Newsletter: April, 01

Table of Contents:

[Much Ado about DU] [Cities and Cars] [Taming the Barbarians] [Voices of Freedom]

Editor’s Remarks

The following speech by Lee Morrison, an Alliance MP from 1993 to 2000 is worth repeating. His speech in the last days of the recent Parliament was reprinted in the National Post on February 12, 2001.

Mr. Morrison is right. Our claim to be a democratic nation is no longer indisputable. Reforms to Parliament and federal politics are urgently needed.

There is a new boogey-man for conspiracy theorists, environmentalists and the leftovers of the Peace Movement. It is a natural story — with the Pentagon, mysterious ailments, and allegations of cover-ups over sinister plans to dump nuclear waste on the Third World through high tech weaponry involving depleted uranium (DU). Unfortunately, the DU story is a classic case of wish fulfillment. Worse still, it appears to be a reprise of a similarly inspired and costly boondoggle.

Depleted Uranium is the spent by-product of uranium that has been used as a fuel in a reactor. It is a very dense material; whose surface becomes extremely hard when exposed to heat (such as that experienced by being fired as a supersonic projectile). These properties make it quite attractive both as an anti-tank ammunition and as a component of the high-tech armor sandwich in the American Abrams Tank.

"Pentagonese" isn’t the most poetic of English dialects, as the name of the APDSFSDU (for Armour Piecing, Discarding Sabot, Fin-stabilized, Depleted Uranium) anti-tank shell can attest. Depleted Uranium ammunition of this sort is fired from tank guns and as a projectile from automatic cannon on ground attack aircraft, helicopters and light armoured vehicles.

The author, some twenty years ago, was among a quartet of Canadian Army officers who "inspected" (we were sight-seeing, really) a series of retired tanks that had just been strafed by American A-10 Warthogs. The A-10s seemed almost soundless until literally overhead, and then God’s own chainsaw ripped into life. The derelict target tanks then became the center of a flurry of dust, actinic flashes and whirling sparks. They were still smoking as the last of the A-10s slipped away and we drove up to climb all over them.

Nobody is in the habit of firing DU ammunition for practice; it is much too expensive for regular use and is saved for wartime. However, given that the 30mm cannon of the A-10s had riddled the thick glacis plates and mantlets with holes, we assumed that we had witnessed a practice with "war-shot" ammunition.

According to the horror story-mongers, we must have been breathing in quantities of oxidized uranium dust for some thirty minutes and therefore should all be candidates for mysterious disabling diseases. Moreover, our children should have also been prone to birth defects and various ailments. Alas, all of us are in robust health. Admittedly, a statistical sample of ten is not much to go on… but even so.

The use of anti-tank ammunition made of DU in several regional conflicts has sparked allegations of mysterious health problems among veterans and those who lived near the arena of combat. Naturally, DU has been identified as a culprit because it is a) used by the US military; and b) it is uranium and must therefore be, without question, toxic as hell under all circumstances. This is all that critics of the US Military, Desert Storm, and the Kosovo bombings need to know.

But before the stampede to blame DU for inexplicable ailments from the Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign gets underway; there is a historical parallel to consider. Anyone remember Agent Orange?

Starting in 1969 and continuing through until the early 1990s, hundreds of Vietnam veterans blamed health problems, tumors and even psychological conditions on purported exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. The Agent Orange scare was strongly encouraged by the environmental lobby, the Peace Movement, and the Hanoi government. Fabricating or distorting evidence is quick and simple, while a truth that depends on scientific evidence can take a long time to show up. Naturally, as the scientists were dragging their heels, the media turned to the sensationalists and the Agent Orange Myth took on a life of its own.

Dioxin, the accused killer in Agent Orange can be dangerous and in large dosages is very lethal … to laboratory rats. Exposures humans receive are another matter. However, the thousands of Italians who were exposed to heavy doses of dioxin in a 1976 industrial accident did not develop excessive birth defects or reproductive failures. A 1984 Journal of the American Medical Association article on workers who had been exposed to a heavy dose of dioxins in a 1949 accident indicated these men did not have higher rates of cancer, heart or liver damage, nerve problems, kidney damage, reproductive problems or birth defects than was the average for men of their age group. They did have slightly higher rates of chloracne and digestive tract ulcers — both of which are quite treatable.

