted of attempted murder in the United States for brandishing a weapon while off his meds and drunk. He was 19 at the time of the incident and no one was injured. And then, of course, there’s Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmed Abou El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, all falsely labelled by CSIS and subsequently detained, interrogated, and tortured in Syria (in one case Egypt), with Canada supplying the questions.

They are part of an even longer list of Canadians in need of assistance. Who gets help and who doesn’t is a matter of “Crown prerogative.” That’s a fancy way of saying if the government likes you, if they see you as an upstanding citizen or a worthy innocent, they’ll go to bat for you. But if you have thick lips or dark skin, if you have a funny last name or you’re mentally ill, if you were born in a country with a bad reputation or if you yourself have a bad reputation, sorry, you’re out of luck. Some Canadian citizens count, it seems, and some don’t. Brenda and I must be among those who count.

My experience as a hostage has profoundly changed my thinking about the nature of government and citizenship. Governments matter immensely. What they do and don’t do, who they see or choose not to see, is of the greatest consequence—literally a matter of life and death. Governments at their best are powerful and essential vehicles of social solidarity. They exist to advance the common good, safeguard the environment, care for the sick and the elderly, nurture and educate the young—in sum, to serve and protect their citizens.

A citizen is a citizen, by definition an equal, subject of an inviolable covenant, entitled to the protection of the government. The integrity of citizenship is tested by its universality, and the test of its universality is in how well the least and most marginalized among us are protected.

It’s time that we reclaimed citizenship from the back rooms of Crown prerogative with legislation that obliges the government to offer consular assistance to every Canadian in trouble abroad.

The government needs be proactive and vigorously safeguard the rights of every Canadian, whoever and wherever they are. The lives of Khadr, Bond, Mohamed, and many more depend on it.

And, given that 4 million Canadians travel abroad each year, your life could well depend on it too.

Here’s Anthony talking with the American investigative radio magazine Flashpoints on KPFA 94.1 FM, broadcasting out of Berkeley, California. (Drag the slider to about the one-third mark to skip straight to the interview.)

A few days before that, Anthony was on the Jeff Farias Show, a progressive podcast from the U.S. (the show is one and a half hours, and he is the last half hour. You can listen to the broadcast through Jeff’s website.

Finally, later in September Anthony was heard on Gorilla Radio, the Victoria, B.C. social justice radio show, heard every Monday at 5 PM PST on CFUV, 101.9. His interview is the first part of the program.

Think we never went to Iraq? Think again.

In March 2008, when the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” marked its fifth anniversary, Canadian media outlets were in a self-congratulatory mood: “Canada isn’t involved” there, one reporter wrote. “The further we get away from the actual date, the better Canada’s decision to not get involved with the U.S. invasion of Iraq looks,” wrote another. Another referenced the anti-war demonstrations that “stopped the Canadian government’s support for the invasion of Iraq.” It was a fact to be proud of: “We didn’t go to Iraq.”

Didn’t we? In fact, Canada has been involved with the Iraq conflict in many ways—political, economic, military—some subtle, some overt. But the notion that Canada “didn’t go to Iraq” is, at best, wishful thinking. And though the war has slipped off the front page of the newspaper, Canada’s involvement in Iraq hasn’t decreased—in fact, today we’re in it deeper than ever.

Since the beginning of the Iraq invasion, a handful of Canadian military personnel have served with the U.S. and U.K. military as part of ongoing troop exchanges. When it originally emerged in November 2003 that Canadian General Walt Natynczyk was going to be serving in Iraq (along the fast track to becoming Chief of Defence Staff), NDP leader Jack Layton expressed his outrage in the House of Commons.

“When it comes to having someone in charge of thousands and thousands of troops in a war which is illegal and should never have happened … this makes us complicit in the unilateral philosophy of George Bush and his administration,” he told the House.

The denunciations stopped, but the arrangement carried on. This owed as much to the media’s indifference toward the issue as it did to the Liberal government’s playing it down: such troop exchanges were defended in the House of Commons as being “routine.” But it later emerged that keeping Canadian soldiers on exchange in Iraq was actually part of a political commitment that Ottawa made to Washington immediately following the formal announcement that Canada would not join the coalition forces going to Iraq.

