Enough of this prattling on about left-liberal politics: Tanzania beckons, and there will be plenty of time for rhetorical flourishes once I am a well-paid Katimavik hireling. One final late night kick at the can before I retire. The Nation's national affairs correspondent, William Greider, has written a comprehensive and eloquent analysis of conservatism's agenda for the 21st century, which he claims mostly involves rolling back the 20th century. Greider's article is worth reading for a variety of reasons, and though Canada can hardly be said to face the same sort of disciplined and rigidly ideological assault as our dear neighbour, some of Greider's conclusions should be read by anyone who worries that the difference between Paul Martin and Stephen Harper may turn out to be more stylistic than substantial. Greider argues:

"Autonomy can be lonely and chilly, as millions of Americans have learned in recent years when the company canceled their pensions or the stock market swallowed their savings or industrial interests destroyed their surroundings. For most Americans, there is no redress without common action, collective efforts based on mutual trust and shared responsibilities. In other words, I do not believe that most Americans want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country . . .

"This is a failure of left-liberal politics. Constructing an effective response requires a politics that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush's governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more positive, inclusive, forward-looking vision. No need for scaremongering attacks; stick to the well-known facts. Pose some big questions: Do Americans want to get rid of the income tax altogether and its longstanding premise that the affluent should pay higher rates than the humble? . . . Do people want to give up on the concept of the 'common school'--one of America's distinctive achievements? Should property rights be given precedence over human rights or society's need to protect nature? . . ."

Greider points out that, in America as elsewhere, the opposition's problem has much to do with its lack of coherent vision. Democrats are "accustomed to playing defence" and prone to perceiving their role as managerial, rather than as catalysts for reform. Here at home, the Liberal government has a hammerlock on power, yet during the Chretien years prided itself merely on simply keeping the national gas works humming with the all the gusto of a B-grade CEO. Even the much-vaunted Chretien "legacy budget" was not so much an exercise in bold progressive future-shaping as the vain and ill-conceived epilogue to one politician's story of lifelong opinion poll-scouring and crude cynicism. Rejuvenation of democracy--both political and economic--has been a goal of Liberal governments in the past, but it's looking like the worst kind of wishful thinking to imagine that a multi-millionaire businessman cum career-PM-in-waiting will be the leader to recast the big questions and offer new answers.

For Greider, "a new understanding of progressive purpose . . . that connects to social reality and describes a more promising future" is likeliest to take shape at the grassroots. In Canada, as in the United States, when people seek to pinpoint the source of their anxiety, they should look to the increasingly warped edifice of late-stage corporate capitalism: "the terms of employment that reduce many workers to powerless digits, the closely held decisions of finance capital that shape our society, the waste and destruction embedded in our system of mass consumption and production." In the past 100 years, left-liberals have saved the free market from itself more than once, and the potential exists for a new generation of leaders (in the streets, in Parliament) to find both the courage of convictions and the policy prescriptions that will deliver political power to the cause of reform. Where are they? That's the first big question.

Here's an article from The New York Times that answers some of the questions asked about how transnational business fits into the picture of chaos in Congo. To summarize:

" . . . the Balkanization and war suit the amazing variety of corporations—large and small, American, African and European—that profit from the river of mineral wealth without having to worry about high taxes, and that prefer a cash-in-suitcases economy to a highly regulated one . . . An exhaustive report to the United Nations Security Council last year detailed the dozens of companies now making money from Congo's conflict, based everywhere from Ohio to Johannesburg to Antwerp to Kazakhstan. As a result, neither the United States nor any other nation now seems to have much interest in seeing a strong Congolese central government keep profits from the country's patrimony—the word the White House uses about Iraq's oil—mostly at home."

Like Canada, the DRC is a naturally rich country: the place has been bleeding timber, gold, diamonds, copper, and cobalt for years. Especially lucrative for illicit traders and their heavily armed patrons are exports of coltan, used in our cellphones and computers, which the Times reports was selling for US$350 per pound a few weeks ago.