If any Vietnam Veterans had come down with problems related to Agent Orange, it would have been the high living "cowboys" of the Ranch Hand project — the US Airmen who actually sprayed the stuff. Flying at near-stall speeds about 50m above ground level, these servicemen took a lot of ground-fire. Indeed, one of their aircraft — known as "Patches" -- is in the Air Force Museum in Dayton Ohio. Often, they ended up coated in Agent Orange when they sprayed it or had it sluicing around their ankles after being shot-up again. Moreover, at initiations for new members of their Squadron, both the newcomers and the older veterans would drink a glass of the defoliant.

Over 1,174 of the 1,206 veterans of this squadron have participated in a careful 20-year study of the results of their exposure to Agent Orange. Net result? The Ranch Hand group continues to have the same mortality rate as their control group of 1,293 similar men — and both have a lower mortality rate than the average American Male population. The only real difference in rates of those ailments associated with dioxin, despite massive exposure to Agent Orange, was that the Ranch Hand vets had a slightly higher tendency to display problems related to heavy drinking — something many of them engaged in as young servicemen on a nerve-wracking duty.

Otherwise, after $400 million in real research, the great Agent Orange scare turned out to be a bust. Real — verifiable and accurate — scientific research does not indict the material. However, it remains an article of faith among environmentalists and peace-movement members that the stuff is deadly. They believe and that is enough.

Real scientific research has not yet adequately connected DU to ailments among veterans — and certainly has not for populations in Iraq and Serbia (despite what the Hussein and Milosevic governments — exemplars of rectitude that they are — insist).

Indeed, the first stirring of interest in DU ammunition came from somewhat Left-of Centre researchers who traveled to Iraq in the early 1990s (after the Gulf War) in the search for additional arguments to hurl against the Coalition. The arguments were already mapped out, and a few "facts" were necessary to string them together.

The argument against DU has been hyper-inflated by activists who know much less than they think they do. For example, one claimed that DU munitions were designed to poison tank crewmen after their vehicle was hit. Oxidized DU may be toxic, but this would be of little or no concern to the occupants of a tank that has been successfully struck by a DU dart. They are already dead from massive kinetic shock or the thousands of red-hot fragments shredding the interior of their vehicle. If they survive this, they might have half a second before their fuel and ammunition cooks off. "Few die well that die in a battle" and this is especially true for the congealed puddles of fats or carbonized husks that tank crewmen risk becoming. If a DU dart slams through the mantlet of a T-72, the crew needn’t worry about cancer risks over the coming decades — the rest of their lives can be measured within a single heartbeat

As for the claims of widespread health problems that might be attributed to the use of DU, one wonders why the citizens of Kuwait (where most of the ammunition was used) do not seem to be sharing the poor health of their Iraqi neighbours. Moreover, even in Iraq, most of the big tank battles occurred far from the settled areas of the Tigris-Euphrates River. Might it be possible that the combination of shortages of food and medicine (caused by the continued sanctions) and the stresses of living under the thumb of the last of the old-time dictators might explain more about Iraqi health problems than notional exposure to depleted uranium?

Before Ottawa (or Washington) is stampeded into action about DU, they might wait for the facts. So should the rest of us.

Civilization is about cities, while much of history and archeology records the horrible things that befall great cities. Floods and tidal waves can inundate them. Earthquakes can shake them flat, and they can be buried under volcanic debris. The streets of cities can be stalked by plague or famine, savaged by barbarians, shelled into gravel by artillery or be burned flat by accident or Mars run amok.

Yet all these things are survivable and cities are resilient creations. The Middle East is dotted with tels — high mounds that mark where cities were built upon the ruins of cities, year after year. When Heinrich Schliemann dug up Troy, looking for evidence of the city of Priam, he found dozens of layers implying that Troy survived repeated traumas. Rome’s fabled seven hills are hard to notice now, as the low points between them have been filled up by the debris of long centuries.