Today, Liberal Party foreign affairs critic Bob Rae says that commitment made sense, and still does: “Because of certain agreements between Canada and the U.S., there were some Canadian officers who served in Iraq, in the U.S. Army,” he says. “This is different from Canadian troops serving in the country. To have ended all military co-operation between Canada and the U.S. would have been a mistake. To have sent troops to Iraq would also have been a mistake.” In an emailed statement, the NDP’s foreign affairs critic, Paul Dewar, disagrees: “Since the beginning of the war our party has spoken [out] against the hypocrisy of stating that we’re not in this war on the one hand, and then sending some of our troops and generals to the war on the other.”

Even the Liberal defence minister at the time of the invasion, John McCallum, later admitted to authors Janice Gross-Stein and Eugene Lang, when interviewed for their bestseller, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, “It was pretty untenable not to be a part of the Iraq war but to have soldiers in Iraq.”

In a rare but extensive article about the topic in 2006, Maclean’s referred to what was becoming Canada’s “dedicated presence” in Iraq: “From the very first days of the U.S.-led Iraq war, Canadians have been deeply involved: setting up crime-fighting units, working as engineers with coalition forces, serving with the UN, flying planes that help guide missile attacks, even fighting. There are anywhere from 100 to 200 working in the country. Iraq may be an unpopular, troubled conflict, but it is a place everyone, from soldiers to high-ranking officials, acknowledges Canada cannot, and has not, ignored.”

Canada’s military involvement in Iraq, however, is dwarfed by the presence of Canadian private industry. Dozens of Canadian companies have benefited from the war and occupation with at least the tacit support of successive Canadian governments. Many of these companies, especially in the military-industrial sector, do so indirectly, through sales to the U.S. military or other militaries that are occupying Iraq.

Canada’s miniature Iraqi military-industrial complex has two prongs: oil companies and the private security firms that protect them. At least 15 Canadian-based companies have signed some form of exploration, production, or production-sharing contract with Iraqi or Kurdish-Iraqi officials since 2004.

Those companies require logistics, security, transportation, and equipment to operate, and Canadian companies are deeply involved on that side of the business too. In various, significant ways, Canadian companies have been providing private, for-profit “mission critical” support to the U.S.-led occupation since the very beginning of the invasion.

As many commentators have noted, thanks to the Iraq war and the accompanying spike in oil prices, the Canadian tar sands became economically viable. In turn, the U.S. officially recognized the tar sands as oil reserves, culminating in Prime Minister Harper’s proclamation that Canada is now an “energy superpower.” Among other benefits, the political capital that these circumstances have generated for Canada has at least indirectly assisted Canadian oil and gas companies in gaining a foothold in securing access to Iraq’s vast, untapped oil fields, especially in the relatively stable Northern Kurdistan Region, which is governed by the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

There is also reason to believe that, with its own strategic interests in mind, the U.S. has given its northern ally a green light to sign contested oil contracts. Writing in Report on Business, Paul Christopher Webster suggests that for obvious reasons of perception, the U.S. has taken a back seat on commercial development, instead allowing non-U.S. companies to do the work for them. “America needs oil,” Webster writes, “but the optics of American oil companies invading Iraq wholesale are not good. Far better, Iraqi and American officials seem to be signalling, that companies from elsewhere predominate in the first wave.”

Eight Canadian oil companies, either alone or with partners, have signed production-sharing deals with the KRG. One of the first to do so, Heritage Oil, recently discovered upwards of 4 billion barrels of oil ready for pumping and export. Other Canadian companies have made discoveries, have begun active exploration, or, like Addax Petroleum, are ready to begin exporting oil and expanding existing production. (Addax may not be Canadian much longer, however, since a Chinese oil company offered an $8.3 billion takeover of the company in June 2009.)

Greg Muttitt, from the U.K.-based oil industry watchdog Platform, summed up the complex political manoeuvrings that these Canadian firms are caught up in, with the Kurdish authorities fighting to maintain oil contracts that the central Baghdad government wants to scrap: “It’s a very serious concern that there’s absolutely no transparency on these contracts, that there’s not even a bidding process; these are just done through closed negotiations and the KRG consistently refused to … disclose any of the terms. There’s no way of checking out that everything is above board.” (KRG officials did not respond to an interview request to discuss their contracts with Canadian oil companies.)

