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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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