CANADA’S ISIL RESPONSE IS NOT OUR FINEST HOUR
Officials with Bashar Assad’s criminal regime in Damascus say Assad is ‘pleased’ with the airstrike campaign so far, while Syria’s beleaguered and bloodied revolutionary democrats are furious about it. Terry Glavin raises: Isn’t the reliability of our partner in the White House something we’d be wise to be more cautious about? … Canadians, too, should be asking.
Here’s the question Obama’s record
In the melodramas of yawning unseriousness that have been substituting for the urgent and grown-up debate that Canadians should be having about the cataclysm unfolding in Syria and Iraq at the moment, the spectacle of Oak Ridges-Markham MP Paul Calandra — Exhibit A, if you like — is just a curtain-raiser.
Against a backdrop of genocide and mass murder that harks back to Belsen and Babi Yar, the prime minister’s parliamentary secretary found himself on the verge of tears in the House of Commons last Friday. But Calandra wasn’t sobbing in contemplation of, say, the mass graves that Kurdish Yazidis have been shovelled into in recent weeks.
Calandra was upset because he was ashamed of himself for having followed orders to offer only scandalously oafish evasions in question period when being quizzed about Canada’s conscription into the U.S.-led coalition against Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State.
But this only brings us to Exhibit B: NDP leader Thomas Mulcair’s absurdly trivial supplementary question that day. Luckily for the New Democrats, the Calandra spectacle caused it to be overlooked. It was about whether the 69 Special Operations Regiment soldiers Ottawa had sent to serve as advisers to the Kurdish peshmerga (“those who face death”) would be obliged to acquire Iraqi visas.
Not to be overtaken in the rush to frivolousness, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals had already declared their sort-of support for the renewable but imminently expiring 30-day Canadian Forces mission, but only if our special ops troops remained in a “non-combat” role and left the heavy lifting to more capable partners. Like the Belgians. Let’s call that Exhibit C.
It’s not like there aren’t serious, substantive and disturbing questions that remain unanswered about U.S. President Barack Obama’s about-face, last-ditch coalition, or about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s otherwise unsurprising decision to sign us up for it.
But entire news cycles have been given over to the most boring little imbroglios. Did Obama ask Harper to bring Canada into the roughly 50-nation alliance, or did Harper take the initiative and offer first? Was the prime minister contemptible for having acknowledged while he was in New York that the Canadian Forces contribution might well have to be beefed up, or should he have waited until he was back in Ottawa before saying so?
Here’s a somewhat more important question. Officials with Bashar Assad’s criminal regime in Damascus say Assad is “pleased” with the airstrike campaign so far, while Syria’s beleaguered and bloodied revolutionary democrats are furious about it. Do we really want the Royal Canadian Air Force involved in a campaign of airstrikes if it’s going to play out like this?
Last week, more than 20 commanders of Syria’s prodemocracy armed fronts revealed that President Obama’s air-power coalition was leaving them all entirely out of the loop. Earlier this week, U.S. bombs were inadvertently dropped so close to positions held by the nominally U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army that several FSA fighters were reportedly killed. No thought has been given to ground co-ordination, not even with Kurdish guerril- las who have been relying on antique rifles to hold back a massive armoured onslaught by the Islamic State (also known as ISIL and ISIS) only 10 kilometres from the Turkish border.
After ignoring every warning about the mess he’d left behind in Iraq in 2011, Obama strung along Syria’s prodemocracy rebels for three years in a shambling policy that Canada’s Foreign Minister John Baird, to his discredit, largely endorsed. Worse, Obama has become a hostage to his own bright idea that the way forward is rapprochement with the terror regime in Tehran, a cascading foreignpolicy debacle that Baird, to his credit, largely opposed.
These contradictions raise an immediately necessary question about Canadian fighter jets joining the squadrons that several NATO countries have already scrambled to the coalition’s cause. Will Ottawa go along with an airpower coalition that bombs only those Islamic State targets in Syria that present a threat to Tehran’s Baathist client in Damascus?
It was only a shift in U.S. public opinion that rousted Obama in the first place, and it’s doubtful that any Islamic State targets in Syria would be on Obama’s hit list at all had his coalition’s five Arab League partners not made those targets a condition of their air-power enlistment. As recently as this past weekend Obama was claiming that the U.S. intelligence community had underestimated the Islamic State phenomenon — a casus belli derivation known in the language of common speech as a “lie.” All along, Obama has also talked an enormous amount of trash about the reliability of the pro-democracy Syrian rebels.
Here’s the question Obama’s record raises: Isn’t the reliability of our partner in the White House something we’d be wise to be more cautious about? That’s the kind of question that kept coming up during my recent visits with rebel leaders and brutalized refugees in Turkey, Northern Syria and Iraq. It’s a question that Canadians, too, should be asking.
By all means, let’s bomb the living daylights out of alBagh dadi’s ISIL bed lamers. But let’s also remember that the gangrene of his al- Qaida offshoot festered and spread from wounds that continue to be inflicted on the Syrian people every day by the Assad regime’s barrel bombs and Shabiha death squads. The Islamic State’s lunatic army has slaughtered only a fraction of the Syrians that Assad has killed.
Canada’s 30-day commitment is almost up. The Harper cabinet’s decision is to be followed by a confidence vote in Parliament. If we don’t send in our CF-18 jet fighters we’d better have a damn good reason. If we do it Mulcair’s way and retreat into an auxiliary Florence Nightingale role, fine, but we’d still need to go over the top and all out.
It’s all well and good to make fun of Paul Calandra, and Canadians can brag that they’ve already contributed more humanitarian aid in the Syrian-Iraqi crisis, on a per-capita basis, than the citizens of any other country. At least this isn’t so hollow as the boast Canadians like to make about having authored the United Nations’ “responsibility to protect” doctrine, which was supposed to allow military interventions at the first sign that innocents were being force-marched into human abattoirs.
Three years lost, Syria torn to shreds, millions of people uprooted, at least 200,000 dead. That’s not much to brag about.