The Great International Convoy Fiasco
As America puts the Canadian Prime Minister's unmentionables in a vise over a truck protest, it's clearer than ever: the world's leaders have forgotten how to govern
Matt Taibbi February 12, 2022
The White House issued a statement Friday, after Joe Biden chatted with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:
The two leaders agreed that the actions of the individuals who are obstructing travel and commerce between our two countries are having significant direct impacts on citizens’ lives and livelihoods… The Prime Minister promised quick action in enforcing the law, and the President thanked him for the steps he and other Canadian authorities are taking to restore the open passage of bridges to the United States.
Translation: Biden told Trudeau his testicles will be crushed under a Bradley Fighting Vehicle if this trucker thing is allowed to screw up the Super Bowl, or Biden’s State of the Union address. Trudeau’s own statement that day came off like the recorded video message of a downed pilot:
I’ve been absolutely clear that using military forces against civilian populations, in Canada, or in any other democracy, is something to avoid having to do at all costs.
An anxious Trudeau promised to deploy law enforcement in a “predictable, progressive approach” that would emphasize fines and other punishments. Because demonstrators will see that the “consequences” for those continuing to engage in “illegal protests” are “going to be more and more extensive,” he said, “we are very hopeful” that “people will choose to leave these protests peacefully.”
Switching gears just a bit, he then added, “We are a long way from ever having to call in the military.”
Such a move, he said, would only be a “last resort.”
And, er: “We have to be ready for any eventuality”:
Trudeau’s speech was clearly designed to convey to protesters that he was under heavy pressure to call in the air strike, making the New York Times headline covering all this — “Trudeau Rejects Calls to Use Military to End Protests” — particularly humorous in its disingenuousness.
Now that the “Freedom Convoy” is inspiring similar protests not just in the United States but in France, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, and other places, it’s clear every Western leader from Biden to Emmanuel Macron on down wants Trudeau, rather than any of them, to take the political hit that would ensue from any use-of-force resolution to this crisis. All of these leaders seem equally to be laboring under the delusion that a decisive enough ass-kicking in the Great White North will make this all go away. Until then, there seems to be no plan in any country that doesn’t involve tear gas, truncheons, or getting Facebook to blame troll farms in Bangladesh for stirring up the “discord”:
As for talking to protesters, that’s out of the question. As Politico recently put it, the “conspiratorial mindset” of the demonstrators means “sitting down with them could legitimize their concerns.” Since we can’t under any circumstances have that, the only option left is the military “eventuality.” Or, as former Obama Deputy Homeland Security Secretary and CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem (the same person who went nanny-bonkers over the Southwest Air “Let’s Go Brandon” incident) put it, “Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks.”
Any sane person should be able to see where any of these ideas would lead. The problem is, we’re heading into our third decade of Western leaders embracing not thinking ahead as a core national security concept. It’s like these people went to anti-governing school.
On February 4th, 2004, the Wall Street Journal published, “A Historian’s Take on Islam Steers U.S. in Terrorism Fight,” about the influence of a Princeton Scholar named Bernard Lewis on George W. Bush’s Iraq policy. The “Lewis Doctrine” was simple. The good professor believed there was no point to asking, Why do they hate us?, because the answer was so obviously rooted in a problem we couldn’t fix: Islam’s civilizational failure.
From the article:
“The question people are asking is why they hate us. That's the wrong question,” said Mr. Lewis on C-SPAN shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. “In a sense, they’ve been hating us for centuries… You can’t be rich, strong, successful and loved, particularly by those who are not rich, not strong and not successful. So the hatred is something almost axiomatic. The question which we should be asking is, why do they neither fear nor respect us?”
For Mr. Lewis and officials influenced by his thinking, instilling respect or at least fear through force is essential for America’s security…
After Karl Rove summoned Lewis to brief the Bush White House, our leaders began talking about how dialogue with the Middle East was impossible. As theirs was a failed culture and ours a successful one, they would always hate us. Therefore, listening to why they hate us was unnecessary, since from a practical standpoint, the only way to end the “axiomatic” hatred was to make their societies less failure-ridden, i.e. more like us.
From there, they embarked upon a conscious strategy of not taking into consideration what other peoples or countries might think, as they launched their ingenious plan to turn Mesopotamia into Arizona by force.
