Don't support Castro's island prison

It grates against our national character that Canada continues to do business with Cuba, thereby helping to prop up Fidel Castro's tyrannical regime.

Trade between our two nations is broad, encapsulating resources, mining, agriculture and beyond, but captains of industry are not the only ones who are complicit. During the winter months, many well-meaning Canadians fly, in grinning ignorance, to that imprisoned island for vacations. I say they are ignorant because my countrymen are not sociopaths: The tragic irony of sipping a Cuba Libre beside the pool in a hotel that native Cubans are forbidden from entering under pain of imprisonment, and within walking distance of one of Castro's torture chambers, would dampen the holiday of even the most hard-hearted snowbird, were they aware of the full circumstances by which they came to be clutching that refreshing beverage.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Castro's regime lost US$4.5-billion in annual subsidies and billions more in trade. To make up for this lost revenue, the dictator decided to promote tourism, and Canadians account for the largest percentage of visitors to Cuba.

Certainly, vacations in Cuba are cheaper than other destinations. Slave labour has never been expensive. Vacationers who employ the flimsy subterfuge that they are injecting money into an impoverished economy ought to be aware that their dollars go directly to the sinister state, which pays the locals in worthless Cuban pesos. Private property and enterprise are essentially outlawed and Cubans who own contraband luxuries or approach tourists without permission are dealt with brutally.

A family friend who defected to Canada from Cuba some years ago -- and whose name cannot appear in print for the sake of his loved ones who are still in captivity there -- can attest to the contrast between the two countries. Having leapt to freedom from an airplane that was refuelling on a tarmac in Canada -- one Cuban guard on each arm to break his fall -- it would stun him to learn that citizens of the country he had risked his life to reach use the island prison of 11 million human beings as a relaxation destination.

As Liberal Deputy Leader Michael Ignatieff put it, in the interests of commerce, Canada has "turned a blind eye to a dictator." Unfortunately, few Canadian politicians of any party share his sober view. There is no shortage of government and academic types willing to tout the miracles of the Cuban health care and education systems -- myths that are routinely exploded by the testimony of liberated Cuban citizens -- and some go so far as to suggest that Canada should follow Cuba's lead. This line of argument will be vastly more compelling when we see thousands of people risking their lives on rafts to get in to Cuba.

The Canadian government's policy on Cuba continues to be "constructive engagement," which is precisely the kind of mealy-mouthed formulation that has been used to justify profit made from misery since time immemorial. Defenders of the status quo insist that Ottawa and Havana have "agreed to disagree" on some issues. How tragically typical of anaemic Canadian foreign policy that our response to tens of thousands of deaths, disappearances and torture carried out over half a century is an emphatic, "We disagree!"

Since 2006, there has been continued speculation as to Castro's health, or whether he is even alive. From time to time, El Jefe has appeared in his track suit to dispel rumours of his demise. But whether or not the despot has gone on to his reward, passing power to his equally brutal brother Raul, tyranny is tyranny and Canada ought to have nothing to do with it.

Canadians are lovers of freedom, and we have made supreme sacrifices in its defence. As pertains to Cuba, our corporate and personal decisions should be more in keeping with our proud history.

Lessons from Vietnam

With all the talk of possible firsts in the 2008 Presidential race -- would the first woman, black, or (until yesterday) Mormon be elected to America's highest office? -- one other potential breakthrough has been overlooked. If John McCain secures the Republican nomination and wins in November, he will be the first Vietnam veteran to be elected President of the United States.

This would be an extraordinary development. McCain's experience in Vietnam would help bring closure to America's role in that misunderstood conflict. It would also have important ramifications in regard to America's current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The United States remains divided and confused about a war in which it lost more than 58,000 lives. Despite never losing a single battle -- including the famed Tet Offensive, whose 40th anniversary is being marked this month-- there can be no doubt that America lost the Vietnam War. The received wisdom has long had it that the United States should never have gone in and was right to get out.