Official U.S. policy under President George W. Bush favoured the establishment of a mutually acceptable hydrocarbon law, and the White House publicly sided with Baghdad in opposing the KRG’s unilateral signing of production-sharing contracts with foreign oil companies. The Canadian government, and Canadian oil executives, remain silent on the details of their operations in such a politically sensitive environment. “Canada maintains full diplomatic relations with Iraq, and respects Iraqi sovereignty. We recognize the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) as a sub-national component of the Iraqi federal system,” a Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade spokesperson told me. “We encourage Canadian firms to participate in the economic development of Iraq, while fully respecting Iraqi sovereignty and the jurdisdiction of central Iraqi authorities.”

And participate they have: the public record, along with private interviews and leaked documents obtained by This, shows a pattern of steadily escalating Canadian involvement throughout Iraq since the invasion.

Fewer than six weeks after the invasion commenced in March 2003, DFAIT sent then-Minister of International Trade Pierre Pettigrew a memo (obtained through a Freedom of Information request) saying that when the dust settled in Iraq, DFAIT “anticipate[d] important opportunities for Canadian companies, particularly in the oil and gas sector.” This memo, dated April 28, detailed an internal meeting earlier that week “to plan coordinated actions and ensure synergy between key departments and agencies that can provide assistance” to companies interested in Iraq. Canada’s embassy in Damascus, Syria, was to “be actively supporting Canadian companies interested in doing business in Iraq,” while exhibiting “a firm commitment … to assist businesses in any way possible to penetrate the market.”

Shortly after, on May 5, 2003, Pettigrew himself sent a letter to Canadian CEOs regarding “emerging export opportunities for Canadian companies in Iraq.” The thrust of Pettigrew’s letter was that while the war made the situation in Iraq “complex,” there was, nevertheless, good reason for optimism, to the extent that “the longer-term prospects for Canadian successes in that market are very good.” Canada’s support of the “reconstructing” efforts in Iraq, said Pettigrew, “is recognized with appreciation by the United States administration.” He wrote that “additional opportunities … will emerge for our exporters in Iraq … especially in such sectors as oil and gas.”

That prediction has come true: today there are more than 12 Canadian companies operating in Iraq’s oil and gas fields. Neatly coinciding with President Bush’s infamous “mission accomplished” speech in May 2003, several large Canadian oil and gas companies let it be known that they had “sent scout teams into Iraq to look for potential projects,” including Nexen, Talisman, and Ivanhoe. Nexen (whose board of directors now includes former Deputy Prime Minister Anne McClellan) has patiently waited for the situation to stabilize while maintaining good relations with Baghdad as one of 30 foreign oil companies short-listed to bid on future contracts. Ivanhoe has signed a number of contracts with the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad. Talisman, on the other hand, has taken the riskier route of forsaking Baghdad in lieu of signing a contested contract with the KRG.

It has been difficult to determine the extent of Canadian government support for oil companies that are seeking contracts in Iraq. Most companies whose spokespeople were reached said that they have neither sought nor received support from Canadian officials. Only one company, Calgary-based OGI Group, confirmed any beneficial interaction with Canadian officials. DFAIT’s O’Shaughnessy said, “The Government of Canada does not participate in commercial negotiations between business firms and foreign governments.”

OGI, a private company that does not disclose its board of directors, has won several contracts from Baghdad going back to 2004. A spokesperson with OGI, speaking on condition of anonymity, says they are “doing the full operations … right from exploration, development, right through to construction.” The spokesperson also con-firms “we have pipelines in there that we’ve designed and [are in the] process of building.” Just how the deals get done is not clear, but government help is, apparently, forthcoming: the source inside OGI says the Canadian officials “provide us with an opportunity, if we need to meet with some dignitaries.”

