Prime Minister Stephen Harper responds to a question during Question Period in the House of Commons, Wednesday, Oct.1 in Ottawa. The Harper government has been unusually punctilious this week in fielding questions about the looming Iraq mission. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick It is true, of course, that the opposition parties are playing silly buggers when it comes to Canada’s imminent participation in the international air war against Islamic State. In this instance, under these circumstances, they’re right to do so. They have an obligation, even, to do so.
The reasons are trust, or the lack thereof, and the enormous import of what is being proposed. “They’re evil butchers, we’ve got this, let’s go,” is not a war plan. And the Harper government, which has been unusually punctilious this week in fielding questions about the looming mission, is late to the game of earnest disclosure.
There is little need at this stage for further elaborations on the barbaric nature of the “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, though we are certain to hear many. The Islamic State is comprised of deviants who kidnap innocents and cut off their heads, as we have seen; they murder, summarily execute, butcher and maim; they rape. They enslave. They recruit and convert at the point of a gun or a blade. They rob, pillage, loot and destroy.
All these crimes are laid out in exhaustive and harrowing detail in a report issued this week by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. There really is no arguing this point. Left unchecked, with the Arab Spring a smouldering ruin, there is no telling what horrors the IS may perpetrate.
But that doesn’t mean any Canadian, and certainly not the opposition parties whose job it is to hold the government to account, can be faulted for being skeptical about this country going back to war.
There is no recent track record of success, in Ottawa, for either the skillful handling of foreign military engagements, or loyalty to the people doing the engaging. On the contrary, Liberal governments in the 1990s and now the Harper government have used the Canadian Forces’ budget as a giant line of credit, to be drawn on as needed, as I have written previously.
Some 40,000 Canadians served in Afghanistan, beginning in 2002. Rather than shower returning soldiers with honours and benefits, leaving no stone unturned, the government closed veterans’ centres. Though efforts are being made within the military to address the problems of the wounded, including those with psychological wounds, the response has been inadequate, as the tragic record of suicides shows.
Soldiers who went to Afghanistan were told they were engaged in a noble effort, to combat global terrorism and help the Afghan people. Skeptics scoffed but many soldiers took that message to heart. Yet today, the Afghan Islamist insurgency is not defeated, nor is there any peace there. According to Graeme Smith, a former colleague now based in Kabul as an analyst for the International Crisis Group, the security situation is tenuous, at best.
The 2011 Libyan air campaign, to which Canada contributed, was heralded as vital to international peace and security, and led to the toppling of the Gadhafi regime. Currently, Postmedia’s David Pugliese recently reported, Libya is a patchwork of warring factions – and some of the same people who fought to topple Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, thus benefiting from Canada’s actions then, are now fighting for Islamic State.
It’s fair to say that the Liberal party was hypocritical in the way in which it broadened the Afghan mission in late 2005, then began playing politics with it as soon as the Tories took office. The shift in the Liberal position on Iraq since the initial Commons debate two weeks ago, which was essentially supportive, and the present day, which is essentially against, has been remarkable.
It’s also fair to say that the New Democrats, because of the party’s reflexive opposition to almost any military action, doesn’t have much credibility on this file. Some of the questions being repeated daily in the House of Commons by Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair – how dare there be 26 special forces soldiers on the ground one day, when there were 69 the day before, and the like – are granular to the point of sounding silly.
But the fact remains that two strands of history support the need for rigorous questioning — about the risks to Canadian military personnel, the estimated long-term costs, the coalition’s strategic objectives, measures of success, and an exit strategy. Afghanistan and Libya comprise the first strand. The second is the Harper government’s execrable record of insularity, epitomized by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to reveal new details about this pending engagement in New York before doing so at home, and the government’s hyper-partisan, petty handling of questions about the Iraq engagement, until four days ago.
The Conservatives should expect, given what has gone before, that Canadians will be skeptical of joining another high-minded, unfocused international effort to stop Islamist extremism in its tracks. And they should come prepared to answer every conceivable question and address every conceivable concern, no matter how picayune those interrogations may seem. They will have to sell this mission. It will not sell itself, as the Afghan effort did in the early days.
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