Battle with ISIL a ‘fight,’ not a war
IDEOLOGY CANNOT BE DEFEATED THE WAY AN ARMY CAN
One day after the terror bombings in Brussels, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion said Canada was not at war with ISIL, even as U.S. President Barack Obama declared Wednesday that fighting the jihadists was his “No. 1 priority.”
Yet an accelerating federal fight is underway against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. At least four government departments with national security responsibilities have started exchanging personal information on Canadians under controversial new security laws, according to a ministerial briefing book prepared for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale.
Additional new powers to cancel, revoke or refuse passports to thwart acts of terrorism by Canadians overseas also are “currently being utilized in close consultation” with the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), say the notes, obtained by Postmedia under access to information law.
The news follows disclosure this month that CSIS intelligence officers are exercising their new authority to actively disrupt suspected national security threats, with about two dozen such disruptions since the fall.
The information-sharing and disruption powers were enacted in June by the former Conservative government under its Bill C-51 national security legislation, elements of which the Liberals vow to repeal.
The Department of Citizenship and Immigration, the Canada Border Services Agency, CSIS and at least one and possibly two other departments (their titles are redacted in the briefing book) have exchanged previously restricted information they hold on Canadians believed relevant to possible national security threats, according to the briefing book.
The Security of Canada Information Sharing Act, created under C-51, allows more than 100 federal departments, agencies and other entities to share information about Canadians with 17 departments and agencies that have national security responsibilities. The 17 agencies also can share and collate information among themselves.
Federal Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien has warned the act puts Canadians at risk of being caught in a web of unbridled government snooping into their personal lives.
Meanwhile, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared “We are at war,” following a crisis meeting called by French President Francois Hollande.
The bombings in Brussels killed at least 31 people and came four months after the attacks in Paris that left 130 dead. ISIL has claimed responsibility for both massacres.
Trudeau, speaking Wednesday on CBC Radio, and Dion, in the House of Commons foyer, both said the conflict with ISIL does not fit the true definition of war.
“A war is something that can be won by one side or the other and there is no path for ISIL to actually win against the West,” Trudeau said. “They want to destabilize, they want to strike fear. They need to be stamped out.”
Said Dion: “If you use the terminology ‘war,’ in international law it will mean two armies with respecting rules and it’s not the case at all. You have terrorist groups that respect nothing. So we prefer to say that it’s a fight.”
Last month, Canada withdrew its fighter jets from the American-led coalition that is bombing ISIL in Iraq and Syria. But it tripled the number of Canadian special forces trainers in northern Iraq, buttressed intelligence gathering assets and increased federal spending on efforts to help displaced civilians.
“That’s why our new mission, which is much more focused on empowering locals on the ground on a military level, on a humanitarian level, on a refugee level, is going to be an extraordinarily strong piece of the coalition’s fight against ISIL,” Trudeau said.
Christian Leuprecht, professor of political science at Kingston’s Royal Military College and Queen’s University, said the “war” analogy is profoundly unhelpful when it comes to terrorism.
“States go to war. ISIL is not a state. In fact, declaring ‘war’ on ISIL bestows the state-like trappings that ISIL seeks, and inadvertently legitimizes ISIL statelike claims and behaviour,” Leuprecht said in an email exchange from Bremen, Germany.
“Trudeau and Dion have it right: war presumes that you can vanquish your opponent. ISIL will simply go underground and run an insurgency if it can’t operate the way it currently does. And the ideology that fuels it cannot be defeated militarily anyway.”
Obama, speaking at a news conference in Buenos Aires, was pugnacious.
“I’ve got a lot of things on my plate, but my top priority is to defeat ISIL and to eliminate the scourge of this barbaric terrorism that’s been taking place around the world,” he said.
“There’s no more important item on my agenda than going after them and defeating them. The issue is, how do we do it in an intelligent way?”