There are no smoking guns here, no conspiracy theories. Oil and politics have always gone hand in hand, and such deals always hinge on tangled networks of privilege and inside knowledge; it’s the nature of the business. As such, it is not unusual to find former political figures working for oil and gas companies as consultants and advisers. Nexen and Talisman, for example, have hired the services of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien whose “international standing opens doors” and who is able “to pick up the phone and speak to a series of ambassadors, presidents, prime ministers, ministers.” While Chrétien’s oil diplomacy has been publicized in the case of conflict-ridden Nigeria and authoritarian Turkmenistan, it is not known if he has “opened any doors” for his clients in Iraq. The same cannot be said for one of his (and Paul Martin’s) former top cabinet ministers, Pierre Pettigrew.

Up to the defeat of Paul Martin’s Liberals in the January 2006 elections, Pettigrew ran the foreign affairs portfolio. As Pettigrew himself boasted to me during an interview, he is the only MP in Canadian history to have had all three foreign affairs portfolios— international cooperation, international trade, and foreign affairs. Few people in Canadian government would be as familiar with Canadian interests in Iraq as Pettigrew.

Upon losing his seat in January 2006, Pettigrew re-entered the private sector. Before the year was out, he joined a little-known merchant bank, Forbes and Manhattan, as an advisor. F&M manages a network of more than 20 junior resource companies that span the globe and employs numerous retired politicians, diplomats, military officers, and intelligence professionals as advisors and board members.

In late 2008, Pettigrew joined the board of directors of Vast Exploration, an F&M-connected firm that has an oil production deal with the Kurdish authority, and he speaks proudly of how his connections, built up during his time as cabinet minister, have now proved useful to Vast. Pettigrew refused to discuss the Iraq-related memos from 2003 or Liberal government policy toward Iraq while he was a Minister. But, he says in an interview, he has “a pretty impressive network around the world. I have a rolodex like few Canadians have.”

“We’re perceived differently because we’re Canadian,” said Stephan Cretier, president of Garda World Security Corporation, in 2007. “It’s a good flag to work under.” Among Garda World’s many clients in Iraq, their 2009 Annual Report notes that the company “provides security services for one of the…Canadian companies exploring for oil in the region.”

As one of the world’s largest private security firms active in Iraq and many other hotspots around the globe, Garda World was, at the time of Cretier’s comments, on a public relations campaign, setting about to distinguish itself from “the stereotypic image … of big black SUVs with guys hanging off them with guns,” an image notoriously exemplified by the U.S. mercenary firm Blackwater. The company’s decision to undertake a public branding campaign—with its Canadianness at the core of the message—“came about because of the controversy that had broken out around Blackwater and the sort of popular notion that they represented the way all of these firms operated—which is not at all true,” company spokesperson Joe Gavaghan says.

Cretier’s comments about Garda World’s Canadian advantage, according to Gavaghan, served two purposes. First, to “distinguish us and the approach that we take from Blackwater—which just happens to be an American firm.” Second, “there was also acknowledgement that Canada did not participate in the Iraq war.” But isn’t Garda World simply profiting from an illegal war and occupation? Gavaghan says his company sees Iraq as being “post-conflict.”

“The Iraqi government and international aid organizations are all trying to rebuild that society, rebuild industries, rebuild infrastructure and, you know, we are assisting companies who are engaged in those activities,” Gavaghan says. “So we don’t regard that as being part of a conflict or a war.”

Of Canadian companies active in Iraq that rationalize themselves as benevolent-but-armed aid workers supporting “reconstruction and democratization,” Garda World is merely one among many.

Armoured cars are one of the key pieces of equipment being employed by the Iraqi counterinsurgency and the private security firms that support it. Armoured car sales thrive not on the shock-and-awe phase of conquering a country, but in the dirty, protracted street-level conflict that follows, and in that sense, Iraq has now furnished the ideal sales climate for half a decade. I contacted four Canadian armoured-car companies, all of whom offered similar takes: their products are defensive-only and save lives.

The Streit Group of Companies, based in Innisfil, Ont., has shipped at least 700 armoured cars to Iraq, and while a company spokesperson, Don MacMillan, refused to name Streit’s customers, he acknowledged that the U.S. military is top of the list. “Troops that are over there and private security firms,” MacMillan says. “We are doing all that’s possible to help protect them.” Toronto-based INKAS Armored Vehicle Manufacturing, Toronto-based International Armored Group, King City, Ont.–based Armet Armored Vehicles— all three gave variations on this response.

“Should our customers not use armoured vehicles and be exposed to high risk or not to provide services in [Iraq]?” asks INKAS spokesman David Khazanski. “Our product is designed strictly to protect passengers and shipments from ballistic and blast threats. No features on our vehicle make it a product for offence.”

Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, dismisses the explanations. “Any company that facilitates the U.S. occupation of Iraq is by default ‘pro-war,’ because they are part of a system that continues to trample on the self-determination of the Iraqi people and support a foreign occupation,” Scahill says. “Companies that provide armed men for hire, or weapons and other equipment to these mercenaries, are the worst of the lot.”

The Canadian company that appears to be most deeply involved in Iraq—although given the nature of the business, such measurements are difficult to make—is Toronto-based SkyLink Aviation, and it is also the most tight-lipped about its operations there. A 2006 newsletter from SkyLink Arabia, the company’s wholly owned and operated Iraq-based subsidiary, describes some of its activities, including transporting armoured vehicles and parts into Iraq, and performing final assembly on armoured cars at its Baghdad warehouse. (Armet Armored Vehicles spokesman Bill Whyte confirmed that his company used to employ SkyLink for these services, but now only uses them to transport vehicles in and out of Iraq.) The newsletter had originally been posted on a SkyLink affiliate’s website, but was taken offline after I called seeking comment.

SkyLink’s Canadian location is no coincidence. The firm’s owners located their headquarters in Toronto because Canada is, according to company co-founder Walter Arbib, “an ideal location” because “it’s a sort of neutral country, like Switzerland, and Canada is known for its peacekeeping.”

The company promotes itself as a “humanitarian aid delivery firm” and “one of the world’s leading providers of aviation and ground logistics in unsecured and hostile environments.” The company’s slogan is “Doing difficult jobs in difficult places.” SkyLink’s co-founders, Walter Arbib and Surjit Babra, were awarded B’nai Brith’s Award of Merit in 2006 for their company’s “strong ethical code” and their “caring, philanthropic efforts.” The keynote speech at the awards ceremony was delivered that evening by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who began by thanking Arbib and Babra “for all you’ve done and all that I know you will do to help our great country in the future.”

With the addition of former Liberal minister of defence turned senator Art Eggleton to their company’s advisory board, SkyLink has not only airplanes, but powerful political allies, in high places. (Both Arbib and Babra were among the guests at Eggleton’s wedding in 2008. A spokesperson for Senator Eggleton says “he has nothing to comment on” regarding the company and that, in his capacity as a member of the SkyLink Group of Companies advisory board, “he’s not involved” with any of their Iraq operations.) Immediately following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, SkyLink signed a lucrative USAID contract to manage Iraq’s airports. This contract, which would fetch them more than $17 million, would in turn translate to multiple other “mission critical” contracts in the war-torn country over the next six years. All my queries to SkyLink were directed to the company’s public relations firm, which provided a single-paragraph response by email: “For the past five years, Skylink has been operating commercial flights, managing airports and providing ground handling in Iraq. More recently, it opened an office in Erbil, providing airport services to help oil companies expand. ‘Skylink is committed to helping Iraq rebuild,’ said Jan Ottens, CEO of Skylink Aviation Inc. ‘We are familiar with Iraq and can make a real contribution in the reconstruction and rebuilding of its economy.’” (Ottens himself, reached on his mobile phone, refused to be interviewed for this article.)

For several years, SkyLink’s Canadian headquarters tried to distance itself from its affiliate companies’ operations in Iraq. As the Center for Public Integrity reported in 2004, the U.S. subsidiary active in Iraq, SkyLink Air and Logistic Support (USA), “turn[ed] to a public relations firm to help deal with the media and distance itself from the Canadian sister company.” A public relations spokesperson told the center, that “the two companies are financially and operationally independent.”

