Let’s not cheer sniper shot

A Canadian soldier now holds the world record for longest fatal shot by a sniper, after killing a Daesh fighter in Iraq from a distance of over 3.5 kilometres.

Justin Trudeau, discussing the record last week, said it was “something to be celebrated for the excellence of the Canadian Forces in their training, in the performance of their duties.”

The prime minister is commendable in his desire to mark Canadian achievement, and the marksman in question seems to have done his job well. But to celebrate our military’s killing power, no matter how many records it breaks, shows a crude and simplistic view of Canada’s role overseas — and of the value of human life.

The issue isn’t the shot itself, which by all accounts was justified, but how we choose to talk about it.

However heinous we may find members of Daesh and their sympathizers, they are human beings. They have homes and families and histories. No matter their crimes, their lives are valuable in the sense that all lives are valuable, and deserving of at least some degree of respect.

We revile terrorists largely because they seem to have so little regard for human life. They measure their success by the amount of carnage they cause and appear to find genuine joy in killing people. That, supposedly, is what sets us apart from them.

Canadians have a long tradition of measuring our military success, and even our national worth, by the number of notches on our gun barrels.

Billy Bishop became a Canadian hero, worthy of a namesake airport, by shooting down several dozen German pilots in the First World War.

The Devil’s Brigade of Canadian and U.S. commandos gained fame in the Second World War for slitting the throats of German soldiers, and leaving behind literal calling cards to claim their kills.

From a modern vantage point, though, taking such glee in the lethal exploits of our soldiers is cringe-inducing, if not downright ghoulish.

Our understanding of war and violence should have progressed by now, beyond the point where we talk about conflict only in terms of the number of “bad guys” we kill or how well we kill them.

Too much time has already been spent lauding this sniper’s deadly shot, and Trudeau’s apparent satisfaction with the killing seems incongruous for a leader who pledged to return Canada to its peacekeeping roots.

Canadians should, in the 21st Century, be able to take pride in our military for reasons other than its ability to end human lives. A peacekeeping mission in Africa, for instance, would be genuine cause to celebrate, but the government has continued to drag its feet on fulfilling that promise.

In Iraq, Canadian soldiers are tasked with “advising and assisting” in the fight against Daesh, and it seems naive to think they can do that without falling into firefights with Daesh themselves. Trudeau only invited Canadians to celebrate the sniper shot after NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair suggested the sniper had violated Canada’s rules of engagement in Iraq. Military officials have since said the shot saved Iraqi and Kurdish soldiers’ lives, breaking up a mass of Daesh fighters as they prepared to attack.

But there is a stark difference between being forced into a fight, and glorifying the act of shooting someone dead.

Canada has just extended its commitment in Iraq for two more years. There will almost certainly be more cases in which it’s deemed necessary for a Canadian to shoot a member of Daesh. There will be more deaths.

But as we approach Canada Day weekend, when millions will reflect on what it means to be Canadian, we have to ask ourselves: Do we want to be the kind of people who celebrate that?

The issue isn’t the shot itself, but how we choose to talk about it