Liberal cognitive dissonance
Just what do liberals think U.S. President Barack Obama should be doing in Syria and Iraq? For three years, Obama resolutely resisted pressure to arm moderate rebel forces in Syria. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former defence secretary Leon Panetta both say they supported arming the rebels sooner, as did Gen. Martin Dempsey and Gen. David Petraeus, who headed the joint chiefs of staff and the CIA at the time.
Clinton has even suggested the “failure” to adequately aid rebel groups fighting in Syria helped give rise to ISIS.
Obama ridiculed that view until this month, when he finally authorized arms and training for rebels in Syria, along with air strikes in Syria and Iraq. On Wednesday, he gave a stem-winding address to the UN on the essential need to do so, as if his previous opposition to the idea had never existed.
“Those who have joined ISIL should leave the battlefield while they can,” said Obama. “We will neither tolerate terrorist safe-havens, nor act as an occupying power. We will take action against threats to our security, and our allies, while building an architecture of counterterrorism co-operation.”
Perhaps, as former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty was fond of saying, “It’s never too late to do the right thing.” But was it wrong to hold off on arming the rebels before, and right to do so now?
The New York Times’ editorialists doesn’t think so. The voice of liberal America recently argued that the President is still wrong to strike at ISIS without Congressional approval: “The White House claims that Mr. Obama has all the authority he needs under the 2001 law approving the use of force in Afghanistan and the 2002 law permitting the use of force in Iraq, but he does not. He has given Congress notification of the military action in Iraq and Syria under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, but that is not a substitute for congressional authorization.”
At the same time, however, it notes that approval was unlikely, if only because Congress — which thanks to Republican opposition has devoted itself over the past two years to obstructing any and all of Obama’s initiatives — is more interested in the mid-term elections: “Congress has utterly failed in its constitutional responsibilities.… It has left Washington and gone into campaign fundraising mode, shamelessly ducking a vote on this critical issue.”
According to this analysis, the President should have sought the approval he was unlikely to receive, or wait six months or so until a new Congress could get around to considering the matter. How many heads would have been lopped off in the interim? That evidently doesn’t matter, as long as the proper procedure was observed.
Obama’s initial reluctance to carry out the campaign about which he is now so enthused, derived partly from his own determination to stay out of foreign entanglements, and partly, one suspects, from the fact Americans were war-weary and sympathetic to his hesitation. But opinion has shifted, for now. ISIS’s policy of releasing videos of its victims as their heads are severed has upset and angered enough Americans that they now feel it’s necessary for the White House to “do something.”
So the President has shifted with the wind. But what happens when public opinion shifts back, as it easily could if the air campaign now underway lasts too long, or broadens into a larger war or provokes the sort of unforeseen repercussions that turned George W. Bush’s war in Iraq into an international calamity?
Liberals — or “progressives,” as they like to style themselves these days — seem uncertain. They want to support Obama, while attacking Conservatives for supporting him, too. As the Post’s John Ivison noted last week, former prime minister Jean Chrétien seized the opportunity of Canada’s latest engagement in Iraq to congratulate himself on staying out of Bush’s war, while warning darkly that Ottawa was going down a slippery slope by aiding Obama now.
“You have only to [look at] the way the Americans got involved in Vietnam. They started with a few advisers,” Chrétien said.
At the same time, the even-more progressive NDP was lashing the Lib- erals for blindly marching off to war with the Tories, while using the same “slippery slope” analogy employed by Mr. Chrétien.
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair says the Conservatives have not provided enough details about the mission. The Liberals demanded a debate, but when it was held, Justin Trudeau didn’t show up (nor did Harper). Trudeau is against ISIS, but unclear on just what that means. He says the U.S. air attack constitutes a “combat mission” and Canadians want no part of that. But he also says that sending fighter jets is “something we could certainly talk about.” So he’s got both sides of the fence covered on that one.
Canadians don’t seem to care much about what Trudeau says, or how many times he avoids the issues. They like him anyway. But the words of prime ministers do matter, as they have to make decisions and take actions, rather than equivocate. So what would Mulcair or Trudeau do if they were prime minister? We don’t know. All we do know is that whatever Harper does, in their opinion, is wrong. That’s their position, and they’re sticking to it.
The fact that Harper, Obama and Trudeau generally agree on taking out ISIS is making progressives’ heads explode