In short, a city can survive as long as the land around it is habitable and can generate a reason -- usually economic -- for people to come to it. City sites have been abandoned because the arable land around them was depleted — often through overgrazing, deforestation, or the water table changed (radical climate change has always been with mankind — it’s one reason why we evolved as we did). Other reasons for the abandonment of city-sites reflect a change in trade — which is why the "Silk Road" between China and the West is dotted with ruins. Alternatively, a city built purely for religious or administrative reasons — such as Machu Picchu — might be abandoned when the culture that created them is disrupted.

Otherwise, the constant resilience or resurrection of cities on flood plains or natural invasion routes is a reflection of their most fundamental characteristic. Cities represent a concentration of talent and ability, of human capital as the contemporary term has it. When the flood recedes, or the barbarians ride off, the survivors start working to piece things back together again. Skilled specialists return to their former activities while gifted communicators start trading and politicking once more, they generate capital and rebuild. Then the city once again creates and attracts wealth, knowledge and power.

In the 20^th Century, we have had ample evidence of the ability of cities to regenerate. Some observers in May of 1945 noted that there was not a building with a roof to it in the vast expanse between Moscow and Berlin — the exaggeration is only a slight one. Warsaw was ground to powder on the orders of a vindictive Hitler while Tokyo had been twice visited by catastrophic fires — one generated in the aftermath of a horrible earthquake and one by 300 US B-29 bombers dropping incendiary bombs in the most lethal air raid in human history. Yet Berlin has been completely rebuilt — as have Warsaw, Tokyo, Rotterdam, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Stalingrad (albeit with a new name), and San Francisco — pummeled by a major earthquake -- and a host of other centres.

There are two lessons to draw from this. The first is the confirmation that cities can be rebuilt because of their concentration of human talent and skill. The second one, which seems lost on so many people, is that cities sometimes have to be rebuilt. In short natural or human disasters are never far away.

The urban and semi-urban landscape that now sprawls across much of North America, and which seems to be raising its scabby head in Europe, is a phenomenon never before encountered in the 10,000-year history of civic life. The automobile, now nearing the centennial of its appearance as a mass-produced means of transport for individuals, has re-defined the shape of our cities and our civilization.

Individually, people find a number of advantages in owning automobiles. They convey a sense of personal freedom, by letting people rove where they will at a time of their choosing. They are convenient forms of individual transportation, especially for parents with families. They can be status symbols, contribute to a sense of privacy, and give many of us more space.

Arguments against automobiles (they pollute, lead to extravagant energy use, kill large numbers of us in accidents, promote our epidemic of obesity, etcetera) must confront another hard fact: We have designed our cities, our lifestyles and our economy around them. No matter how sensible an argument against the automobile culture may be, there is little or no incentive for us to climb back down the path we have been following for nearly 100 years.

But…

Automobiles use energy — a lot of it -- although the efficiency with which they use fuel notably improves with every decade. Yet the Ford Model T and Rolls Royce of 1904 burned gasoline, as do almost all current cars. Oil reserves may be finite and certainly fuel prices will climb before we can figure a way around this problem. The potential use of Nanotechnology to convert almost any material into fuel, or the development of fusion power would remove this limitation, but these are still very much in the theoretical stage and decades from providing commercially available products.

Automobiles also demand infrastructure… there has to be money to pay for roads (and more roads, and still more roads, and bridges and tunnels and… ). This is their second vulnerability.

Civilizations do get disrupted, and it is inevitable that some combination of human and natural causes will someday savage North America’s population. Just because no North American city has seen anything too traumatic since the 1906 Earthquake or the 1918 Influenza epidemic (or the destruction of Atlanta and Richmond during the American Civil War), there is no reason to imagine we are invulnerable to disaster.

When this occurs, we may find that the automobile was a mistake. Cities bounce back from disaster because they are concentrations of talent and resourcefulness. However, the automobile has led to a major dispersal of our populations. Suburbs that may only be an hour’s drive from the city’s core are a two day’s journey for a fit man on foot. This dispersion mitigates against rapid recovery in a major post-disaster environment. Moreover, our neglected railway systems certainly could not fill the gap either. Those suburban communities that do have train stations are still spread out — with outlying subdivisions being several hours walking time away.