But, as a Navy pilot and POW during Vietnam, McCain's perspective is different. He continues to believe that the fight to stop the spread of communism was justified, and the history of that region proves him right.

The pitiful scene of America's allies reaching for helicopters as Saigon fell was only the beginning.

When the Democratic U.S. Congress of 1975 insisted on starving the government of South Vietnam of support, it led to the massacre of millions of innocent people across Southeast Asia. Moreover, it made America appear to the world as an unreliable ally. It has taken a generation for that image to be repaired. As local populations in Iraq and Afghanistan risk their lives in siding with the United States against terrorist insurgents, a President Mc-Cain could be expected to honour the lesson of Vietnam and not abandon America's friends to their fate.

Critics of the Iraq war often characterize the conflict as "another Vietnam." They are right -- but for the wrong reasons. What the wars have in common is not that both were/are unwinnable quagmires, but that, in both cases, U.S. war planners underestimated the enemy, and were too impatient to get out. The so-called "Rumsfeld Strategy" in Iraq -- against which McCain inveighed from the outset -- prioritized technology and speed over numbers, and thereby provided too few troops to secure the peace. It was only last year, when George W. Bush implemented a "surge" strategy that boosted troop levels by 20,000, that sustained progress was made. This vindicates McCain, a military man who loudly and consistently championed a much larger invasion force as far back as 2003.

Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan all represent regional conflicts fought against global foes. In the case of Vietnam, the larger enemy was Chinese-and Soviet-sponsored communism; in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is worldwide Islamic terror. The United States needs a president who understands that losing this struggle would be as disastrous as losing the Cold War would have been.

To be sure, McCain has made many missteps in his long career. The 2002 McCain-Feingold legislation and the 2007 McCain-Kennedy immigration bill were affronts to freedom of speech and the rule of law, respectively. But from a foreign policy perspective, McCain is a formidable candidate. If he becomes President, we can expect that he will apply the lessons of Cold War history -- lessons that, unlike any presidential predecessor, he learned first-hand in Vietnam.

The thankless lot of the urban conservative

It is a curious thing to live in a city -- any city -- and to veer to the back roads of conservatism from the main strip of leftist thinking one finds in an urban center. Conservative city dwellers are akin to the early Christians in that, while we can expect disagreement or outright scorn for voicing our views in the public square, we cherish those rare kindred spirits we find, and we bond together for warmth.

Not all those on the left are hostile, of course, and their attempts at converting conservatives can be almost endearing. "Oh, you must read the latest piece by [insert, say, Erica Jong, Robert Reich, Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, or any other mainstream liberal thinker]," they will gently insist. If you have presented a business card or contact details to the progressive proselytizer, the column in question may helpfully appear in your email. The assumption, of course, is that in your pitiful benightedness, you simply have not been exposed to received liberal wisdom. This misunderstands the reality that if a person lives in a city -- and especially if he or she was brought up in one -- that individual is already surrounded by liberal voices and has, at some point, had to make a decision to look at the world differently.

For this reason, we happy few who live with conservative views and within driving distance of an international airport prove infuriatingly difficult for our liberal friends to turn. It is not that we are unfamiliar with your ideas; rather, we have heard them through and through and we respectfully disagree. The urban conservative prioritizes the rule of law, limited government, and low taxation, and does so without anticipation of Amens from next door. Being faced with such an individual can be a gobsmacking experience for the average city dweller.

At times, an ailing metropolis will turn its lowly eyes to one of these strange characters in their midst. When a dilapidated and crime-ridden New York City elected Rudy Giuliani in 1993, for example, it was a choice made out of necessity and against type. Filthy streets, spiralling homicide rates and the scorn of the rest of America forced Gotham to turn from its path of least resistance and vote for a no-nonsense prosecutor from the Reagan Justice Department who promised to revamp welfare, curb spending, and punish lawbreakers. It is worth noting that Giuliani had offered his services to the city four years before, in 1989, and was rebuffed. New Yorkers needed four years of the disastrous David Dinkins to decide, at long last, that it was time to turn to one of the confident minority of the citys conservatives.

Despite his demonstrable success, Giulianis overarching philosophy was never accepted by the locals. Times Square and the theatre district came back to life under Rudys watch, but Broadway stars spoke out vigorously against his erstwhile campaign for the United States Senate in 2000. There was no more adamant opponent of Giulianis campaign for the presidency in 2008 than the New York Times even though Rudy arranged for them to come and go from their 43rd Street offices without fear of being hit with a bicycle chain. Such is the thankless lot of the big city conservative.

Some cities never learn. Washington, D.C., for example, would be a punch-line, were the squalor and homicides on its streets not so tragic. And yet, Americas capital has never elected a conservative or even a liberal Republican to be its mayor since the District was first given home rule. Elsewhere, as in Toronto or Boston, severe budget shortfalls brought about by profligate spending are obscured when higher levels of government swoop in with cash. Service shortages and garbage pileups are shrugged off as the cost of being cosmopolitan.

But the urban conservative is the eternal optimist, and so presses on against the crowd.

'I prefer messy democracy to the stability of tyrants'

Election workers sort ballot papers in Kabul in
October, 2004 (Ahmad Masood, Reuters)

An interview with Iraq's ambassador to Canada

Howar Ziad, the Iraqi ambassador to Canada, has seen the best and the worst of humanity in his homeland. The courage of the Iraqi people, and in particular the emergence of the Kurdistan region from decades of genocide and devastation, represents the highest aspirations of the human spirit. The brutality of the previous 35 years, meanwhile -- torture, mass killings, disappearances and chemical attacks -- is a legacy of man's inhumanity to man. Western politicians, journalists and intellectuals inveigh against the American campaign in Iraq but, having seen the changes in his country, ambassador Ziad shares none of their doubts.

In conversations with me last week, ambassador Ziad spoke of the progress Iraq is making, the yawning indifference this has aroused in the mainstream press and the gratitude of his people for the intervention of the United States and its allies.

When asked if, despite the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the persistence of the terrorist insurgency and the resulting death and instability, the campaign to topple Saddam Hussein was justified, Ziad's answer is categorical and emphatic: "Absolutely. To put this question to the average Iraqi is ridiculous and probably insulting. That regime enslaved people and caused genocide, wars and breached every single human right."

It is this history that makes the nascent success of a free Iraq so remarkable. "We have a democratically elected government," Ziad reports with pride. "We had three elections and, for the first time in the Islamic Middle East, we didn't know the result of the election beforehand."

With a federal budget of $48-billion, declining inflation rates and a newly merged currency that is steadily increasing in value, the economic picture of the new Iraq is brightening, too. Iraq's Kurdistan region, spared major terrorist attacks in recent years, is booming. Its annual development budget is a remarkable $5-billion, and in its capital of Erbil people are buying Western-style apartments in gated communities built around swimming pools. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have begun returning to their homes, thanks to the improved security situation.

Despite constant attempts by terrorists to disrupt production, Iraq's oil output is approaching three million barrels per day. With oil prices at historic highs, this upward trend is good news for Iraqi citizens. "In the past," Ziad points out, "oil revenue has gone to dictators like Saddam, with none of the benefit going to the people." As Christopher Hitchens noted during a trip to the region: "Everybody knows how to snigger when you mention Jeffersonian democracy and Iraq in the same breath; try sniggering when you meet someone who is trying to express these ideas in an atmosphere that only a few years ago was heavy with miasmic decay and the reek of poison gas."

To be sure, the terrorist threat within the country remains, although al-Qaeda haunts the nation as a ghost of its former self. Sectarian divides among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish populations pose a challenge, but ambassador Ziad likes to point to Canada's example of devolved federalism to demonstrate how people of different cultures and regions can share a nation.

The analogy may seem far-fetched, since Canada's cultural fissures are nowhere near so recent and deadly as those in Iraq. Even so, Canadians can be grateful and proud that Iraqis see our system as an object of supreme aspiration.

