"The Forgotten: Lieutenant General E.L.M. "Tommy" Burns and UN Peacekeeping in the Middle East" Canadian Army Journal Summer 2006   Abstract: The ongoing Canada and UN peacekeeping debate spiked again in 2005-06 with the deployment of Canadian combat troops back to Afghanistan. As usual, the Canadian cultural elite lost its long-term memory and whined on and on about how Canada was a "peacekeeping" nation and that Lester B. Pearson invented it. I'd gotten into enough cafe and seminar skirmishes with people who hadn't read Canada and UN Peacekeeping: Cold War by Other Means 1945-70 and the exchanges with DFAIT people stubbornly defending their hero seriously increased. Consequently, I went back down to New York, plunged back into the UN archive, and wrote this piece. Yes, a Canadian was part of the creation of UN peacekeeping in the Middle East, but it wasn't Lester B. Pearson.... |