A child could have grasped that invading Iraq, devastating its cities with “Shock and Awe” tactics, and scooping its citizens off the streets to God knows where to be waterboarded or worse, was only going to spawn a new generation of committed adversaries. Only people with heads as far up their own backsides as Karl Rove, David Frum, George W. Bush, Richard Perle, and Donald Rumsfeld could talk themselves into believing an entire region would accept without objections the stated rationale of our presence, as in, “Yes, we blew up your Dad yesterday, but in the long run, you’ll have voting and supermarkets!”
Even when your adversary is Osama bin Laden, if your goal is preventing future problems, you have to at least try to understand both the opposition’s thought process and the nature of its appeal. Is bin Laden likely to end up with more or fewer volunteers if we invade Iraq, if we start blowing up Mosques, or if photos leak out of, say, grinning female American soldiers taking selfies in front of bound, hooded Muslim men rolled into naked pyramids? Forget morality or ideology, these are basic strategic questions.
In the Bush years, thanks to people like Rove, the sensible or at least intellectually defensible concept, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” morphed into the much broader idea that it’s no longer necessary to understand the thinking of any adversary or oppositional group. It’s where the now-hegemonic idea that talking is weakness and not talking is strength was born.
Early in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama ripped this Bush administration innovation, saying:
The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous.
His primary opponent Hillary Clinton cried foul, saying it was “very irresponsible and frankly naive” to countenance an American president sitting down with the leaders of countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria. Why, she said, those people would use the meetings for “propaganda points.” Unacceptable!
Not listening to terrorists or “rogue states” quickly turned into not listening to anyone, even at home. In 2016, the propaganda surrounding the motives behind both the Trump and Sanders campaigns was strikingly similar to the Bush-era takes on Why do they hate us? We were again told we didn’t need to ask questions about the sources of anger. Trump supporters were uneducated white men who couldn’t accept their loss of status, and “Bernie Bros” were a related species of hopeless malcontent, perhaps sharing an ancestor in the Pliocene period.
The Bush administration at least had a plan for dealing with Middle East discontent. It was idiotic beyond belief — invade the wrong country, democratize it by force, and solve the Arab inadequacy problem by turning them into Americans — but at least it was a plan.
There has never been a plan for dealing with the Trump phenomenon, or Leavers, or the gilets jaunes, or any other populist uprising in the modern era. All our leaders have come up with are strategies of suppression and containment: combinations of policing, surveillance, censorship, and propaganda (and even the propaganda is mostly just mocking). Over and over, we’re told the only thing we need to know about the opposition is that it’s insane, wrong, and won’t get anywhere. Which brings us back to the “Freedom Convoy.”
Virtually every news story that’s come out about the Canada protests has focused on bad behavior of individual protesters, or polls showing their supposed unpopularity, or news linking leaders to QAnon and vaccine skepticism and even Holocaust denial. Editors now routinely make sure that the word “Convoy” is surgically attached in headlines to delegitimizing rhetoric, as in the Independent’s “Freedom convoy’ pushed by QAnon” or NBC’s “As U.S. ‘trucker convoy’ picks up momentum, foreign meddling adds to fray.” My favorite is from my old employers at Rolling Stone: “A Porno-Metal Song About Gay Cowboys Is Disrupting the Anti-Vax Trucker Convoy.”
As for the protesters themselves, Vox just landed right back where Bernard Lewis was in 2004: “They are angry because they have lost.”
Let’s assume critics are right about everything: the protesters are a distinct minority, and unpopular, and maybe not even truckers mostly, and all far-right nuts whose brains have been scrambled by vaccine misinformation, and willingly led by QAnon figures and neo-Nazis, with the help of Russia and other “foreign threat actors.” I don’t think that portrait is right, but let’s say.
What would any of that change? Do people disappear once you’ve declared them illegitimate? Center-left leaders around the world seem more interested now in defending the principle of not listening than in the practical question of amping down tensions, a logistical problem that in this case needs to be solved somehow, sooner rather than later. A mass-covering of official ears while shouting “QAnon Holocaust Derp!” isn’t going to get it done, and sending in the military is pretty much guaranteed to work about as well as it did in the Middle East.
What’s happening in Canada and other countries seems less about specific demands than about the general principle of being listened to. Leaders like Trudeau could likely make this thing go away if they’d make even a slight gesture toward the idea that legitimate differences of opinion exist on questions like mandates, vaccine passports, surveillance tracking, lockdowns, the vaccination of children, and other matters. You don’t have to agree with people, just find a way to look at them without betraying your profound regret they were ever born. The longer this convoy phenomenon goes on, the clearer it becomes that none of the leaders involved knows how to do this. They’re not choosing to govern without listening. They just don’t know any other way.