No easy answers on Syrian policy divide

Liberal MP Irwin Cotler could not go along with his party’s opposition to a combat mission against Islamic State in Iraq. This is unsurprising given Cotler’s long record as an advocate of the responsibility to protect. The only surprise is that the Montreal MP chose to stay away from the vote in the House, instead releasing a statement explaining what he called his “principled abstention.”

He couldn’t support the government’s motion either, he said, because of Stephen Harper’s suggestion that Canada might expand the mission to Syria, but only if it were asked by the Syrian government.

“I am deeply disturbed by the prime minister’s statement that Canada would require the approval of the criminal Assad regime to carry out operations in Syria,” Cotler said.

This difference of opinion about Syria gets to the philosophical heart of the debate over Islamic State, in a way that the mostly manufactured differences of opinion about six planes in Iraq have really not. Harper and Cotler are looking at military intervention in two distinct ways. For Cotler, the people of Syria have a right to be protected not only from Islamic State but also from Bashar Assad. This is a clear moral position. But legally, the question is muddier.

So we Canadians are left with the question: Is the longterm war against Islamic State truly about the atrocities taking place in Iraq and Syria, in Harper’s mind? Or is it merely a containment operation to reduce the severity of a terrorist threat to international security, in Canada’s direct national interest?

That second justification may well be justification enough, but in the coming months, that will be the question that determines what Canada does next.