SANLIURFA, TURKEY - OCTOBER 01: A woman holds a child after crossing the border from Syria into Turkey in this file photo. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images) So we are agreed. ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, call them what you will, is a genocidal menace; a metastasizing cancer rapidly spreading across much of the Middle East; a terrorist proto-state with the resources and the capacity to wage open-field war, to take and hold territory, and to project influence beyond it; a threat to neighbouring populations, to the stability of the region, and, through the jihadists it attracts and sends abroad, to countries half a world away — including, by its own declared intent, our own. No one seriously disputes any of this.
So we are all agreed. Now: What are we going to do about it? As of today we know. The Conservative government will send six fighter jets, two surveillance craft and a refuelling plane, to supplement the 69 special forces personnel it has already committed, whose operations will be restricted to those countries that have expressly permitted them to enter, namely Iraq, and whose mission will be limited to six months. That is as much as the government dares. It is probably as much as we are capable of.
And the NDP? And the Liberals? Nothing. Or to be more precise, nothing. No, I’m sorry, it’s true. Humanitarian aid, refugee tents, blankets, even the NDP leader’s call to help “the people of Iraq and Syria to build the political, institutional and security capabilities they need to oppose these threats themselves” — these are all perfectly lovely things. They will no doubt prove helpful in addressing other problems, or in the long run. But they are of no use whatever in addressing the immediate objective, which is to stop the spread of Islamic State, and the slaughter that inevitably follows.
The prime minister’s statement in the House of Commons was notably clear on this point. He did not promise that the international air campaign in which Canada will participate would eradicate or even defeat Islamic State. There will be no surrender ceremony, no victory parades. The objective for the moment is simply containment — as the prime minister put it, “to significantly degrade the capabilities of ISIL … to either engage in military movements of scale, or to operate bases in the open … (to) halt ISIL’s spread in the region and greatly reduce its capacity to launch terrorist attacks outside the region.”
Nothing in this prevents us from also providing humanitarian assistance, taking in refugees, or helping in other ways. So the question is not, why is the government choosing a combat role over a humanitarian one? It is: Why does the opposition rule out any combat role, even so carefully circumscribed a one as the prime minister has proposed?
We know why the NDP is opposed. It has consistently opposed any Canadian participation in any military action since the Second World War. Tom Mulcair’s speech to the Commons was a feast of red herrings, irrelevant historical anecdotes and pointed mentions of “the U.S.,” but what it boiled down to was: We say this is war and we say the hell with it.
But the Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, has taken a rather different position — or rather positions. When the idea of an international military campaign against Islamic State was first proposed last month, he spoke in favour of Canadian participation; now he is against it, having spent the intervening weeks saying he was undecided. Fair enough. Positions evolve. Only he still is not opposed to military intervention in principle: only to Canada taking part in it. And he has not begun to explain why.
There are any number of reasons one might question the wisdom of military intervention, at least as currently envisaged. Perhaps you doubt the efficacy of air strikes — though they are intended mostly to buy time until ground forces can be assembled from within the region, and though they have already succeeded in keeping Islamic State from taking, for example, the Mosul dam. Maybe you worry it will simply encourage more jihadis to enlist — though nothing has proven more potent recruiting material for Islamic State and other such groups than the promise of victory.
Likewise there are valid questions to be asked about the risks of indirectly propping up the vicious Bashar Assad regime in Syria, the costs in civilian lives, the dangers of being sucked into still deeper interventions, and so on. Maybe all of the governments from all of the countries that have agreed to take part in the mission, and all of the political parties, of every ideological hue, that have supported it, have it wrong. Maybe they and all of their military advisers have failed to take into account objections that seem so obvious to posters on Twitter. Maybe there is some other way of stopping Islamic State’s advance that no one has yet proposed.
But that is not the position the Liberal leader is taking. Go ahead and put your own forces at risk, is his message to our allies. We’ll be over here making coffee.
The closest he has come to justifying this utterly discreditable position is to suggest that in fact, the best contribution we could make to the fight was to stay out of it: that a strictly non-combat role was, as it were, our comparative advantage. I cannot imagine our allies are likely to see it that way. When it comes to sharing the burden of military intervention, the sacrifice that counts lies in the willingness to take casualties. As the prime minister put it, “being a free rider means you are not taken seriously.”
This is not the position that previous Liberal leaders have taken. I’m happy to debate the Iraq war again, and Jean Chretien’s decision at that time, but the situations are not remotely comparable — which is why so many critics of the 2003 campaign, France among them, are on board for this one. And in any case, Chretien did put our troops into Afghanistan: far more of them, and at far greater risk. If the Liberal party cannot support this Canadian mission — small in scale, time-limited, in concert with the international community and at the invitation of the sovereign state in question — what mission would it ever support?
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