Today ISIL, tomorrow a new threat, says Andrew Coyne
Our politicians won’t acknowledge the mission could last decades
The demand for exit strategies and the like presumes a conflict that is tidy, time-limited and confined to a single, identifiable foe. We come, we see, we conquer, we go home. Andrew Coyne The unpleasant likelihood is rather of a shifting, open-ended conflict, engaging different Islamic extremist groups at different times and in different places, probably for decades.
The one surefire, rock-solid, money-back guaranteed way to trigger applause at any gathering of Liberals is to recall the time “Prime Minister Chrétien kept us out of the Iraq war.” It is unclear why this should produce such a reflexive outpouring of Liberal self-congratulation (except insofar as most things do). Instead of being sent to fight and die in Iraq, our soldiers were sent to fight and die in Afghanistan, which proved to be every bit as dangerous a place.
And Jean Chrétien’s decision was hardly the principled stance it was made out to be. Indeed, as the National Post’s Chris Wattie reported some months later, Canada offered to send a battle group of up to 800 soldiers to Iraq — only for the prime minister to change course at the last minute, and reroute them to Afghanistan. Liberals don’t tend to recall that as often.
In all that time, from 2001, when the Afghanistan deployment began, through the two-step over Iraq in 2003, Chrétien never once involved Parliament in these decisions: whether to go to war, or where, or in what numbers. But that, too, has been dropped down the memory hole, as the Liberals, together with the NDP, now demand, not only that any combat role for Canada in the current campaign in Iraq be put to a vote of MPs — which the government has promised to hold — but that virtually every detail of the government’s deliberations be made public.
Of course, just because this is hypocritical doesn’t make it wrong. As a matter of law, the government is under no obligation to obtain legislative approval for any military engagement — not even, as American presidents must, when war is declared. Under our system, as the constitutional scholar Philippe Lagasse reminds us, the power to wage war is part of the Crown prerogative, which is to say executive authority. When Parliament votes confidence in a government, that is one of the things it empowers the government to do. If it does not like how it exercises that power, it always has the option of withholding confidence.
But what is lawful and what is wise are not always the same. The decision to put soldiers into battle is a momentous one, and though there may be circumstances when time and operational security preclude it, it will more often be advisable to at least consult with Parliament — for military reasons, as much as democratic. Democracies, as it has been said, are slow to anger, but formidable once resolved to fight. But that resolve depends upon consent. Soldiers need to know, when they are putting their lives on the line, that the country has their back.
The larger and more dangerous the deployment, then, and the deeper the commitment required of the nation, the higher the level of consensus it would seem proper to obtain. At the one extreme, in an existential fight such as Britain faced in the Second World War or the massive national effort Canada undertook in the First World War, it might go so far as formal coalitions, “governments of national unity” and the like. At the other, say a routine peacekeeping mission, keeping Parliament abreast should suffice. Somewhere in between you might find closed-door briefings to allparty committees, all the way up to formal votes of Parliament.
Where are we in the present conflict, in which Canada has been asked to contribute to a multilateral mission against (as it calls itself ) the Islamic State? That’s the problem. From what we know, we have to date committed at most 69 special ops “advisers” — we are told just 26 are actually on the ground — with the possible addition, should Parliament agree, of half a dozen fighter jets. But there has been so much secrecy and obfuscation around the whole thing from the start, from a government much given to both in any event, that the opposition is understandably disinclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Still, the level of commitment asked of us to date is, on any historic scale, trivial. (The initial Afghanistan deployment, by way of comparison, involved 1,200 troops.) To be sure, it is always possible that it might expand at some later date, but to suggest, as some critics do, that it must inevitably do so is nonsense. Certainly the government shows no appetite for any such adventurism, with all of the political risks entailed; neither, to be blunt, do we have the capacity.
At the same time, many of the questions to which the opposition are demanding answers, as reasonable as they sound at first blush — how long will our troops be there? what’s our exit strategy? how much will all this cost? etc. — have no ready answer. That’s partly because the whole mission, and Canada’s part in it, is very much still being put together. But it’s also the nature of the conflict. As much as the opposition are inclined to overstate the risks in the short term, they are also understating the broader challenge we — the West, the democracies, modernity — face in the long term. The demand for exit strategies and the like presumes a conflict that is tidy, time-limited and confined to a single, identifiable foe. We come, we see, we conquer, we go home.
But that is not what is in front of us. The unpleasant likelihood is rather of a shifting, open-ended conflict, engaging different Islamic extremist groups at different times and in different places, probably for decades: a long, low war of attrition, or perhaps triage, not a short, sharp war of conquest. It was the Taliban yesterday, it is Islamic State today, it will be someone else tomorrow. What is more, there is nothing we can do about it. Whether or not we choose to fight, they will fight us: They have made that brutally clear. We had better get used to it.
That’s the sort of conversation we ought to be having as a nation. Only the government doesn’t dare. And the opposition knows it doesn’t — knows it can’t or won’t answer the questions it asks. Which, one suspects, is why it asks them.