As pleased as I am to see the Youth for Martin posters around campus have already been cleverly defaced, there's no denying that the coronation of Canada's richest ever prime minister will be hard to avert. Much of this blog has been devoted to armchair quarterbacking for the NDP in 2004, but just to prove I'm not a deluded hack pointlessly squandering his hours in the SMU computer lab, here's an article to cheer the troops from fellow-believer Murray Dobbin. He notes a February 2003 poll revealing "that the Alliance had plummeted from its election high of 25.5 per cent to an almost historic low of 10.7 per cent--a nearly sixty-per-cent decline in support," while the NDP "had doubled its popular support, going from 8.5 per cent in the last election to 17.2 per cent." The two parties are now tied in Manitoba and Saskatchewan; even better, in BC, the NDP is actually nine points ahead of Harper & Co. True enough, this could all have been the result of the conventional bounce that every party enjoys when it picks a new front man. But most of the numbers coming out of Canada's big research firms seems to conclude that larger forces are at work. Canadians are not interested in the Alliance vision of huge tax cuts and imperial vassalage, and they are beginning to take note of the alternative on offer from the left.

What are you thinking about war today? Have the endlessly repeated images of jubilant Iraqis slippering the heads of toppled marble Saddams caused you to reevaluate your convictions? No matter what you happen to feel about the Bush Doctrine (or Bush himself), you cannot begrudge the people of Iraq their moment of celebration. Liberation is dandy, and those scenes emulated across a dozen countries in the Middle East and elsewhere would go some way toward making the world a more just and hopeful place. The question to ask yourself now is: Can war be the only route to this? Consider some suggestions about regime change without war from Mary Kaldor. And this spooky shit on preemptive deterrence from Mother Jones.

Let me be clear first off that I am no great admirer of Canadian political bad boy and Liberal pitbull Warren Kinsella. But his recent blurb in The Hill Times is dead on the mark when it lays the smackdown on Stephen Harper for going to Fox TV to bitch about Canada's war stance. Why is it that, as a general rule, parliamentarians do not go on junkets to other countries to badmouth their homeland? Read on:

"Opposition MPs are elected to give voice to criticisms about laws and regulations and policies. Most days, however, they aren't permitted to do anything that is harmful to the nation's interests. The reasons are so obvious they barely merit stating. What Stephen Harper did--along with his fellow Crawford, Texas ranch-hand, Stockwell Day--was more than petty partisanship. It was a reckless stunt calculated to curry favour with a few Republicans--and designed to harm Canada, and those many Canadians who oppose the war for bona fide religious, moral or political reasons. It was a bloody disgrace.

"Messrs. Harper and Day aren't going to be persuaded by anything the likes of me have to say on the subject, however. So perhaps they can reflect on this next time: did George W. Bush travel abroad to attack Bill Clinton's decision to send troops to Somalia or Bosnia? Did Tony Blair go to another country so that he could ridicule his Tory opponent's decision to participate in the last war in Iraq? Did any Canadian opposition leader ever . . . attack his own country in another nation's media?

"Not a chance. And that tells you all you need to know about select 'patriots' in the Alliance. They're patriots, alright--just not for Canada."

NDP communications hack Jamey Heath helpfully adds: "Given the drop in Alliance support when Stephen Harper speaks to Canadians, it's only natural he'd want to speak to people who agree. The hidden bonus for the Alliance is every moment spent on Fox-TV is one less moment spent on Canadian TV ­ and fewer lost votes . . . Was he anti-Canadian? Only if one applies the same definition to him that's applied to members of Congress who oppose George Bush's war, or the Alliance's own notion that to disagree with Bush is to soil an entire nation. Thank God for the bleeding hearts and their nostalgic definition of freedom that Mr. Harper was spared such prattle."

Another fine resource on the war in DR Congo can be found on BBC World Edition's website. The same source has plenty of information on the troubles in neighbouring Burundi.

