The most difficult question the leader of a nation ever has to contend with is whether to take his/her country to war or to keep it in one that may already be raging such as the one against ISIS. That is why I was disappointed in the throne speech not naming the war against ISIS and its affiliates; perhaps so as to not highlight the fact that we are bent upon ending our bombing mission in Iraq while our allies are ramping it up. To do or not to do doesn't seem to have posed too much of a dilemma for Trudeau - at least not in the case of his pre election promise of withdrawing our CF 18s from the US led coalition air strikes against ISIS. To bomb or not to bomb ISIS appears to have been no quandary either. Bombing ISIS is alright as long as we don't do it. Why, because when in opposition Mr. Trudeau had promised we will withdraw from the airstrikes and that was because Prime Minister Harper hadn't made out a cogent case for their deployment in the first place. That is what we were told.
I do not believe Prime Minister Trudeau has at all made the case for pulling out the CF18s. Regardless they will be grounded. And of course we shall do other things such as training in special operations, provide more humanitarian aid and take in more refugees. In sticking to our guns we are asked to perish the thought we could do all of it and more including continuing the airstrikes. The former Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier's believes we should keep our CF18s in Iraq as we do more on the training and humanitarian front. If Bombing of ISIS by our allies is acceptable, why is it so wrong for Canada to do so? That is the question that cries out for an answer from our Prime Minister.
Just a few days ago on November 20th the UN Security Council passed a resolution urging "all member states to take action by all necessary means on the territory under the control of ISIS to prevent terrorist acts committed by ISIS and other Al-Qaida affiliates". Hollande has been visiting important capitals of the world seeking to build an alliance for that very purpose. He even sat down with Putin. He has moved French warships to aid in the ramped up bombing. The US is sending special expeditionary forces to assist Iraqi and Peshmerga fighters confronting ISIS. After a vigorous debate Britain's Parliament has overwhelmingly voted to expand its airstrikes against ISIS into Syria. Germany too has declared war on ISIS and is sending Tornado Jets, naval frigate and 1200 soldiers to the region in the fight against it. It is also sending 500 personnel to Mali to assist the French there. Italy is doing its part in Libya.
We are told that none of our allies - Obama, Cameron and Hollande among them- has directly asked Mr. Trudeau to remain engaged in airstrikes in Iraq against ISIS. The withdrawal of CF18s has been "accepted abroad without complaint", say Canadian officials and "Hollande was reassured and happy" that Canada remains a part of the fight against ISIS. But wait a minute. When asked about Canada's decision to recall CF18s, didn't Hollande say each should "contribute within their own means?" That and the actions of all our major allies in speeding up the bombing of ISIS along with doing more on all other fronts is a clear rebuke to Canada for bringing our bombers home unless one could honestly argue - and honestly none can - that Canada doesn't have the means to keep the CF18s deployed along with doing the training, refuelling and more humanitarian work.
Some argue bombing will kill civilians. Despite the coalition doing its best to avoid them, mistakes may happen. But they will be mistakes as opposed to the deliberate and continuing slaughter, executions, burnings, beheadings and general death and destruction by ISIS. Some others argue it was the original blunders by George W Bush and consequently by Obama that wrought us ISIS; and if we bomb more we make it worse. But apportioning blame - no matter how justly - will not stop the carnage by ISIS. Those who argue past mistakes and possible civilian casualties by CF18s should give memory a jolt and remember the airstrikes in Kosovo saving the day and preventing perhaps a million potential refugees from fleeing and knocking on other European doors.
The NDP argue for an end to the bombing mission while asking that we help shut of the flow of money to ISIS and prevent the sale of their oil on the black market. But they forget that our CF18s along with our allies' planes are used to bomb ISIS oil convoys too.
Our six CF18s are a drop in the Iraqi dunes, some say; US, France and UK can more than make up for their absence in the Iraqi skies. I say every little bit helps. They will free up six British bombers to focus on Syria. I see no logic in the 'drop in the bucket argument' and it and more arguments like it may actually hide the unarticulated 'moral superiority' or misplaced sense of pacifism that drives the likes of Jeremy Corbyn to say no to all wars, no matter how just.
Hopefully Vienna talks would bear fruit and we will soon see Russia's client Syria's Assad's back. But we can't afford to wait for Assad to be defeated before focussing on and finishing ISIS. As some say, it is true Saddam Hussein was a monster. But he kept other monsters under control. Assad was that monster until the winds of the Arab Spring unleashed both democrats as well as monsters of Islamism. And we and his victims are paying the price for our failures to understand and manage the changing geopolitics of the Middle East.
Canada has an important role to play in the world including the Middle East but we need to understand it may not be the same or even similar to the role that we played until 9/11. Canada's post war persona had been defined by our robust internationalism in the Second World War; hence our subsequent leadership on the world stage. Canada had stood shoulder to shoulder with the allies to defeat fascism and particularly Hitler who deliberately gassed and butchered millions of Jews, hundreds of thousands of Roma and others. In the bipolar world that followed the Second World War we were able to play what became known as the Pearsonian role because of the valiant sacrifices our men and women had made on the front lines in defeating and destroying the evil of fascism. We had done the heavy lifting sending Canadians into the war in numbers disproportionately exceeding the size of our population. In that war against fascism we were second to none.
But the era of bipolar detente where strategically placed and allied with the US, we could play the honest broker in most international disputes is long gone. And in any event in the Middle East there is no peace to keep and the UN Security Council has urged member nations to take all reasonable and necessary actions to defeat and destroy ISIS and its affiliates.
We are in a war; a war that is now sanctioned by the UN. On one side are the fascists of ISIS - the enemy of not just East or West but of all civilization. On the other are our allies and us. ISIS and its ideology of Islamist terror seeks to force itself on people all over the world. Tragically support for this ideology of terror exists deep in parts of Muslim societies; in fact more and deeper than we dare acknowledge. Previously the only training ground for the 'soldiers' of this ideology was Afghanistan and Pakistan's border areas close to it. Now Iraq, Syria, Libya and parts of Africa too are its training and killing grounds. If we don' defeat and destroy ISIS and its ideology in Iraq and Syria and do so quickly there is a danger of other lands irretrievably falling under its terroristic stranglehold.
To those who will scream "war monger" at me - a Gandhian - let me tell them that even Mahatma Gandhi once naively tried to do his bit against Hitler by writing to him to stop war; oblivious to the fact that fascism is the ultimate personification of unreason and inhumanity. I am at peace with the international community militarily obliterating the ISIS fascists just as we defeated Hitler over 70 years ago.
We should take in as many refugee men, women and children as we can. But we can't just keep taking them in ad infinitum while Abu Bakr al Baghdadi continues maiming and killing to create more. We must stop and destroy ISIS now. To do that we would be wise to use all possible weapons at our disposal. That is why it makes no sense to me that as we rightly accept more refugees than Prime Minister Harper was willing to, we are about to take away the very thing - the CF18s - which will substantially help destroy ISIS, the evil the refugees are fleeing.
