PM needs to explain stance on airstrikes
I am assuming that, at the G20 Summit in Turkey last weekend, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was permitted to sit at the adult table.
But he’s behaving like an obstinate child.
Clenching his fists: I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!
And to all the voices raised in dismay over his decision to withdraw Canada’s contribution to the military bombing of Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria: You’re not the boss of me!
Those would be the fighter jets of which Trudeau famously said, a year ago: “Why aren’t we talking more about the kind of humanitarian aid that Canada can and must be engaged in, rather than trying to whip out our CF-18s and show them how big they are?”
Trudeau continues to insist that the Canadian electorate handed the Liberals a mandate to govern according to their campaign promises, which were clearly enunciated. He’s certainly correct in drawing that conclusion. There was a multitude of reasons — all thoroughly legitimate — for jettisoning Stephen Harper and his Conservatives from power. A nation had grown weary of the stiff-necked Harperites. Many no longer recognized, under Harper’s doctrinaire regime, the country they loved.
But for Trudeau to tether his justification for bugging out of the coalition airstrikes to the citizenry’s purported opposition to the bombing sorties is mendacious. Every opinion poll in the past year has shown that two-thirds of Canadians approved of the military campaign against the Islamic State group (ISIS) — and those responses cut across partisan lines.
A great many voters cast their ballots for the Liberals despite the party’s stated position on military isolation. It was not a wedge issue and not a deal-breaker.
After the atrocities in Paris last Friday — which didn’t actually change the landscape, but brought the ISIS malice into sharper silhouette for those who haven’t been paying attention to Nairobi and Sousse and Beirut and Syria and Paris earlier this year-end — there need be no apology or unease in Trudeau adjusting his stance. Astute leaders must recalibrate their positions when events warrant, rather than clinging to vows rendered creaky and erstwhile.
The fact is Trudeau never explained why Canadian jets should be yanked out of the fray, other than a preferred alternative of humanitarian aid. But these aren’t mutually exclusive endeavours; indeed, they should go hand in hand. Which is why the ambitious objective of taking in 25,000 Syrian refugees stands as urgent today as it was a month ago. Those desperate asylum-seekers need Canada as a place to land, like all the waves of human misery that preceded them to our shores, such as the Vietnamese boat people in the late ’70s (if not the Jews in the pre-war ’30s). A moral obligation of refuge is paramount. Only the arbitrary deadline of getting this massive undertaking done by the end of the year — a logistical impossibility — can be impugned as foolhardy. The workload required to properly vet migrants is unreasonable under this hasty deadline, much less the simple act of airlifting them here en masse from holding camps in Europe.
Still, these are matters that can be resolved without backtracking on commitments.
What’s inexplicable is how Trudeau can pledge to deploy more Canadian troops to help train local fighters in Syria and Iraq — 600 troops and 69 special forces members that have been engaged in directing bombs against ISIS targets, the latter last week involved in a crucial offensive to take back the Iraqi town of Sinjar — while simultaneously retreating from the airstrikes by pulling out half a dozen CF-18s, the same jets that have flown 180 sorties over the past year.
I cannot for the life of me understand why Trudeau would be willing to put more boots on the ground in hostile terrain — and that’s what “training” means, rather than the deliberately false impression bruited about of their “noncombat” role — while abandoning the airstrike allotment that was to have ended in March, at a time when the U.S.-led coalition is begging for sturdier military support. As of September, the coalition had conducted 7,000 airstrikes, costing the U.S. alone about $10 million a day, which have hit 10,000 ISIS targets.
It is easy to ridicule U.S. President Barack Obama’s assertion — in a pretaped interview with ABC News that aired one day before the Paris attacks that killed 129 innocents — that the combat mission had degraded ISIS in Syria and Iraq. “We have contained them,” he said. “They have not gained ground in Iraq and Syria.”
Obama added, though this part of the quote is usually left out by the maddened right-wing-media elements: “What we have not been able to do is completely decapitate their command-and-control structure.”
Neither remark is false. The spread of ISIS military reach — its combat offensives — has been halted. Sinjar Mountain was reclaimed last weekend. “Jihadi John,” the masked propagandist of video beheading fame, was apparently killed just days before the Paris atrocities as he got into a car in the ISIS Syrian stronghold, its so-called capital, of Raqqa. These are successes both crucial and deeply symbolic.
True, it’s rare that air operations alone can vanquish a war-wizened enemy, especially one like ISIS that has a strong conventional command-and-control structure and at least 10,000 fighters willing to die for glory. Yet the NATO intervention in Libya three years ago, a coalition led by Canadian Lt.-Gen. Charles Bouchard, certainly achieved its military goals. That Libya has fractured into internal chaos, its transition to democracy and stability stunted in the aftermath of rebellion, is a failure of politics and planning, not military short-sightedness. They did their job. Those bringing up the rear did not.
Thus far, Trudeau has failed to delineate the practical difference between troop deployment (good) and airstrike sorties (bad). I can only assume an intrinsic revulsion for bombing missions — if we’re the bombers, not merely the airstrike callers while others do the bombing.
If Trudeau has a convincing argument to make beyond an ideological — selfie — pacifism, he better stand up and do so immediately, instead of scooping up his CF-18 marbles and going home. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.