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Canadian General Takes Senior Command Role in Iraq
by Jon Elmer and Anthony Fenton
Despite the government's official position abstaining from combat in Iraq, Canada has dispatched yet another top general to the command group overseeing day-to-day operations for the U.S.-led occupation and counterinsurgency war.
Brigadier-General Nicolas Matern, a Special Forces officer and former commander of Canada's elite counter-terrorism unit, will serve as deputy to Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin III, incoming commander of the 170,000-strong Multi National Corps-Iraq beginning in mid-February.
VANCOUVER, Jan 23 (IPS) - Matern is the third Canadian general to serve in the command
group of Operation Iraqi Freedom as part of an exchange programme that
places Canadian Forces officers in leadership positions in the U.S.
military. His deployment is part of a three-year post with the U.S.
Army's 18th Airborne Corps, based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Officials
at Fort Bragg confirmed that Matern has already been deployed to Iraq,
though no official statement has been made by Canadian officials.
Meanwhile,
42 Canadian tanks and armoured personnel carriers left Edmonton last
week destined for Fort Bliss, Texas to participate in pre-deployment
training exercises with the U.S. Army before a summer rotation in
Afghanistan. A Department of National Defence press release
characterised the training as "massive", with more than 3,000 Canadian
soldiers taking part in Exercise Southern Bear.
Such joint
exercises are commonplace throughout all branches of the armed forces
and beyond. A report from the U.S. Department of State's
counterterrorism office described how "the governments of the United
States and Canada collaborated on a broad array of initiatives,
exercises, and joint operations that spanned virtually all agencies and
every level of government."
During his first visit to
Washington as Prime Minister in 2006, Stephen Harper boasted that the
North American alliance was the "strongest relationship of any two
countries, not just on the planet, but in the history of mankind." As
much as 90 percent of Canadian trade is with the U.S., with upwards of
two billion dollars a day in goods and services crossing the border.
There
are also economic interests in Iraq itself. The April 2007 Iraq
Reconstruction Report lists Canada as the fourth largest importer of
Iraqi oil. Industry Canada records that total Canadian imports from
Iraq have risen from 1.06 billion dollars in 2002 to 1.61 billion
dollars in 2006, making Iraq second only to Saudi Arabia as a Middle
Eastern source for Canadian imports.
According to Canada's
Defence Policy Statement, the increased collaboration with the U.S.
military will "not see the Canadian Forces replicate every function of
the world's premier militaries," but rather fill niche roles that allow
Canada's interventionist capabilities to be relevant and credible.
To
this end, Matern's Special Forces background is seen as an asset. "He
comes in with a unique set of skills," Col. Bill Buckner of the 18th
Airborne told the Ottawa Citizen. "We're the home of the airborne and
the special operating forces, so he fits in very nicely to this warrior
ethos we have here."
Matern was a commander in the secretive
commando unit, Joint Task Force-2, before being promoted to deputy
commander of the newly created Canadian Special Operations Forces
Command.
Canada's most important foreign policy documents list
Iraq, along with Afghanistan, Haiti, Sudan, and Israel-Palestine, as
areas of "strategic priority".
Canada was an active
participant in the 1991 Gulf War and helped enforce the crippling
blockade on Iraq throughout the 1990s, but declined to join the
so-called "coalition of the willing" in March of 2003 when the U.S.
launched the invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein without a final U.N.
resolution authorising the war.
Nevertheless, Canada's
contribution to the mission is notable. In 2003, Canada pledged 300
million dollars in aid and reconstruction in Iraq. The Royal Canadian
Mounted Police has helped train more than 30,000 Iraqi security forces
in neighbouring Jordan, and has had top level advisors operating within
the Iraqi interior ministry. As well, Canadian frigates continue to
operate alongside the U.S. aircraft carriers in the Arabian Gulf that
are a primary staging platform for bombing raids in Iraq.
Indeed,
during the first week of the war in 2003, then-U.S. Ambassador to
Canada, Paul Cellucci, said that Canada had provided "more support
indirectly to this war in Iraq than most of the 46 countries that are
fully supporting our efforts there."
Around the same time that
Canada opted out of combat in Iraq, it increased its combat role in
Afghanistan, ultimately taking command of the counterinsurgency war in
southern Afghanistan.
Unlike the Canadian deployment in
Afghanistan, which is subject to relatively significant coverage
domestically, Canada's participation in Iraq is handled much more
carefully by Canadian officials.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay
did not return a call seeking comment and no official statement has
accompanied Matern's recent deployment.
Opposition New
Democratic Party defense critic Dawn Black expressed reservations about
the implications of the special military relationship: "We're concerned
about an overemphasis on interoperability with the U.S," she told IPS
from her British Columbia office. "It affects whether we have an
independent foreign policy and sovereignty as a country."
Though
approximately 93 percent of the coalition troops in Iraq are American,
the U.S. has long been keen to emphasise the multinational component of
a war that former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan described as
"illegal".
Major General Peter Devlin, a Canadian Forces
officer currently operating as deputy commanding general in Iraq,
recently told the Washington Post that the effect of the multinational
element is in bringing "greater legitimacy to the effort here in Iraq".
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