In other news, my increasingly radical United Church-espousing Green-voting Dad sallies forth this morning into the minefield that is his new hardline Baptist home congregation in Kearney, Nebraska. His quixotic mission: to convince the patriots that their Dear Leader's war in Iraq has been a blood-soaked misbegotten adventure from the start, and one contemptibly unworthy of America's better republican traditions. Far be it from me to preach against Dad's determination to speak truth to power (or at least power's most reliable constituency in the rural Midwest), despite the risk that he will be run out of town on a rail, packed off to Soviet Canuckistan, or have his marriage annulled by some hasty act of the state legislature in Lincoln. Indeed, I toss fuel on the fire, and encourage one and all to check out the one article Dad should consult for ammunition on his crusade.

Looks like Tanzania will be my next home-away-from-home: Right to Play offered me a project coordinator placement in Dar es Salaam, and I decided to take it late last week. Still not 100% what this position will entail, but RTP's programmes are mainly oriented toward providing recreational and educational opportunities for refugee kids. Tanzania is home to Africa's largest refugee population, with the two main groups originating from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), respectively. The International Crisis Group has a treasure trove of background information on the conflicts devouring those two countries. Also notable: this article from the International Rescue Committee, which asserts that Congo's bloody conflict has been the deadliest since the Second World War.

The American infatuation with "nonpartisanship" (trans: the readiness of politicians to make compromises across party lines) has never really made sense to most Canadians, who have more choices on the ballot and a lower level of party identification. That does not mean we have been spared the rhetoric from our pundit class about the need for a "new politics" that transcends tired old cliches of left and right, liberal and conservative. No one likes to listen to politicians squabbling, and the rants heard on both sides of the House of Commons these days seldom amount to what anyone could seriously label public debate. But there's a reason politicians disagree: some of them are right, and some of them are wrong. A recent article by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect hits the bull's eye on this matter and reminds us all why we could probably afford to have a bit more partisan bickering here in Canada.

The New York Times magazine article linked previously contains one paragraph that deserves particular attention:

"As radical and impatient for democracy as the students are . . . most of them do not want to lead Iran into another bloody revolution. I asked Mehdi Aminzadeh, a 25-year-old student leader studying civil engineering, if there was anything brewing in Iran equivalent to Yugoslavia's Otpor, or ''resistance''--a grass-roots movement spread by Serbian youth that defeated the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic. (One of the opposition satellite television channels that are beamed into Iran by the Iranian diaspora in California constantly replays the chronicles of Milosevic's destruction of Yugoslavia and Otpor's destruction of Milosevic, as if trying to suggest a script for the students to follow.) No, he said. For now there is no social movement or political party tough enough and well financed enough to organize such mass demonstrations."

The Bush team will look upon regime change in Iraq as a template for the application of US resources and institutions to democratization abroad, but an even better template already exists. Check out this description of Otpor and this examination of the role of Robert Helvey and the IRI in supporting Otpor's movement to oust Slobodan Milosevic. This report from the US Institute of Peace provides comprehensive analysis of how a cheap and largely uncontroversial form of US intervention managed to achieve the nonviolent removal of a regime that not even NATO's air war could dislodge.

The more Bush & Co. beat the war drums, the more they undermine Iranian reformers and strengthen the hand of conservative clerics in Teheran. Peace activists in the North who oppose American military adventurism but recognize the moral vacuity of offering no better response to tyrannical regimes cannot afford to ignore the Otpor model.

With Saddam's regime on the verge of collapse, it might be worthwhile to start thinking about the country that many consider to be next on the White House hit list. Bush's circle of neocon hawks, yearning to refashion the Middle East with US firepower, have been grumbling a lot about Iran lately. This article offers a glimpse of an "alternative way forward in the Middle East, a method and a movement that welcomes external influence but does not want the United States military to midwife its democracy."

