‘DE-ESCALATION’ WON’T DO

A revolution is underway that unites Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians and Iraqis

Long known as the city’s Champsélysées, Beirut’s Hamra Street and surrounding district has managed to survive Lebanon’s tumults over the years, anchored by universities, coffee shops, upscale condos, banks, fashionable shops and libraries. On Tuesday night, Hamra Street was a mayhem of screaming protesters, riot police, broken windows, ambulance sirens and tear gas.

Since last October, hundreds of thousands of protesters have been pouring through the streets of Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, Bekaa and Khaldeh in an uprising that has brought Lebanon’s corrupt, incompetent and Hezbollah-beholden government to its knees. During Tuesday night’s rampage, 59 people were arrested and the Red Cross reports at least 37 serious injuries.

In Iran, the protesters have been more disciplined, but their cause is the same. They want the overthrow of a corrupt, incompetent regime, an upending of the entire political system, or at the very least the toppling of the regime’s theocratic dictator, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and all his accomplices and acolytes.

Since last Saturday, when the government of Hassan Rouhani was forced to admit that his officials had been lying, and that it was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that had shot down Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752, killing all 176 passengers, an uprising that began last November has kicked back into gear with mass protests in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad, Kermanshah, Hamedan and other centres.

In Iraq, where an unprecedented wave of street demonstrations, strikes, marches and occupations broke out last October — at least 500 protesters slaughtered and 19,000 wounded — the scene was much the same. Long before U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the firing of a Hellfire missile from a Reaper drone circling Baghdad airport in order to eliminate Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s notorious terror chief, the pro-democracy uprising had already plunged Iraq into its worst crisis since the U.s.led overthrow of Saddam Hussein 17 years ago.

In Syria, meanwhile, the Khomeinist satrap Bashar Assad and the Russian air force continued their immolation of the towns and cities of Idlib this week. Idlib is the last governorate of Syria outside regime control, and its conquest is the bloody denouement to what began as a pro-democracy uprising in 2011. At least 300,000 Syrians have been rendered homeless in the past few weeks. The Syrian death toll now exceeds a half million people.

It is against this backdrop that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plaintive appeals for “de-escalation” in the region ring hollow. Trudeau deserves credit for refusing to be goaded into blaming Trump for the downing of Flight 752, which took the lives of 57 Canadians, although by his equivocations and banalities — “If there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families” — he’s come perilously close.

It’s the “escalation recently” that gives away Trudeau’s woeful unfamiliarity with the course of events across the Middle East over the past decade, a bloody “escalation” that did not begin with Trump. It is an “escalation” that has led to the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War and the bloodiest upheavals since the implosion of the Ottoman Empire that followed the First World War.

It is perhaps understandable that some of the candidates in the ongoing contest for the Democratic ticket in the November presidential elections might suggest such an outlandish scenario, pitting Trump as the arch-villain of the latest drama. And certainly no Canadian politician risks losing stature by saying an uncharitable thing about the impetuous, mercurial and vulgar American president.

But it should tell you something about the low standard of Canadian “debate” following Soleimani’s execution and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ subsequent missile-firing pandemonium that a kind of high-society benediction has been bestowed upon Mike Mccain, the chief executive of the Maple Leaf Foods conglomerate who is, incidentally, a key corporate opponent of Canada imposing Magnitsky sanctions against China’s worst human rights abusers. All Mccain had to do to win such favour was issue a Trump-bashing broadside that was objectively indistinguishable from the standpoint set out by Iran’s sleazy foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

There is a clear current that runs through all of these tumults, from Hamra Street in Beirut to the widespread revulsion among marching Iranians this week to the dismemberment and disembowelling of Syria to the assassination of the beloved Iraqi journalist Ahmad Abdelsamad and his cameraman, Safaa Ghali, in Basra last Friday.

There is a revolution going on. It has been underway in fits and starts for years. It unites Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians and Iraqis. Its object is the sundering of a bloody Khomeinist despotism that runs from the IRGC’S Quds Force in Tehran through the Assad regime in Damascus to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and the Hashd al-shaabi militias in Iraq, which have now insinuated themselves into every branch of the Iraqi state.

It’s all very well for Trudeau and the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron to want to force Tehran to get back in line with Barack Obama’s nuclear-rapprochement arrangement, which Trump has renounced. But the genie will not be put back in her bottle so easily.

It was Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that freed up the Quds Force to enforce its ghastly Khomeinist hegemony throughout the region in the first place, and now, Iran’s Hassan Rouhani is warning that it’s European soldiers in the region, not just American soldiers, that may soon find themselves on the Quds Force target list. Counselling a return to the JCPOA status quo ante is not a call to de-escalation. Don’t believe it.

It is profoundly ill-advised. It may suit the purposes of some Canadian and European firms that are scraping for a place for themselves in the Iranian economy, much of which is owned and controlled by the IRGC. But it would be a profound betrayal of the people of Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Iraq, who have already known little but betrayal from six successive Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States, and from the “West” generally, Canada included.

For Canadians, extending the Quds Force sanctions to take in the entire IRGC complex would be a more principled, useful course of action.

But that would mean taking sides for once on behalf of the liberal-democratic values Canadians like to boast that we champion. And there’s not much evidence that the Trudeau government — despite a July 2018 House of Commons motion advocating that we do just that, in a vote that carried 248-45 — has any interest in doing so.