Worse still, a city of a million people is one that requires a lot of food on a daily basis. In a situation where the transportation infrastructure has been severely disrupted, it would be useful (or even vital) to eke supplies out by harnessing arable land around the city. However, when all the fields for a 100 kilometres around have been ploughed under for sub-divisions, this option becomes a severely limited one.

Robert B. Edgerton’s book Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (Free Press 1992) is a classic study of maladaptive practices in primitive societies. He points out that most peoples can survive little idiosyncrasies (like female circumcision believing in witchcraft, or taboos on useful food-sources, etc.) until their society is severely challenged by outside circumstances. At that point, their capacity for survival is severely reduced by both the disaster and the continuation of their cultural eccentricities. We should take care to see that our love affair with the automobile does not damn our future by making our cities too fragile to survive major catastrophes.

"Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run."

-- Mark Twain, 1900

It can be argued that much of contemporary peacekeeping would not be all that unfamiliar in principle to many soldiers in history. Peacekeeping is what soldiers do between wars, when they are lodged on the frontiers of civilization. Ask a Captain of Chariots in Pharonic Egypt, a Roman Centurion, a Han Chinese Cavalrymen, or Tommy Atkins in his red coat and solar helmet what to do about a place like Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo or Sierra Leone… They would know the answer.

Before the usual labels come out — it is important to say that Afghans, Chechens, Kosovars or Sierra Leonians are not barbarians, or rather that barbarism is a state of existence, but not a state of being. Will Durant, in "The Story of Civilization", attempted to define the difference between civilization and barbarism. He couldn’t, and thought the transition between the two was gradual. There is no reason to doubt him on this score, but civilization can normally be discerned by a higher degree of safety, the permanence of its institutions, the ability to focus resources for large public works, an expectation of property rights and an idea that that law should supercede natural justice. This is nothing like a proper definition, but the difference between Afghanistan and Austria, Kosovo and Kuwait, or Sierra Leone and Singapore becomes more apparent.

Nor is it right to accuse Afghans, Kosovars or Sierra Leonians of being barbarians. Given a choice, most of the people there would certainly prefer the conditions of life that prevail in Austria, Kuwait or Singapore. However, the circumstances of geography, nature, culture and geopolitics combine to perpetuate a barbaric situation that has endured for over a generation.

Civilizations produce soldiers — trained and disciplined specialists under arms and with unique status in their society. Soldiers are normally held in restraint until their government orders them to accomplish something. Barbarian regions produce warriors — adult males (usually) who have survived the conditions of their life long enough to become proficient in the use of violence. This proficiency can be exercised in self-defence, for fun and profit, or for aggrandizement. While it can be directed at other warriors, its most common impact is upon non-warriors

Periodically, civilizations must confront the Barbarian reaches: This can be done for strategic reasons (which is why Victoria’s Britain and the USSR got their noses bloodied in Afghanistan). It can be done to keep order on the frontier and keep trade flowing; which is why the British and Dutch waged a centuries long war against the Pirates of Indonesia — who have lately returned anyway. Sometimes, intervention is necessary for humanitarian reasons… Britain went into much of Africa to halt the slave trade and NATO intervened in Kosovo to prevent what looked to be (at the time) a looming campaign of genocide. With the revival of peacekeeping in the Post-Cold War world, the soldier has had to confront the warrior in a number of barbarian areas.

Whatever the reasons, when the soldiers retreat out of these regions, barbarism re-emerges unless the conditions that let it flourish have been changed. There are barbarian regions that have changed: Western Europe for one, with the last hold-outs (some of the writer’s own ancestors) being the Highland Scots who were finally curbed in the early 18^th Century. Large swathes of Africa and Asia are now under the control of their own civil - more or less - governments. Other regions, like southern Colombia, Afghanistan (still), much of West Africa or portions of the Indonesian Archipelago have reverted to barbarism. It could also be argued that portions of the Balkans (such as rural Albania) have never left that state.

