Stephen Harper has put Canada into the fear gear once more – just as his political toes are hitting bottom in the latest polls. According to the wizardly Frank Graves, hula-hoops are more hip than Harper.
After a perfunctory “consultation” with his caucus – (please remember this man doesn’t give a fiddler’s fornication about anyone else’s ideas or opinion) the prime minister will tell us today what Canada’s new Mission Implausible will be — this time in Iraq.
It will not be Norway’s 40,000 blankets, 10,000 kitchen sets, and 18,000 plastic tarpaulins. It will not be Sweden’s $20 million in humanitarian aid to Iraq, nor Switzerland’s $12 million. It will probably be bombs. But no boots — at least not for now.
So far, the prime minister has restrained his natural belligerence. Canada has deployed a few dozen commandos to Iraq, ferried in military supplies, tossed in $10 million in “non-lethal” military assistance, and $5 million in humanitarian aid. But Harper knows he will probably be able to get into the war that eluded him once before after former Prime Minister Jean Chretien refused to join the coalition of the misguided when George W. Bush invaded Iraq.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, has already raised the possibility of deploying U.S, ground troops to fight ISIS. After all, bombing without ground support is just an exercise in killing a lot of people and going home. Which is to say, not winning.
Case in point from Harper’s foreign affairs report card? The bombing campaign that ousted Muammar Gaddafi from Libya has left the country with two parliaments and two factions gripped in an escalating civil war. I wonder if Stephen Harper thinks the raging internecine battle on the shores of the Mediterranean warranted a million dollar fly-over of Parliament?
So far, 62 countries have joined the U.S. in its stated goal of degrading the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is code for bombing them into the dust. There have already been many warnings that fighting ISIS will be a long-term proposition. That is code for the inevitable outcome; mission creep.
But think about it for a moment. Does the U.S. really need the help of military gnats like Estonia to deal with insurgents without an air force? Does it really need Canada to kick the stuffing out of the bad guys? Of course it doesn’t.
The coalition, of which Harper is eager to be a part, is merely a P.R. ploy by Washington. A recent U.S. poll showed that when the air strikes against ISIS are presented as America and its Western and Arab allies working in concert, support for the mission in the U.S. is high at 73 per cent. But when the air strikes are portrayed as a unilateral American operation, support drops to 50 per cent.
Members of the coalition are merely helping President Obama to market the war back home, just as lobbyists like Hill & Knowlton were paid millions of dollars by the government of Kuwait to market the first Iraq War in 1990.
The other way the war on ISIS is being marketed is through fear mongering, this PM’s strong suit. Harper has worked up justifiable revulsion at beheadings like James Foley’s into the nonsensical proposition that ISIS represents a serious threat to Canadian security. If ebola doesn’t get you, ISIS will.
If only the geopolitical landscape were that simple. Saudi Arabia, one of Canada’s coalition partners in Iraq, has beheaded 22 people since August 4. This dictatorship has been described by U.S. intelligence sources as the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. Another coalition partner, Kuwait, is the epicentre of fundraising for terrorist groups inside Syria. And according to a memo written by then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, (made public by Wikileaks) yet another coalition partner, Qatar, has among the worst records for co-operating with the United States in counter-terror activities.
Yet Stephen Harper talks as if this is yet another of those good-versus-evil fables he is always passing off to the public as deep analysis and sound policy.
More honest and experienced minds make a more rational case. In the United Kingdom, the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove said that politicians are merely taking advantage of a distortion towards Islamic extremism. That distortion was branded on the public consciousness by the 9/11 attacks. It has since been used to exaggerate all kinds of threats, ISIS being just the latest of them. Dearlove correctly points out that fighting in Syria and Iraq is essentially Muslim on Muslim.
He thinks that governments and the media make a great mistake in sensationalizing the threat represented by ISIS because the oxygen of publicity actually encourages their excesses. It is, he says, time to move away from the distortion that 9/11 understandably created, time to regain our footing. It is an idea not without appeal.
The so-called war on terror is now 13 years old. During that time, civil liberties have been eroded in every Western democracy, Islamaphobia has flourished, and there have been a few disastrous and ruinously expensive military interventions from which politicians seemed to have learned nothing.
Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau are right, plain and simple. The PM needs to make the case for war, if there even is one to be made. And he needs to make it to the Canadian people, not in an interview with the Wall Street Journal while in the offices of Goldman Sachs.
If he doesn’t hold a real debate, it will demonstrate that he is in the same headspace as Republican freshman Senator and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz. According to one wag, Cruz’s idea of foreign policy is part John Wayne and part Sarah Palin; “shoot first and don’t ask any questions.” Sound familiar?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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