Canada
Need Not Follow The US
By Javed I. Chaudry
09 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
The
lessons the US has failed to learn after 15 years of misadventure in
Viet Nam, may be willing to learn after 5 year long misadventure in
Afghanistan and 3 years of destruction and terror in Iraq. It appears
that the US administration is now considering to negotiate with the
Talibans, just what NDP leader Jack Layton and many other sensible people
in Canada have been saying all along.
Why this switch? In 1960s,
the US industry was churning out all sorts of products; they were manufacturing
every thing from a sowing needle to the largest ship and aircraft. Money
was flowing in and there was no concern of balance of payments for its
imports and exports. The US does not have that industrial output and
financial luxuries that it had during the first three decades after
the end of WWII. Other countries have obtained or developed all sorts
of technologies. Not only that they and are not importing the goods
from the US but producing and competing with the US products quite successfully.
The big 4, auto giants shrank to big three, years ago, and now quickly
loosing their place in the world market, getting run over by others
who used to be their clients 30-40 years ago.
The industries like aircraft
manufacturing, telecom and steel production have strong challengers
in the international market place. It has lost the household electronics
appliance market, decades ago. As a result of mass scale industrial
manufacturing job losses, the US is not in a position to keep throwing
money on its misadventures, such as Afghanistan and Iraq at the rate
of 5 billion dollars a month.
The present strength of the
US armed forces is about the maximum that it ever had or will have in
the future. The operations of its armed forces rely mainly on its highly
advanced air force. The moment, others come up with defensive technology
against US air force offensives, the US will be at par with others and
naturally will refrain from terrorizing foreign nations.
It is high time, the Canadian
government and its public learn to differentiate between right and wrong
in the light of the lessons learned from the history rather than make
decisions on the basis of political expediency. While at it, they must
not forget, the difference between the export of the manufactured goods
as opposed to the export of the raw materials. Canada does not have
to follow the American way of thinking in its social, cultural, industrial,
financial or political sectors.
The Americans are still behaving
as they did 200 years ago in the wild West. In spite of the fact that
they appear to be the leaders of the world in many fields of human endeavor,
they still lack in the basic human character that is expected to be
an important trait of a civilized, intelligent and well reformed nation
with strong historical traditions. The quick industrial explosion after
the WWII seems to have gone to their head, thinking that their values
are the best thing after the invention of the sliced bread.
I am sure the world will
soon witness the rise of other societies that will take care of the
American hegemony and its new world disorder in favor of a proper and
civilized order to curb the terror that has been created in the world
after 9/11.
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