The contest between the soldier and the warrior has never been an easy one. There are a number of reasons for this:

First, fighting warriors has rarely been the primary business of the soldier. He may normally be trained and equipped to fight other soldiers first, which is as it should be — rival soldiers are more dangerous threat to any civilization. Confronting warriors is a secondary tasking, and the soldier might not get the political and material support he needs for this purpose.

While there is an easy solution to dealing with warriors, it is often neither palatable nor easy to accomplish. The Romans could "make a desert and call it peace", but actual genocide is not a viable or welcome policy option in the Western World. In addition to our dislike of indiscriminate violence, there is the Western respect for sovereignty. As nations, Afghanistan or Sierra Leone might be spectacularly disorganized and chaotic, but they are still considered to be sovereign countries with their own authorities and must be accorded the rights and privileges of the same.

Given that the soldier then seldom has "carte blanche" to deal with warriors, it is more common for him to be forced to contain them. This is the point were life gets complicated — for modern peacekeepers and their many forbearers alike.

The long historical record in dealing with barbarians includes a number of useful tactics. These include:

1) Use barbarians to fight barbarians. There are hazards in this, as barbarians — being only human — can be just as capable at playing soldiers off against rival factions. The intervention force that landed in Somalia in 1992 discovered this to their peril, and got a reminder that in barbarian territory, a friend in the morning might be your enemy that night. Worse, the group that the soldier aligns with might be the next problem he has to deal with — as success in dealing with their rivals leads to an increase in their own power.

2) Retain layers to your defences. Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China and the Ancient Egyptian defences around the first cataract are (or were) impressive — but ultimately proved useless by themselves. Alliances with local leaders across the wall, subsidies and trade kept an elastic barrier or supporters on the far side of the wall that a would-be irritant had to fight through first.

Nowadays, our "walls" consist of customs checks, security on internet providers, and police and security organizations that can screen new-comers, in the hope of separating the transnational criminals or insurgents from the peaceful travelers or refugees from barbarian regions. To strengthen this wall, reliable and accurate intelligence is needed. One way to get it, it is to become involved with those in barbarian lands who hate the barbarians themselves — students, small shop owners, and all the peaceful folk who want a better life for themselves. The same is true of international aid agencies and NGOs that work in barbarian regions — they can also be used to provide information about who is safe and who is dangerous.

3) Ruthlessness is still occasionally useful. It should be instructive that the mishmash of rebels around the capital of Sierra Leone disappeared quickly in early 2000 when British soldiers arrived with a wide permission to open fire. The rebels had been used to kidnapping members of ineffective UN troops and pillaging their stocks of equipment and supplies, as the UN troops from Africa and Asia were badly armed, badly trained and constrained by restrictions on self-defence. The prospect of facing well-trained soldiers was another matter. Warriors will rapidly exploit any weakness that presents itself, but will usually avoid any potential confrontation with soldiers. The Peacekeepers of the 19^th Century usually understood this quite well.

4) Fund construction. The Highlanders might have had their noses put out of joint at Culloden in 1745, but what really tamed the Highlands were the roads pushed into the hills by the British government. The Roman Empire also only reached as far as its roads could. Barbarianism is enhanced by isolation and threatened by infrastructure, particularly as good roads, reliable power and clean water adds so much to life for the non-Warriors among them. Moreover, good roads and airfields let soldiers get out to confront the Warriors much more quickly.

5) Support and foster trade and development. The growing relationship between contemporary humanitarian NGOs and peacekeeping troops is not a new development; rather it seems to be a case of parallel evolution. Peacekeepers in the 19^th Century also came to understand the worth of protecting missionary hospitals and schools, and in fostering trade. For every problem these might present, they also add significantly to the development of those things that barbarism inhibits: an expectation of security, of permanence and of prosperity.

The modern habit of flinging troops into places like Chechnya, Kosovo or Sierra Leone and expecting them to establish peace by their presence alone betrays how little contemporary political leaders know about history. Keeping the barbarians under check is a more complicated activity — and an expensive one. But in the long run, it is always for the greatest good for the most people, and therefore must be worth it.

"No nation was ever ruined by trade."

"The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

"Every man over forty is a scoundrel."

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca