[Bloquez l'empire!] Maclean's: Cda in Iraq

[mary foster]

> A DEDICATED PRESENCE IN IRAQ
> Maclean's
> May 29, 2006
> COLIN CAMPBELL
>
> Yes, Canada has troops there. And they've been around for a while.
> Several times a year, a group of Canadians gets together at a place called
> the "Canadian building" in Baghdad. Tucked away in the relative safety of
> the guarded Green Zone, the building is actually Canada's
> soon-to-be-opened embassy in Iraq, staffed by a small number of Canadian
> consular officials. The informal parties are arranged by emails traded by
> Canadians who meet inside the Zone. Guests include security contractors,
> government officials, police officers -- a sampling of Canada's small but
> 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.
>
> Insp. Ron van Straalen, an Ontario provincial police officer, flew into
> Iraq in January 2005. "What caught me right away was the amount of
> security needed to move me around," he recalls. After flying to Kuwait,
> then hopping a military transport plane to Baghdad, he waited several
> hours to catch the next U.S. helicopter into the Green Zone, where he
> began his stint as one of two Canadian police officers advising Iraq's
> Ministry of the Interior. "That was my first taste of how things function
> and how you have to operate."
>
> Van Straalen was part of an RCMP program to help train Iraq's police
> force. (Canadians are also part of an international effort in Jordan to
> train Iraqi police officers.) During his year there, van Straalen was
> highly involved in the fight against the insurgency. His main task
> involved re-establishing the Iraqi police's forensic capabilities by
> rebuilding labs across the country. He also helped develop bomb disposal
> capability, decimated by lack of equipment, training, and the sheer number
> of bombings. "There's a strong insurgency," van Straalen says. "But the
> majority of what we're seeing is crime-related, like kidnapping, murder,
> extortion. What the police need are experts and the capabilities to deal
> with these major crimes."
>
> The rescue of the two Canadian Christian Peacemakers, James Loney and
> Harmeet Sooden, in March provided a rare glimpse into Canada's ability to
> operate in Iraq. Our officials were involved from the morning after the
> abduction. But the groundwork was laid much earlier, when the FBI was
> building a task force to fight major crimes in Iraq, including the rash of
> abductions. One source they looked to was van Straalen, because of his
> Interior Ministry connections. "Within a month we had a task force of 20
> up and running," he says. In addition to Iraqi-American forces like that
> one, and the British and U.S. militaries, the Peacemaker rescue included
> the RCMP, the Canadian military and the Department of Foreign Affairs --
> all working inside Iraq.
>
> When Canada reluctantly admitted to playing a role in the mission, Prime
> Minister Stephen Harper said Canadians shouldn't be surprised that a small
> number of Canadian soldiers are in Iraq. "That's been the case since the
> beginning of the war," he said. For three years, some Canadians troops
> have been in Iraq as part of a long-standing exchange program that places
> soldiers with U.S., British and other NATO forces.
>
> Maj. Ghislain Sauve, on exchange with the British, crossed into Iraq on
> March 22, 2003, wearing his Canadian Forces uniform "with flags and
> everything," he says. Sauve had been with the British military for three
> years, and had served in Afghanistan. A member of an engineer unit, he was
> second in command of a team charged with setting up military camps. "I was
> never exposed to any danger per se," says Sauve, now at CFB Borden near
> Toronto. "Did I hear gunfire and explosions? Sure. It was a war." Sauve
> was given the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, a rare
> distinction for a Canadian. The award was pinned to his uniform by the
> Queen at Buckingham Palace.
>
> The decisions to let Sauve and others serve in Iraq are made on a
> case-by-case basis, says Lt.-Col. Roland Lavoie, a Canadian Forces
> spokesman. No soldier has been pulled from an exchange because of Iraq.
> But Lavoie stresses that Canada does not send soldiers to Iraq -- soldiers
> follow their foreign unit. On average, there have been about five soldiers
> on exchange there at any one time (as of last month, there were two, both
> with the British). But at the beginning of the war there were as many as a
> few dozen, most serving as flight crews on exchange with U.S. forces.
> Canadians regularly flew AWAC surveillance planes, which help guide
> fighter jets, over Iraq.
>
> Joint programs between the Canadian and U.S. militaries have become
> increasingly common, especially since 9/11. U.S. Marine Sgt. Scott
> Crichton, a native of Edmonton, trained with his unit for a deployment to
> Iraq alongside a Canadian battalion at a U.S. military airport in
> Victorville, Calif. The exercises focused on urban warfare, something
> Crichton experienced first-hand during his two tours in Iraq. He describes
> the country in the matter-of-fact language of a soldier. "It was hot," he
> says on the phone from Camp Pendleton, a U.S. Marine Corps base north of
> San Diego. His advice for dealing with roadside bombs: "Keep your eyes
> straight." Finding other Canadians on the ground was also not uncommon, he
> says. Two others from his battalion have served in Iraq. In fact, more
> than 100 Canadians have gone south to join the U.S. military since the war
> began.
>
> Canada has good reason to be involved, says Martin Rudner, the director of

> the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at Ottawa's
> Carleton University. According to CSIS, Canadians are also fighting in
> Iraq with the insurgency, and "the fear is they are going to return and
> bring the lessons they learned," Rudner says. Far better, he adds, for the
> insurgency to be crushed before such fears are realized. The other major
> Canadian concern in Iraq is oil -- Canada, like other Western countries,
> has a strong interest in making sure the Middle East is stable, to avoid
> major disruptions in the global economy.
>
> Canada has maintained an almost uninterrupted presence in Iraq since 1988,
> when it sent soldiers to the region, says Sean Maloney, a professor at the
> Royal Military College of Canada. Canadians have played important roles in
> a number of UN and U.S.-led efforts, as weapons inspectors and military
> observers, in a decade-long campaign to contain the Saddam Hussein regime,
> he says. In 1991, Canadian CF-18s supported the U.S.-led air campaign in
> the first Gulf War, and in 1998 Canada sent frigates to the Gulf to
> support U.S. operations. The unwavering involvement in Iraq amounts to an
> unwritten, though ambiguous policy, says Maloney. "Every time we send
> someone to the Gulf there's a reason for doing it. We're keeping an eye on
> it and remaining involved. We didn't just do this haphazardly," he says.
> "This is part of Canadian policy."
>
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