A slightly more hopeful article on antiwar activism from William Hartung suggests a few more next steps for the peace movement, such as:

(1) "maintain all the energy and creativity that has resulted in the mass mobilizations, the vigils, the mass faxes and phone calls to Congress, the growing civil disobedience against the war, the campus teach-ins and the whole rich festival of democratic activity that has gotten us this far";

(2) "make sure that every protester (and all of our friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances) registers and votes against Bush and his circle of new-age warmongers . . . it's time for the peace movement to play political hardball, just as the NRA and the Christian Coalition have been doing for decades"; and,

(3) "ask some of the questions that the media rarely address."

Hartung sizes up the situation and concludes that international peace and security will be served by one more stab at regime change: in November 2004. For more on that, check out some of the prospective giant-killers here, here and here.

In the same vein as the Clara Jeffery article below, Mark LeVine uses his space in the Christian Science Monitor to describe How the Peace Movement Blew It. His advice on how activists can seek to win the peace is insightful:

"First, articulate a holistic critique of, and alternative to, Bush's postwar vision. Second, demand significant representation in the postwar 'reconstruction regime,' and if refused, infiltrate it with the coordinated efforts of international humanitarian and relief organizations. Third, force public scrutiny of companies that will be awarded billions of dollars of 'reconstruction' contracts, especially those with close ties to the White House . . . The forces for peace, democracy, and justice can successfully challenge America's Middle East policy when the blowback from our invasion and occupation of Iraq comes."

Calling all protestors: it's time to mobilize around this sort of vision for how global civil society can prevent the failure of reconstruction in Iraq. Opposing war is not enough. Right or wrong, the world has trained its sights on Iraq, and promises have been made that must not be broken as they have in Afghanistan. So the question now is, will we brave the cold of our streets to demand a just and workable international plan for Iraq? And what will that plan look like?

More strategic advice for Jack Layton. Here are the top 10 city ridings the New Democrats must steal from Paul Martin for any "urban strategy" comeback to succeed:

1. Toronto-Danforth ON (Dennis Mills owns this riding, but it's also Jack Layton's home turf, and he's vowed to run there in 2004)

2. Trinity-Spadina ON (Layton's wife, Toronto city councillor Olivia Chow, ran in this riding before, and may be willing to take on Tonny Ianno again)

3. Beaches-East York ON (old NDP stronghold, now held by disgraced Cabinet minister Maria Minna)

4. Vancouver Centre BC (another ex-minister, Hedy Fry, could lose here if a serious challenger emerges)

5. Ottawa Centre ON (with the departure of Liberal Mac Harb, his student-heavy stomping ground could be ripe for the NDP's picking)

6. Vancouver-Kingsway BC (Liberal Sophia Leung should be an easy target for New Democrats, who did well here in 1997 and 2000)

7. Parkdale-High Park ON (New Dem Paul Schmidt placed second to Lib Sarmite Bulte here in two straight elections, 2004 could be his lucky year)

8. Winnipeg South Centre MB (Lloyd Axworthy's bastion with a strong leftish tradition, where the NDP won 7501 votes three years ago)

9. Halifax West NS (Gordon Earle held this seat for the NDP in 1997-2000, then lost by 4000 votes to Geoff Regan, who could still be bounced)

10. (toss-up) Oshawa ON or Davenport ON (Oshawa was once represented by Ed Broadbent, and the NDP's successes in industrial Windsor could bode well there; Davenport's MP Charles Caccia has been around since the steam engine, and might be beaten in this traditionally NDP-friendly neighbourhood)

An electoral strategy aimed at convincing downtown left Liberals to switch to the NDP will invariably cost the party seats in the rural West and Atlantic Canada. Assuming that New Democrats trade two or three incumbents for the capture of all ten seats listed above, the caucus could stand at 22-23 after the next general election; judicious messaging to northern and newcomer communities and a bigger-than-expected bump in the popular vote might yield as many as 25 or 26 MPs. Given the impending implosion of the BQ and the likelihood of Alliance losses to Martin in Western suburban swing ridings, the NDP could end up the third-largest force in the Commons, and the one that causes the most Liberal hand-wringing.