Ambassador Ziad shares the belief held by many supporters of the Iraq campaign that, as the counterinsurgency strategy of U.S. General David Petraeus has yielded positive results, the elite news outlets that condemned the American invasion from the beginning have turned a blind eye. According to the Media Research Center, which has been tracking news coverage for over 20 years, the major American networks carried 178 news stories about the Iraq war in September, 2007. By November, by which time the situation had improved, that number had plummeted to 68. In a news culture where The New York Times put Abu Ghraib on its front page 32 days in a row, such a precipitous drop in concern for Iraq speaks volumes.

At times, reporters' obsession with finding bad news about Iraq can lead them beyond satire. Presumably with straight faces, the McClatchy news service lamented in October of 2007 that, "As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch."

But ambassador Ziad's ideals are higher than what one reads in the morning paper, and he knows that words are only that. "Regardless of what the media do," he says, "if we genuinely make progress, it really doesn't matter. We have faced many challenges: the terrorists, obviously, and many others who have vested interests -- they didn't want us to succeed. It's not easy to overcome the legacy of a genocidal, fascist regime, but so far we have made it. Economically, the average person is much better off than they used to be, and freedom has strength. It's not perfect. But step by step, we are moving forward, with the help of our friends, the United States."

Reflecting on the vicissitudes of Iraq's young liberty, he adds, "I prefer messy democracy to the stability of tyrants."

It is fashionable to dismiss the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq as a mistake, a failure or even a crime, and with such scorn comes easy agreement and approbation from sophisticates. But, for the people of Iraq, the unpopular truth is more compelling.

Which Party? Answer Is Shockingly Easy

TORONTO - An obvious choice can be unnerving. When the apparent perfection of one option or the unspeakable awfulness of another makes a decision seem too easy, it is human nature to become suspicious.

This instinct intensifies as the stakes of the given choice are raised. American voters know no greater responsibility to their country and to the world than to select their president wisely. While we do not yet know who the Democrat and Republican nominees will be, any combination of the leading candidates from either party will make for the most obvious choice put to American voters in a generation. To wit, none of the Democrats has any business being president.

This pronouncement has less to do with any apparent perfection among the Republican candidates than with the intellectual and experiential paucity evinced by the Democratic field. "Not ready for prime time," goes the vernacular, but this does not suffice to describe how bad things are. Alongside Hillary Clinton, add Barack Obama's kindergarten essays to an already confused conversation about Dennis Kucinich's UFO sightings, dueling celebrity endorsements and who can be quickest to retreat from America's global conflict and raise taxes on the American people, and it becomes clear that these are profoundly unserious individuals.

To be sure, there has been a fair amount of rubbish and rhubarb on the Republican side (Ron Paul, call your office), but even a cursory review of the legislative and professional records of the leading contenders from each party reveals a disparity akin to adults competing with children.

FOR THE Republicans, Rudy Giuliani served as a two-term mayor of New York City, turning a budget deficit into a surplus and taming what was thought to be an ungovernable metropolis. Prior to that, he held the third-highest rank in the Reagan Justice Department, obtaining more than 4,000 convictions. Mitt Romney, before serving as governor of Massachusetts, founded a venture capital firm that created billions of dollars in shareholder value, and he then went on to save the Salt Lake City Olympics.

While much is made of Mike Huckabee's history as a Baptist minister, he was also a governor for more than a decade and, while Arkansas is hardly a "cradle of presidents," it has launched at least one previous chief executive to national office. John McCain's legislative and military career spans five decades, with half that time having been spent in Congress. Even Fred Thompson, whose excess of nonchalance transformed his once-promising campaign into an early casualty, had more experience in the U.S. Senate than any of the leading Democratic candidates.

WITH JUST over one term as a senator to her credit, Hillary Clinton boasts the most extensive record of the potential Democratic nominees. In that time, Sen. Clinton cannot claim a single legislative accomplishment of note, and she is best known lately for requesting $1 million from Congress for a museum to commemorate Woodstock.

