Harper goes to war and puts Trudeau in a pickle
Conservatives gain as Liberals are divided on Syria bombing mission
Back in 2002, when George W. Bush was thinking about invading Iraq, his secretary of state, Colin Powell, warned the hawks around the table about the possible consequences, coming up with the Pottery Barn Rule: if you break it, you buy it.
“You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people,” Powell warned. “You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You’ll own it all.”
Bush’s hawks thought Iraqis would welcome their American liberators, and that a democratic Iraq would be such a powerful example that Iranians would soon be clamouring for a similar government.
It hasn’t worked out that way. As many as one million Iraqis have died and the Iranian mullahs are stronger than ever. The Washington Post reported this week that Firdaus Square, where Iraqis pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003, now features a billboard of the late Ayatollah Khomeini.
U.S. President Barack Obama has been forced to back Iraniansupported militias to bring order to what remains of the country and to fight ISIL.
“We’re in a goddamn free fall here,” James Jeffrey, Obama’s former ambassador to Iraq, said this week.
As Powell predicted, the Americans own Iraq’s problems, and have no choice but to put together an international coalition to fight ISIL.
For the past six months, Canada has been a small part of the fight. Our six CF-18s have made 53 of the coalition’s 1,631 airstrikes. On the ground, 70 Canadian special forces troops have been training Iraqi fighters and helping guide Canadian airstrikes.
The government says our soldiers are not on a combat mission, but three times they have exchanged bullets with ISIL, and on March 6, Sgt. Andrew Joseph Doiron of Moncton, N.B., was killed by friendly fire.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper introduced a motion Tuesday in Parliament to extend the mission for a year, and, for the first time, launch airstrikes against ISIL in Syria.
Polls show that a majority of Canadians support this. We are horrified by the masked killers in the desert, afraid they may attack us, and want to fight them.
This is helping Harper, in part because it is difficult for the Liberals.
It’s natural for the traditionally pacifistic NDP to oppose the mission, but the Liberals could have gone either way. In opposing the war, they seem out of step with voters, and party elders have chided Justin Trudeau.
This is good for Harper, both because voters who oppose the ISIL mission will divide their support between the two opposition parties, and because the Liberals are divided.
Until this week, it looked like Trudeau might listen to those who think he erred, and find a way to support the mission that he opposed six months ago.
By announcing that Canadian warplanes will now bomb ISIL in Syria, Harper made it easier for Trudeau to stick to his guns, since the Liberal leader was able to argue that the airstrikes will help homicidal Syrian leader Bashar Assad.
That may be why Canada is now going to Syria: not because the Americans need our six CF-18s there, but because Harper was afraid the Liberals might otherwise support the mission.
Harper did nothing to convince us there are more meaningful reasons when he joked about the legal justification for the mission, and Defence Minister Jason Kenney, when asked for an operational reason, falsely said that only Canada has the right kind of bombs for the job.
This looks like good politics for the Tories, but it is a departure from the Canadian tradition in the Persian Gulf, where we have rarely been at the pointy end of the spear.
The Americans have been engaged in vicious Middle Eastern power games since 1953, when they organized the coup that put the Shah of Iran in power. To protect their oil imports and hold off various strategic threats, they have been scheming and fighting in the area ever since.
Sleepy Canada has never seen the need to be at the forefront of those fights, enjoying the benefits of Pax Americana without shedding much blood or spending much treasure.
We broke nothing and bought nothing, and made our mark through diplomacy. In 1956, Lester Pearson invented peacekeeping, helping end the Suez Crisis. In 1979, Ken Taylor snuck eight Americans out of Tehran under the Ayatollah’s nose.
Harper has taken us in a more warlike direction, and done what he can to turn away from our peacemaking tradition. In 2012, he closed our embassy in Tehran, and in 2013 he shut the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre.
He is wagering that Canadians want to bomb Syria, that Canadians will rally behind him on election day.
Whatever the polls say today, it’s too soon to be sure that he’s right. As Bush could tell him, some wars poll better in the beginning than at the end.
Harper has taken us in a more warlike direction, and done what he can to turn away from our peacemaking tradition. In 2012, he closed our embassy in Tehran, and in 2013 he shut the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre. Stephen Maher