Trudeau walks ISIL tightrope
Prime minister trying to avoid plunging into Iraq, Syria quagmire
OTTAWA — Justin Trudeau has a line in the sand when it comes to Canada’s involvement in the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
The prime minister’s biggest fear is that the country — and the West as a whole — will get dragged even further into the seemingly intractable military and sectarian cauldrons of Iraq and Syria.
But whether Trudeau will be able to stand by his campaign commitment to refocus Canada’s role in the war-torn region is an open question in the aftermath of this week’s major ISIL offensive.
“What I’ve said I’m concerned about, from the very beginning, is anything that leads towards active engagement by the West and boots on the ground,” Trudeau said in a year-end interview this week with The Canadian Press.
“And I think that’s something — whether it’s Libya, whether it’s the previous Iraq conflicts — we know doesn’t necessarily lead to the kind of long-term, positive outcomes that people would hope for and would justify the human cost of engaging in that way.”
At first blush, from a broad policy perspective, his position is not much different than that of the Obama administration in the U.S. — or even Trudeau’s own predecessor, Stephen Harper.
Since ISIL roared out of obscurity and across the deserts of eastern Syria and northern Iraq almost two years ago, the message from the U.S., Canada and other allies has been consistent: Military action? Yes. Boots on the ground? No.
Even Haider al-Abadi, Iraq’s beleaguered prime minister, has repeatedly made clear he doesn’t want western troops fighting his war and would prefer to eject ISIL himself — or at least in tandem with Iranian-sponsored Shiite militias.
But in Washington and elsewhere in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, the message has been sliding as the U.S. deploys more special forces and increases the tempo of airstrikes.
In military jargon, it’s called mission creep, something the Harper government — fresh from the politically bruising experience of Afghanistan — sought to avoid in its parliamentary motion that sent the Canadian military into Iraq.
Although special forces trainers are clearly “boots on the ground,” the notion of excluding large deployments of conventional army troops was a fundamental component of the Conservative government’s strategy. Trudeau has pledged a more robust training presence in Iraq, but where he differs substantially from his predecessor is in the plan to end the air force’s role in the U.S.-led coalition bombing campaign.
He insists Canada will still be a “substantial military contributor to the military efforts against ISIL,” but his government’s inability to define and articulate what that will look like carries a mounting political cost for the Liberals.
“The Liberal policy to withdraw our fighter jets is completely incoherent,” said Tony Clement, the Conservative foreign affairs critic.
“The defence minister has said that the air combat mission, including CF-18 bombing sorties, will continue well into next year, perhaps beyond the parliamentary authorization.”
On the opposite side of the political spectrum, the NDP continues to insist the withdrawal should happen immediately.
Defence analysts see the attacks on the French capital and Beirut, as well as the recent terror lock down in Brussels, as a sign that the Islamic State militant threat is evolving into organized campaigns of terror directed at specific countries. Indeed, ISIL continued to surprise this week by launching a major conventional military offensive in northern Iraq that saw Canadian special forces and CF-18s engaged in ground combat and bombing to blunt the extremist attack.