Barack Obama is nearing the halfway point of his first term in the Senate, having previously served as an Illinois state legislator and, as Clinton has correctly pointed out, has done nothing but run for president since he first arrived in Washington. Between calling for the invasion of Pakistan and fumbling a simple question on driver's licenses for illegal aliens, Obama has shown that he is not the fellow to whom the nation ought to hike the nuclear football.

John Edwards, meanwhile, embodies the adage that the American people will elect anyone to Congress -- once. From his $1,200 haircuts to his personal war on poverty, proclaimed from the porch of his 28,000-square-foot home, purchased with the proceeds of preposterous lawsuits exploiting infant cerebral palsy, Edwards is living proof that history can play out as tragedy and farce simultaneously.

Forget for a moment all that you believe about public policy. Discard your notions about taxes and Iraq, free trade and crime, and consider solely the experience of these two sets of candidates. Is there any serious issue that you would prefer to entrust to a person with the Democrats' experience, rather than that of any of the Republicans?

Now consider the state of debate in each party. While the Republicans compare tax proposals and the best way to prosecute the war on terror, Democrats are divining the patterns and meaning of the glitter and dried macaroni glued to the page of one of their leading candidate's kindergarten projects.

Does this decision not become unsettlingly simple?

Beneath our petty differences, a common love of freedom

Tony Blair spoke in Toronto last week, and he stressed an important truth that has been obscured in recent years. To wit: No matter how profound political differences may seem within and among Western democracies, and despite the passions those differences ignite, those distinctions are minor compared to the cosmic contrasts between our culture and those that oppose us.

On issues ranging from freedom of speech and religion to women's rights, the environment, commerce, democracy and on ad infinitum, Westerners of all parties and persuasions can usually agree, at least, on the fundamentals.

Democracy is good, for example (or, as Churchill called it, "the worst form of government, except for all the others"). Individuals should be allowed to worship, or not, as they choose. Women are not property. These concepts are nowhere near revolutionary in the West. But, Blair posits, we ought to remind ourselves that those who oppose us openly (al-Qaeda, Iran, etc.) or strategically (China, and increasingly Russia) do not share many of our most basic beliefs.

This realization ought to do two things: First, it should disabuse us of the guilty misapprehension that every conflict we encounter is somehow our own fault, the natural result of an imperialist past or Western excesses; second, and more important, it ought to sharpen our focus and steel our resolve to protect our shared values in a dangerous world.

The most apparent and explosive threat to free society is radical Islam. But cancerous concepts such as communism (despite the much-ballyhooed demise of that twisted ideology, it still enslaves one-fifth of the world's population) or good old-fashioned dictatorial thuggery (Vladimir Putin, please pick up the nearest courtesy phone) will gladly fill any vacuum left by liberty's retreat.

Faced with eager adversaries whose worldviews are utterly antagonistic to our own, democratic leaders and candidates for office ought to be mindful of the maxim that political differences should end at the water's edge. By all means, discuss and debate tax policy, environmental controls, immigration and health care. But do so with gratitude for the system that makes such debate possible, and remember that there are many who would rob us of that freedom. Blair's political career epitomized the transcendence of smaller notions in furtherance of liberty. As conservative writer Mark Steyn observed in 2005, "If I lived in Britain, I'd vote for Tony Blair's Labour party. Yes, yes, I know he's a nanny-state control-freak and you can hardly pull your pants on in the morning without filling in the form for the Public Trouser Usage Permit and undergoing inspection from the Gusset Regulatory Authority. But on the One Big Thing -- the great issue of the age -- he's right, and he's reliable."

Not only are we blessed with the right to dissent, we are charged with the duty to defend it. At times, that defence takes the form of military action, as in the efforts Blair supports in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as all people of good faith agree, war ought to be our last and least-favoured option. Our most potent weapon is the manifest goodness of freedom. Refined and ratified by history, the concept of government that guarantees individual liberty has defeated despots time and again.