A recent lawsuit has offered a possible glimpse into the company’s operations. A former consultant to the company and part-owner of the Iraq-based arm, SkyLink Arabia, Richard Galustian, is suing Arbib and Babra in a Toronto court for several million dollars, alleging fraud and other mistreatment. Galustian’s affidavit alleges that Arbib and Babra defrauded him of a promised stake in the company and that they conspired to create a fake Iraqi arrest warrant to force him out of the country.

Galustian’s affidavit goes on to say that SkyLink is under two separate investigations, by USAID and the U.S. Army, related to its activities in Iraq. (Reached for comment, both USAID and the office of the U.S. Army’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction could not confirm or deny any such investigations.) The suit is ongoing and none of the parties will comment. But it is clear that Galustian believes SkyLink is finding Iraq a lucrative place to do business: from January 2007 to March 2008, Galustian’s affadavit alleges that SkyLink Arabia’s total revenues were approximately US$100 million.

With little or no scrutiny of their operations either by an indifferent media or a public that believes it won a considerable victory in 2003 by forcing the Liberal government to “stay out” of Iraq, it is unclear what will be the implications, if any, of Canada’s miniature “mercenary-oil-industrial complex” in Iraq. The war itself has cost upwards of one million Iraqi lives, the country is considered among the most corrupt in the world, and the war, and occupation, are far from over.

Nova Scotia NDP Premier Darrell Dexter has a lot of reading to do, including This Magazine. Illustration by David Anderson.

The September-October 2009  issue of This Magazine should now be in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on your local newsstand coast-to-coast this week. All the articles in the issue will be made available online in the weeks ahead, though, so keep checking back for more. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other tasty links.

On the cover of the September-October issue is Anthony Fenton‘s special investigation into the world of Canadian private security firms, armoured-car manufacturers and oil companies that are profiting from the chaos in Iraq. While Canadians are justly proud of the fact that we declined to join the misbegotten “coalition of the willing” that occupied Iraq in 2003, Fenton finds that in many ways — politically, economically, militarily — Canada’s involvement in Iraq today is deeper than ever. Three years after the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, Paul Gallant surveys the terrain of LGBT activism and finds it increasingly deserted. Marriage certificates in hand, middle-class gays and lesbians have drifted away from the movement, he finds, while the underfunded and burnt-out activists left behind say there’s still plenty of work to do. And reporting from Israel, Grant Shilling meets the beach bums, peace activists, and former soldiers who believe that the region’s world-class surfing could be one way to bring Israelis and Palestinians together—if only he can deliver a load of wetsuits to Gaza.

There’s plenty more, including Paul McLaughlin‘s interview with new Nova Scotia NDP premier Darrell Dexter; Sienna Anstis profiles the remarkable long-distance relationship between the University of Manitoba’s microbiology lab and a sex-worker clinic in Nairobi, Kenya; Andrew Webster meets the  independent videogame designers who make Canada an increasingly important player in an emerging art form; Hicham Safieddine says that during the election uproar over the summer, Western mainstream media got it wrong about Iran—again; Soraya Roberts finds that, in choosing Veronica over Betty, freckle-faced comic-book icon Archie Andrews has subverted seven decades of cultural expectations; RM Vaughan tests the limits of his solidarity during Toronto’s great municipal strike of summer 2009 as the litterbox threatens his sanity; Laura Kusisto digs into the real numbers behind Saskatchewan’s plan to pay $20,000 to recent graduates who choose to settle there; Souvankham Thammavongsa sends a postcard about the strange nighttime happenings in Marfa, Texas; and Darryl Whetter asks why, when 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, so much of our fiction takes place down on the farm.

PLUS: Chris Jai Centeno on University of Toronto budget cuts; Emily Hunter on overfishing and the seafood industry; Jenn Hardy on the DivaCup; Milton Kiang on better ways to recycle e-waste; Navneet Alang on microblogging service Tumblr; Jason Anderson on the Toronto International Film Festival; Sarah Colgrove on Len Dobbin, the Montreal jazz scene’s most important audience member; Kelli Korducki reviews Who’s Your Daddy?: And other writings on queer parenting; and Graham F. Scott on net neutrality and the CRTC.

With new poetry by Sandra Ridley and Lillian Nećakov, and a new short story by Kathy Friedman.