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All that's off table is chance to have finger on trigger

24 Feb 2005| The Globe and Mail [Toronto, Ont] A.4. | Paul Koring.

"[Paul Martin] hasn't been able to control the agenda," Mr. [David Biette] said. "He said he wanted better relations [with Washington] but he is just unreliable in a different way." While "Chrétien just turned his back" to the [Bush] administration, Mr. Martin has delayed and lost control of his choices, he said.


The dithering, not the decision, may cause the most lasting damage.

Paul Martin's long-delayed decision to opt out of a continental missile defence shield won't leave Vancouver any more vulnerable to a nuclear-tipped missile from North Korea. The likely fallout will be in Washington, where the Prime Minister's efforts to repair relations and portray himself as a more reliable friend and partner than his predecessor, Jean Chrétien, just suffered a self-inflicted direct hit.

"Americans who watch Canada had higher hopes for Martin," said David Biette, director of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. "Instead, he has really relegated Canada to an irrelevant position."

Official American reaction was muted, with the Bush administration stressing that Canada-U.S. defence co-operation remains strong and that the biggest potential stumbling block on missile defence had been sorted out last summer.

But Canada's position looks opportunistic, playing to domestic sentiment rather than principled opposition.

For a year, Mr. Martin has done nothing to make the case for missile defence and by allowing its opponents to dominate the debate he allowed the issue to grow, say political and defence analysts in Washington.

"Martin hasn't been able to control the agenda," Mr. Biette said. "He said he wanted better relations [with Washington] but he is just unreliable in a different way." While "Chrétien just turned his back" to the Bush administration, Mr. Martin has delayed and lost control of his choices, he said.

Dwight Mason, a retired U.S. diplomat and former co-chairman of the Canada-U.S. Permanent Joint Board of Defence, said "the problem is that delay has become very expensive politically in Canada because it makes the issue bigger than it otherwise might be."

At first glance, Mr. Martin's strategy might seem to offer a double win for Canadians. They remain protected against the remote (but catastrophic) possibility that Pyongyang's unpredictable regime might launch one of its handful of nuclear warheads across the Pacific. But they can also maintain the posture that they are unsullied by the militarization of space.

Except that Canada is up to its neck -- by choice -- in the shield's key detection, tracking and identification systems, the networks of radar that are watched every second of every day by joint North American Aerospace Defence Command teams of military personnel in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo. Last summer, the Martin government explicitly agreed to use NORAD, complete with its Canadian component, as the front half of continental missile defence.

Or, as Canada's next ambassador to Washington, Frank McKenna, put it quite accurately: "We're part of it now."

With the NORAD problem solved, there's no need to try to pry the Canadians out of the mountain or keep them away from missile defence data processing so, in Mr. McKenna's words, Ottawa "has already given a great deal of what the United States needs."

That doesn't sound like poking Uncle Sam in the eye, which may be good politics for a minority government prime minister. But if American outrage was hoped for, it wasn't evident yesterday. Rather, there was a resigned sense that Canada is a sometimes-reliable ally.

All Mr. Martin has opted out of, really, is joint responsibility for pushing the firing button. The interceptor missiles would still rise from their silos in Alaska and California to kill incoming warheads, whether they are bound for Vancouver or Seattle.

In practical terms, the officer peering at the radar screen may be a Canadian. The officer who determines that the incoming blip is a warhead may be a Canadian. But the decision to fire an interceptor would always be made by an American.

Canada won't have it own interceptors or radars, but then none were ever planned.

Nor can Canada claim that it has opted out of the concept of missile defence, so long as its military personnel are watching for and tracking that possible threat.

As for taking a stand against the "militarization" of space: The current (and still not operational) missile defence system uses ground-based missiles. The satellites that form part of the detection and targeting system aren't weapons, although they are part of a weapons system. And so are the satellites that guide bombs dropped from Canadian warplanes.