In the streets of Baghdad and Kabul and the corridors of power in Tehran and Beijing, there are many who would crush the best hopes of humankind. But, as Blair said in his seminal speech to the United States' Congress in July of 2003, "In the end, it is not our power alone that will defeat this evil. Our ultimate weapon is not our guns, but our beliefs."

The season of sound bite politics

Ronald Reagan is credited with saying, "It is not that our liberal friends are ignorant, but they know so much that isn't so." Of course, misbegotten certainty is not the sole province of the left, but they certainly have a talent for it.

Every election cycle sees the general American populace put atrophied political muscles to use. Like a middle-aged former athlete overdoing it at the company softball game, voters strain to assimilate issues -- tax policy, immigration, social security reform, what-have-you -- that most of them do not spend their daily lives contemplating.

It is likely a very good thing that, absent an election, most folks go about their business without obsessing over policy issues. A society in which everyone constantly discussed politics would descend into an oxymoronic wasteland of tedium and rage. But, while regular people keep political worries to their season, the committed left remains in high dudgeon even in odd-numbered years, committing to memory all the nonsense that they "know:"

"Bush lied!" "The deficit is huge!" "The economy is a disaster!" "Iraq is a quagmire!" "Illegal wiretaps!" "CIA spies exposed!" And so on.

One of the many troubles with this carnival barker discussion of policy is that the repetition of these imagined grievances creates a place for them in common parlance. Consequently, when the nation turns its lowly eyes to political campaigns, this caterwauled nonsense is mistaken for legitimate opinion.

And who can be expected to respond to the liturgy of liberal "truth," recited at full speed and volume, as above? An attempt, in reverse order, may go something like: "Valerie Plame was not undercover, the Senate has declared in a bipartisan statement that her husband fibbed, and it was Richard Armitage, no friend of the Bush administration, who told Robert Novak that she worked at the CIA; Democrats and Republicans in the Senate voted 99-0 to authorize changing the way in which wiretapping is done, now that even terrorists have been approved for cellphone plans with unlimited evenings and weekends; Sunni and Shiite populations in Iraq have turned on al-Qaeda and allied themselves with the U.S. military, which has seen an extraordinary decline in casualties and tremendous success since the "surge" began; the American economy has experienced six straight years of economic growth, surpassing the average rate of the 1990s, '80s, and '70s, with 3% GDP growth in 2007, creating 8.3 million jobs in 52 straight months since 2003; the budget deficit is down to 1.2% of GDP, well below the average of the last 40 years; and if Bush lied (presumably about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction), so did Bill Clinton, Al Gore, 16 different intelligence services, Tony Blair and countless other politicians and policy makers, going back to years before George W. Bush was first elected governor of Texas -- but surely the "fact" that Saddam had no WMDs comes as a great relief to the more than 20,000 people killed, blinded or maimed by his chemical attack on the city of Halabja." Catchy rejoinder, no?

It is far easier to be brief and blithe than plodding and accurate. So the shorthand silliness often sells at election time. But it is not merely the front page, high stakes issues on which the left is consistently and conspicuously incorrect. The notion that the Democrats are the party of the little guy is exploded every year with perennial reportage that the wealthiest donors are overwhelmingly Democrats, yet the myth persists. Financial heavyweights champion liberal causes with regularity. As Warren Buffett joins forces with Hillary Clinton to defend the death tax, Michael Bloomberg bans cigarettes and trans-fats, and George Soros massively funds left-wing lobby groups. If you are being told not to smoke, what to eat and how much of your life's work you can leave to your children, chances are it's a billionaire doing the bossing.

One small mercy is that, as we approach Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, the left's purveyors of truth become so shrill as to consign some of their talking points to pitches that only dogs can hear. Whether these pleas translate to success at the ballot box is a matter for the American Kennel Society. But citizenship comes with responsibilities, and voters must be vigilant and wise in order to separate "fact" from fiction.