4 ~ Sunday, February 3, 1991 - North Shore News

Sadi

am isn’

the only liar

SINCE THE war began in
Iraq, Brian Mulroney’s rat-
ings in the polls have un-
doubtedly risen.

I'm not privy to the latest
Decima Research findings com-
missioned by the Tories to track
public opinion about the war, but
one such poll after the first Scud
attack on Israel — before news of
the giant oil spill broke — put
support among Canadians for the
war effort at 70 per cent.

After the oil snilt, I'm sure
public support for the war option
took another surge upward. All
this must be good news for our
beleaguered prime minister.

Before the war erupted, he was
running at an historically low ap-
proval rating of 12 per cent. More
people believed that Elvis was
alive than believed Mulroney was
doing a good job.

No one conducts polls in Iraq,
but even if reports are true that
Saddam Hussein is loathed by the
oppressed masses of Iraqis, he
couldn’t be that much more
loathed than our boy Brian.

And while Saddam has brought
a war down on the heads of his
people, Mulroney has been doing
not a bad job of bringing a
depression, bankruptcies, upris-
ings and political disintegration
down on our heads.

Public opinion is a fickle thing,
and one must beware, especially in
the media, of going along with it.

Back when Pierre Trudeau im-
posed the War Measures Act on
all Canadians in order to ‘‘ap-
prehend an insurrection’ by what
proved to be a handful of crazies
in Quebec, public opinion was
overwhelmingly in favor of the
tough-guy approach.

it was only years after the dust
had settled that we learned how
the Trudeau regime had lied in
order to manipulate public opi-
nion.

And it wasn’t until fully a de-
cade later that the University of
Western Ontario got around to
studying the way Canada’s news-
papers had responded to
Trudeau’s Hes and the civil war
hysteria they generated.

There were only three colum-
nists in the entire English-speaking

Bob
Hunier

STRICTLY PERSONAL _

country who opposed the use of
the War Measures Act at that
time, under those conditions. “
Writing then in The Vancouver
Sun, I was one of them.

What this means is that the rest
of my journalistic colleagues fell
for the exaggerations, distortions
and misinformation about the
FLQ crisis coming out of Ottawa.

I trust, as almost every editori-
alist and columnist gets in lock
step with the special task force
organizing the Tory media cam-

. paign from the Privy Council Of-

fice, that they wil! pause to con-
sider how foolish they are likely to
look a few years down the road,
when the full story uf the
disastrous series of decisions that
led to the war in fraq finally
comes out.

The fact is they are being conn-
ed into jingoistic flag-waving
bloody-mindedness one more
time.

This would be tough-enough to
say were we merely dealing with a
sadistic monster who tortures
people, poisons women and
children, and unleashes suffering
on entire nations.

But this is also a modern
monster who thinks nothing of
contaminating and destroying an
entire marine eco-system, and may
yet trigger petroleum fires on a
scale never before seen, with in-
calcuable environmental side-ef-
fects.

Thanks to Saddam, the term
**ecocide’’ has been added to the

repertoire of contemporary milita-
rism. I suppose it has always been
around in the form of scorched-
earth policies, but never including
scorched sea and scorched sky as
well.

I must confess that news of the
1.7-billion litre off spill in the Gulf
caused my gut to tighten in anger
in a way that nothing that had
transpired until then had caused it
to do.

The attack on Israel, rather
than being as horrifying as we all
expected, turned out to be a con-
siderable relief: at least nukes or
chemical weapons hadn’t been us-
ed. Not yet anyway. And com-
pared with the destruction of such
places as Beirut and Phnom Penh,
this was relatively lightweight
stuff.

We still do not know how this
war is going to come out. I, for
one, have trouble believing any-
thing uttered by the military.
These aren’t nice guys. To them,
media are simply propaganda
vehicles.

If anything distinguishes this
war, apart from the use of
ecological destruction as an offen-
sive weapon, it is the extent to
which the PR arm of Desert
Shield has controlled the agenda
of coverage.

And if it isn’t the Allies keeping
the body counts out of the news,
it is the lraqis themselves trying,
however clumsily, to use Cable
News Network, for instance, as a
conduit for the kind of flack that
guns can’t deliver.

In other words, they’re all in it
together — [raqi propagandists,
Pentagon spin docters,
Republican speechwriters, Tory
pollsters — trying their best to
rinse our brains.

There is damned little any of us
can do about Iraq at this stage.
But I do think we all owe it to
ourselves to at least take
everything we are tald about the
war with a healthy sprinkling of
salt.

Saddam is bad, maybe even
evil. But there are a fot of other
bad actors around, and they are
no less averse to lying their faces
off if need be.

Even Mulroney, believe it or
not.

W. Van Police inspector retires

A WEST Vancouver Police inspector retired in January
after a long career with the local police department.

Insp. Gten Mackenzie
started in 1963.

Insp. Glen Mackenzie joined
the force in March 1963 as a night
clerk.

He said he was originally drawn
to law enforcement because he
‘thad a strong idea of what’s right
and wrong.’"

Added Mackenzie, ‘“‘The flaw
was right and I wanted to help
society be a peaceful place and I
wanted to help people.”’

And he believes that his ambi-
tions have been fulfilled.

“I chink what I liked about the
West Vancouver Police is that
they are what I would call a
community-oriented police
department. If a citizen had a
complaint, we tried to deal with

[IT’S A MATTER OF
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it. We weren’t strictly dealing with
a legalistic outlook on things. We
tried to do that in the past, and
we're still trying to do that,’ he
said.

When the retired inspector join-
ed the police department, there
were !! uniformed members and
two civilians responsible for polic-
ing West Vancouver. The force
now numbers 26 civilians and 74
uniformed members,

Mackenzie, who investigated
most of the serious criminal cases
that occurred in the community
during his time as a police officer,
will take time off to enjoy the rel-
ative peace of family, including
his grandchild.

It’s you who counts the most

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