Not Saluting Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin, the Globe and Mail's moral conscience and oracle of humanism, has published a neat little rant on the new American strategy in Iraq. While to take up all of Salutin's article would take more time than I can allow for such an inconsequential article, I will take him to task on two points: 1) He criticizes Lgen David Petraeus for not having served in Vietnam, by implying that his PhD dissertation on the subject was "unimpeded by the lessons of real experience." 2) Without so much as a feeble justification, he says that the Canadian involvement in Afghanistan is analogous to the American experience in Iraq.

I will deal with the second point first. On the phenomenological level, the two interventions seem very similar... America and allies topple a middle-eastern government, move in troops (invade, to the critic) and attempt to establish-impose order while supporting an indigenous government that adopts some liberalizing elements and is loosely (tightly?) aligned with the United States. Unfortunately, the comparison ends there. Any deeper analysis reveals fundamental political differences between the two situations. Eg.: The Afghan government that was toppled in 2001 was never recognized by the international community as the legimate government of Afghanistan, Iraq's government was, etc...

It's rather rich that Rick Salutin can flippantly dismiss Lgen Petraeus' PhD dissertation by asserting that it "was unimpeded by the lessons of real experience."

In saying such a thing, the critic gives himself licence to suggest that PhD dissertations must be based on having directly lived through the phenomenon under study. In this case, I would suggest that this methodological requirement would disqualify approximately 98% of PhD dissertations in the humanities.

The critic subtly suggests the infamy of "draft-dodging" by pointing out that Lgen Petraeus never served in Vietnam. In doing so, he has fallen into the mould of the American political culture, perhaps an unconscious reflection of his years studying in the United States during the Vietnam war, which has used Vietnam as a litmus test for character (recall the perpetual critiques of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for having somehow not served in Vietnam, like over 90% of the American population).

The critic's sly attack on the credibility of Lgen Petraeus' graduate studies is all the more self-damning given Salutin's status as public intellectual. A reading of the critic's biography (playwrite, author and columnist) reveals a great deal of what I would qualify as intelligent creativity, "unimpeded by the lessons of real experience."

To mix a cocktail of apt aphorisms: Let he who lives in a glass spire atop a shiny ivory tower, and is without sin, be careful when casting the first stone.