What do you call the potent cocktail of military celebration, disdain of objection, intimidation of dissent and abuse of sentiment we see around us today? Mark Kingwell answers in The Post: the word is fascism. Were the antics of Canada's conservatives not so pitiful and degrading, it would be the word most suited to describing their innane views on this war, too.

This article from back in March was just the latest to raise the prospect of Jack Layton running in an as-yet-unannounced Ottawa Centre byelection. Journalist Abbas Rana quotes Layton as saying that whether he will run when incumbent Liberal Mac Harb departs for greener pastures is "a hypothetical question." For his part, the NDP caucus director of communications, Jamey Heath, might be interested. But a Layton candidacy in Ottawa Centre could be just the sort of audacious move voters will need to see in order to rethink the NDP in 2004. Keep in mind: New Democrat Mike Cassidy won there in 1984, and in 2000, the relatively unknown New Dem Heather-jane Robertson won 13 515 votes against long-time MP Harb's 22 710, to place a respectable second. Layton, a high-profile national party leader, could reasonably expect to do better, especially since his most likely opponent will be Richard Mahoney, a Martinite lawyer and tired Liberal hack. An upset Layton win in this downtown riding would set the scene for an NDP storming of all those urban progressive seats that have reliably voted Liberal since 1993. Layton hasn't shyed away from taking risks so far: this is one that should be keeping him up at night.

This morning, Canadians were treated to a rhetorical sucker punch from the long- and encouragingly-silent Mike Harris. Alas, in his op/ed piece in The Globe & Mail, Harris returns to form with a regurgitation of the crap we've been hearing lately from his esteemed colleagues like Stephen Harper and the patriots at the Vancouver Board of Trade:

"Mr. Chretien's decision to keep Canada out of the effort to disarm Iraq is a betrayal of Canadian values, of our national interest and of our closest allies. But this failure of national leadership extends far beyond Iraq . . ."

Harris lashes out at our government's "misguided deference" to multilateral institutions like the UN. He criticizes the world body's failure to deal with crises in Somalia, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia--conveniently ignoring the reality that UN interventions in those countries failed largely because of the obstructionism and obfuscation of Washington and its rich world cronies. He demands that Canada jerk back from the paralysis of a veto-plagued UN in favour of a truly independent foreign policy, but then proceeds to argue that our economic dependence on the American market and our role as go-between for the Empire and its more remote subject states necessitates blind acquiescence to US objectives. When Harris proposes stronger common institutions to manage our southbound trade, it causes one to wonder whether he has ever heard of the NAFTA trade panels, and Washington's repeated refusals to honor their decisions favourable to Canada. The sheer laugh-out-loud potential of this polemic is laid bare in this line: "If it comes down to Jean Chretien or Don Cherry speaking for Canada, I'll take Don Cherry." At least Harris has a sense of humour, if not a sense of dignity.

Since the beginning of the war, the kow-towing of Canadian conservatives to their brethren in Washington has embarrassingly revealed this lot for what they are: simpering, pathetic, and wholly out of touch with mainstream opinion in their own country (and many across the border, for that matter). This piece in Canada's newspaper of note probably represents an effort on the part of his Blue Machine minions to establish the former premier as a heavyweight with foreign policy creds, but I'd be surprised if many readers are fooled. Next year, both parties of the right will be humiliated at the polls by Paul Martin, and go grovelling to Harris to save them. If it wasn't clear before, it should be know: what Harris the neocon messiah will offer is nothing less than foreign policy by Don Cherry and trade policy drafted by American exporters.

