REAL STRATEGY IS NEEDED
While the West improvises, thousands are dying in Syria
Is there anything about either of these plans that is capital building or in the national interest? If the answer is no ... the NCC should simply sell the property to whichever bidder offers the higher price. — Randall Denley
Trudeau’s plan rests on an extraordinary hubris — that the Middle East’s convulsing, bleeding human terrain in 2019 is somehow knowable now.
Among the maxims and banalities Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated in his Monday news conference, is there anything amounting to a logical justification for substituting six RCAF CF-18s with roughly 140 more special operations trainers as Canada’s contribution to the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS, also known as Daesh? Discuss.
That is how the terms of respectable debate are set, in what is a conveniently manageable, perfectly Canadian rumpus. The partisans and the pundits line up exactly as you might expect. The necromancy of opinion-polling and chat-show backchat is marshalled to one side or the other. With so much politely left unsaid, anything that really matters is conveniently occluded.
There was one thing Trudeau said on Monday, though, that gives it all away: “Our new policy in Iraq, Syria and the surrounding region reflects what Canada is all about.” There it is, staring us straight in the face.
Take a long look at everything that Trudeau and his ministers announced, and what should have been entirely obvious is that it is all solely about keeping up appearances, and there was nothing in any of it that will have any impact whatsoever to what matters, which, sorry to be dreary, is the ongoing mass murder of the people of Syria. Twice the death toll of Hiroshima over the past five years, and counting. Yet nothing. Not one thing. While Trudeau was unveiling the means by which he intended to keep his unpopular and difficult-to-explain election promise, Vladimir Putin’s bombers were dropping cluster munitions on what little was left of the glorious and ancient city of Aleppo — in shameless disregard of a UN Security Council Resolution that Putin himself signed only two months ago.
More than 600 innocents dead in a week. As many as 50,000 people had streamed out of Aleppo and reached the Turkish border, where they huddled against the cold in makeshift shelters or roughed it out in the open, fleeing Russian bombing and the encirclement of the city by Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar Assad along with the Iranian Quds Force and Hezbollah. Ankara has now closed the border to Syrian refugees.
Also on Monday, the Turkish coast guard was picking up the remains of at least 27 refugees, including 11 children from the Aegean waters where the Syrian refugee child Alan Kurdi drowned last fall, inconveniently upending the terms of the debates we’d all settled on during the federal election campaign. Scores of Syrian children have drowned in those waters since the death of little Alan, whose family had hoped to make it to Canada.
But we’ve since moved on. Nothing to see here.
So, 4.6 million Syrian refugees and counting, and half the Syrian population bombed out of their homes inside Assad’s nightmareland. Also Monday: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report documenting in the most lurid detail Assad’s systematic and widespread “extermination” of his insufficiently loyal citizens. In the regime’s vast network of dungeons and torture chambers, thousands and thousands of people have been disappeared and murdered, including children, some as young as seven.
“Hey, why not? In Washington, it’s all about ObamaCare and the deal with Iran, so honestly, Trudeau and the Canadian government can do whatever. ISIS has killed a fraction of the people Assad has killed,” Michael Weiss, co-author with Hassan Hassan of the indispensable New York Times bestseller ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, told me this week.
“None of this makes sense anymore. It’s all Alice in Wonderland stuff. There is no concerted strategy. It’s all ad hoc and improvisational. For the first two years, the Syrian people were very pro-American, but we’ve done nothing to help them, and (Secretary of State John) Kerry just keeps making things worse, pretending there’s peace negotiations while the Russians are dropping 800 bombs a day.
“So what could Canada do? I don’t know. You’ve got a new young prime minister, might be a bit of an altruist, he’s nice to refugees — whatever. This is Obama’s Rwanda. It’s Obama’s Holocaust. There’s nothing to be done now but write the epitaph for Syria.”
Still, one must keep up appearances.
In the “surrounding region,” Trudeau’s Liberals will continue the generous approach of their Conservative predecessors in the provision of refugee relief and infrastructure support in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. Apparently there will be some additions along the lines International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau meant when she alluded to “garbage collection.”
It is in the largely ISIL-free districts of that portion of Northern Iraq nominally controlled by the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government that our Special Operations Regiment will confine its “train and assist” efforts. Distinctions between a “combat role” and a “noncombat role”: disingenuous or not? Discuss.
The Liberals have to their advantage a variety of meaningless pieties of the sort Trudeau appears to have filched on Monday from Green Party leader Elizabeth May: “We think we ought to avoid doing precisely what our enemies want.”
The Conservatives will take their cues from Global Affairs critic Tony Clement, who says that the Liberals’ long-awaited ISIL policy “backs away from meaningful involvement.” One small mercy: NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, whose party has rendered itself ideologically incapable of having anything useful to contribute to these conversations, has kept mostly quiet.
And there it is: a middling ramp-up of a Canadian response that was immedi- ately necessary and relevant by the autumn months of 2014, when ISIL’s genocide of the Yazidis was in full flourish. Having swept out of Syria and into Iraq to within 40 kilometres of the American consulate in Erbil, ISIL’s marauders had sufficiently embarrassed Barack Obama that he was roused to an 11th-hour realization that led circuitously to Monday’s news conference.
After the catastrophe he’d engineered with Iran and Russia in Syria, and after squandering the demonstrable achievements his Republican predecessors had chalked up in Iraq out of their initial shock and awe follies of 2003, Obama had little choice. It was time to enlist some small contribution from America’s traditional allies to contain the vexing publicrelations problems ISIL’s genocidaires were causing him. But even that was too much to ask of Canada’s Liberals. So here we are now.
Trudeau’s plan rests on an extraordinary hubris — the new deal is mapped out at roughly $1.6 billion over three years — that the Middle East’s convulsing, bleeding human terrain in 2019 is somehow knowable now. Our Aurora reconnaissance flights and aerial refuelling runs will continue. Plus a refugee relocation program indistinguishable from what the Conservatives were promising. Minus six jets.
“It makes no sense, not unless you’re living in Alice in Wonderland. There is no plan,” Weiss said. “There is nothing except this idea that if we could cut a deal with Iran, everything will be fine. It isn’t fine.”
But hey, U.S. Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said nice things about Canada this week, so, you know, relax. Obama’s been on the phone and he’s cool with it. The White House likes Canada. Nothing’s changed. Trudeau got that much right: “Our new policy in Iraq, Syria and the surrounding region reflects what Canada is all about.”