Canada still a ‘refuge from militarism’?

Canada still a ‘refuge from militarism’?
by Mark Nykanen

NELSON, B.C. — Just two months before ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff and his Canadian cameraman, Doug Voigt, were seriously injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Woodruff stood on the set of the ABC Evening News and introduced a report about war resisters in Nelson, B.C. The picturesque mountain town, where actors Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah cavorted in the film “Roxanne,” has become the center for U.S. war resisters planning the first-ever gathering of Vietnam era draft dodgers and U.S. military deserters. It is scheduled for July.

In his introduction, Woodruff noted that during the Vietnam War 125,000 Americans fled to Canada, “the largest modern political out-migration from the United States,” according to Northwestern University professor, John Hagen, featured in the report itself.

Woodruff also noted that decades later thousands of those war resisters still make their homes north of the border, many in the Kootenay Mountains.

The reunion weekend organizer, former Seattleite Isaac Romano, says a new generation of U.S. military deserters will be welcomed at the July event. “We feel it’s essential to lend them a helping hand because…

they are a model of non-violence at a time that cries out for non-violent solutions to conflict.”

Since the invasion of Iraq, it is estimated that more than 100 active duty U.S. service personnel have fled to Canada. Some have made headlines here for decrying the widespread killing of civilians that has taken place in the war, where all Americans, including journalists such as Woodruff, have become targets.

Woodruff’s colleagues say that in the days before he suffered serious head wounds, for which he remains hospitalized, he witnessed the Iraq war firsthand. When the roadside bomb exploded, he was, in fact, “on the scene” in the back of an Iraqi armored vehicle. He was shooting a “stand-up,” which in television parlance refers to video of the correspondent, this time with an eight vehicle convoy of mostly U.S. armored Humvees trailing behind him.

Like most journalists, Woodruff expected to report the story, not to become a grisly headline.

That he has become such a subject of news coverage, while most servicemen and women have suffered in anonymity, says little that is laudatory about the way the war has been covered. To date, almost 17,000 U.S. military personnel have been wounded, but “wounded” conveys little of the horror young men and women have sustained fighting this war. While only one in 10 wounded soldiers has died — compared with about one in four in Vietnam and one in three in Word War II — the severity of the wounds in Iraq is often shocking.

As many as 20 percent of the wounded have, like Woodruff, suffered head and neck injuries. That may include irreversible brain damage. Many others endure more than one injury. The combinations are gruesome: a severed spinal cord with arm, leg or facial fractures, blindness with loss of hearing, breathing and eating impairments.

The savagery of multiple wounds, and the severe emotional disorders that accompany them, have forced the Veterans Administration to open what it calls the Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center in Tampa.

There has been even less attention given to the tens of thousands of Iraqi women and children now estimated to have been killed in this war. The number of war victims may be much higher. The respected John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health places the number of Iraqi dead at 100,000, and the results of that study were released 16 months ago. In recent weeks, the killing appears to be accelerating as Iraq teeters on the edge of civil war.

Is it any wonder that about half the Iraqis polled support attacks against Americans on their soil?

It’s clear that the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people have been lost, as the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese were lost to an earlier generation of U.S. war planners.

In Nelson, the pretty town featured in the report Woodruff introduced, plans proceed apace for the reunion weekend with former South Dakota Sen. George McGovern recently agreeing to provide the keynote address.

Meantime, new war resisters continue to flee to Canada. Some are living underground, and some are seeking official protection from a Canadian government that does not appear willing, at this time, to adopt the position of former premier, Pierre Trudeau, who more than 30 years ago said, “Those who make the conscientious judgment that they must not participate in this war … have my complete sympathy, and indeed our political approach has been to give them access to Canada. Canada should be a refuge from militarism.”

Organizer Romano says major news organizations, including ABC News, have assured him that they’ll be arriving in July to report on the event. Sad to say, the journalist mostly likely to be missing from the coverage will be the most famous casualty of the United States’ latest war: Bob Woodruff.

Mark Nykanen is a four-time Emmy award-winning journalist and author of three novels.

To go to original article: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/262419_resist10.html