Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks about the government's motion on a combat mission in Iraq in the House of Commons Friday, Oct. 3. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld This may be, paradoxically enough, Stephen Harper’s finest hour. The man who admires Lincoln, Churchill and Thatcher, at last has his opportunity to lead as he imagines they did, with unyielding conviction and no care to the political cost. Hanging in the balance are Harper’s fourth term, and his legacy.
For the Conservatives now have the ultimate differentiator between themselves and their opponents; an open-ended, aspirational foreign war in which they stand alone, guardians of all that is good and true, while the “wets” of the New Democratic and Liberal parties natter from the sidelines. Next year’s Tory election ads will surely offer clips of the speeches to occur Monday as the House of Commons debates the six-month deployment, which is to include up to 600 support personnel, up to six F-18 fighters, two Aurora surveillance planes and a refuelling plane. The PM’s speech will be charged with the gravitas he reserves uniquely for such occasions.
The wrinkle – the wild card that makes this a Hail Mary pass, in political terms – is that it all may go so very badly wrong. In effect Harper has relinquished a large measure of control over his political future to luck, and the U.S. air force, and the ability of Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites to first, cobble together a stable new polity in the midst of civil war, and second, defeat and/or contain Islamic State, in some way that is recognizable, before Canadians go to the polls next fall. A tall order, one would think.
Indeed, given the immediate recent histories of Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq itself, the chances of achieving anything that looks like victory, in the time allotted, have to be considered remote. The prime minister cannot promise there will be no Canadian casualties. He cannot promise there will be no friendly-fire incidents, or civilian deaths caused by Canadian bombs. He cannot promise there won’t be overwhelming pressure from allies to put in the Royal Canadian Regiment, Van Doos or Princess Pats, in six months or a year.
The PM told the House of Commons Friday – and there is no reason to disbelieve him – that he made the decision to deploy warplanes knowing that doing so is politically difficult, particularly in an election year. He also acknowledged, laudably in terms of simple frankness, what appears to be his main rationale. “If Canada wants to keep its voice in the world – and we should, since so many of our challenges are global – being a free rider means you are not taken seriously.”
Whether it be in the F-35 affair, or the Libyan campaign, or the Afghan war, or the international dialogue over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or the response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and encroachment in eastern Ukraine, or the defence of Israel, the Harper government’s foreign policy has consistently been informed by a desire for this country to be perceived as reliable by its allies. Canada, under Harper, is the friend who doesn’t “cut and run” under fire. That can be potent imagery, not only for the Conservative base, but also for swing voters horrified by IS barbarism.
Set against it is the clear evidence that this is not a six-month effort, or a war that bombing can win, or even one that a massive ground invasion backed by air power, on the scale of Gulf War one or two, can win – the evidence being that two such invasions and one aerial bombing campaign later, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, there is no peace and much chaos. Indeed the 2003 Iraq invasion, which president George W. Bush envisioned as the first step in a glorious flowering of democracy across the Arab world, is the direct genesis of this crisis.
Anthony Cordesman, a scholar at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, who stood out in the winter of 2002 for his warnings that the Iraq invasion could be disastrous, sounds similar notes now about the air campaign against IS.
“Even if the United States could solve the logistic and sustainment issues involved on a timely basis,” Cordesman wrote last week, “the United States cannot deploy its own major ground force combat units into the middle of a civil war. The rise of the Islamic State and the support it has gained from Iraq’s Sunnis is the result of the conflict between Arab Sunni and Arab Shiite that former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki provoked between 2010 and being pushed out of the position in 2014. Far too many Iraqis will now see any U.S. action as taking sides in their civil war, there are far too many hostile Shiite and Sunni militias, and far too many Iraqi politicians who will exploit the situation for their own benefit.”
Iraq is a hornet’s nest, in other words, into which this country is now thrusting itself, with no apparent strategy beyond shoring up alliances. Monday will be Stephen Harper’s “some chicken, some neck” moment. Conservative MPs will be hoping, as they watch the headlines between now and election day, that it’s not their swan song.
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