Check out this Clara Jeffery article on how your pesky neighbourhood anarchists are squandering the potential for a broad-based antiwar movement in North America. Jeffery is the best kind of leftish journalist--one who isn't afraid of launching a blistering takedown on the left's sacred cows. Case in point: keeping one's mouth shut about crazed IDS majors trashing cellphone boutiques because do to so would risk "dividing the movement." Well, I say: divide it. Public opinion will never shift behind the most important progressive positions so long as progressives themselves refuse to decouple themselves in the popular imagination from the Concordia Student Union and Jaggi Singh. Jeffery's article on antiwar leadership is also a worthwhile read. The fact that 200 000 people turned out for an antiwar march in Montreal and at best Halifax has been able to muster a few thousand has a lot to do with the fact that local soccer moms aren't chuffed about turning out with the kids for a rally spearheaded by Ana Hunter or Isaac Saney.

MIT's John W. Bower won a Pulitzer for his analysis of the US occupation of Japan after the Second World War. In a recent article he draws out some lessons from Japan's postwar reconstruction for the would-be American rulers of Iraq. Bower concludes that most of the conditions that existed in Japan in 1945 (such as the perceived legitimacy of US action) will be absent in post-invasion Iraq, and that, in the end:

"What made the occupation of Japan a success was two years or so of genuine reformist idealism before U.S. policy became consumed by the Cold War, coupled with a real Japanese embrace of the opportunity to start over . . . The Americans may not have been self-critical, but they had definite ideas about what needed to be done to make Japan democratic."

The Bush Administration's performance in the realm of nation-building in Afghanistan is dismal, and only the most fervent neocon hawk could seriously believe that Washington will do better in Iraq. This war is not about what comes next, and Bush is not keen to tell the world the truth about what might happen after he disarms Saddam Hussein. Nurturing an Iraqi democracy that might feasibly serve as a model for Arab liberalism will take years, and it will cost billions--but the White House will never say so for fear of alienating its domestic constituencies and wrecking public support for war. And if the Bush Administration wins the war but loses the peace, the costs for the president and his minions will be miniscule. Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld will be happy to cut a deal with the House of Saud, settling for an Iraqi Mubarak rather than committing America to the investments of money and political capital necessary to foster an Iraqi Kostunica. Sadly, Bower's article suggests that might be the best Iraqis can hope for after "liberation."

Posters recently started to pop up on campuses around town bearing the slogan "Focused on the Future" and the semi-serious faces of suitably diverse twentysomething Canadians. Closer inspection reveals that these are promos for an outfit called Youth for Martin (check out the website here), which proclaims young people to be "more than just a demographic" and is inexplicably linked to both YMAAP and CWY, among other worthy causes. Presumably, this is just the latest manifestation of Young Liberal slavering for for our long-suffering dauphin, Paul Jr.

Since Jos and I very nearly signed-up with the YLC back when Stockwell Day scared the hell out of everyone (and what a daring hoax that turned out to be), I take a lazy interest in the Grit pups and their goings-on. Sure, once Rock bolted I lost my taste for the Liberal leadership smackdown and have been content to await the satisfaction of seeing John Manley place a remote third. But the Young Libs are not to be ignored: the rigged rules and double standards of Liberal internal elections typically hand about a fourth of the delegate slots at leadership conventions to them. In the past they've used this awesome power to push progressive issues onto the party's platform, but the fact that Young Liberals are now high-fiving in the Martin camp cannot mean they are committed to much more than a watered-down Canuck brand of compassionate conservatism. All the evidence would seem to indicate that the future most Young Liberals are focused on is the one that involves them receiving appointments en masse to the parliamentary offices of lucky Martinite backbenchers.

Also of interest: The website of the hard left UFP, currently contesting seats in the Quebec provincial election, carries this story about several of its comrades meeting newly annointed NDP honcho Jack Layton. UFP candidate Amir Khadir says the meeting was not about any sort of formal collaboration between progressives in the two solitudes, but rather, a tete-a-tete to discuss possible convergences around antiwar activism. Pierre Ducasse aside, the NDP has never done much in Quebec; could a grand reform coalition (a la Lafontaine-Baldwin) be in the offing?