Mass casualties are nothing new in our world

‘ We’re not making things better with planes and bombs’

Actions have consequences: what a concept. Last Wednesday, Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson wrote a straightforward column about the situation in Libya. But while what Simpson said about Libya was bang-on, it could just as easily be applied to pretty much all of Canada’s recent bomb- drop diplomacy.

And here’s a bit of the column: “All that malarkey about democracy. All that guff about an orderly transition to a post-Gadhafi Libya. All that nonsense from ( Foreign Affairs Minister John) Baird and so many others, including Canada’s opposition parties that twice acquiesced in parliamentary resolutions to extend the bombing missions without anyone asking questions: Okay, what next?

“What began as a humanitarian mission to protect civilians with bombs against the regime morphed, as it had to morph, into a full- scale campaign for regime change, which is what we got all right, except that there is no regime.” Another snippet: “Less than four years later, Libya is a violent, scary, utterly failed state whose chaos has invited in supporters of the Islamic State.”

Something that Simpson did not mention?

Well, that our government seems completely incapable of learning from its mistakes, as we drop bombs all over again and figure — somehow — that blowing things up will somehow de- radicalize an entire region. It won’t, it hasn’t and it never has.

Vietnam, anyone? Tonnes of ordnance killed many Vietnamese, but did little to damage their resolve.

Just imagine for a moment that the shoe was on the other foot, that a foreign nation, frightened by the direction our nation was taking, dropped bombs on our capital, on our military and, in the process, on our parents and children as occasional and unavoidable collateral damage.

What do you think Canadians would think of that foreign nation? Would we be delighted they had dropped tons of democracy on us? Or would we develop a deep and abiding hatred for an airborne invader whose actions had killed family members? I think you know which one it would be.

We are going into a federal election where one of the main issues is almost certain to be the need to fight terrorism. (Once upon a time, it might have been the economy, but, well, the economy’s not doing so well right now.)

ISIL is a handy foe; people are legitimately horrified by their particular style of video warfare. ( Beheadings, rape as a weapon of war, the killing of children and the execution of prisoners, by the way, are hardly the sole preserve of ISIL. They just broadcast it better. Congo? Five million dead, a country labelled “the rape capital of the world” by the United Nations — 45,000 deaths a month in 2008, half of them children under five — but no bomb diplomacy solutions from the outside world.)

We’re fighting ISIL because, frankly, we’re scared of them. Congo isn’t scary enough. But we’re not making things better with planes and bombs: we’re just digging a deeper hole (or crater) for the future.

Don’t forget Prime Minister Stephen Harper quoting German physicist and satirist Georg C. Lichtenberg while the bombing missions were ongoing in Libya: “A handful of soldiers is better than a mouthful of arguments.”

Our government can — and will — argue that this latest war is a war that must be fought. But the argument that it necessarily makes anything better for anyone?

History is likely to have a harsher view.