Taxes are bad. Carbon taxes are really, really bad. Iran is bad. Russia is bad. Exports are good. Oil is good. Pipelines are good, too. The military is good. Israel is good. Terrorists are bad. Islamic State are terrorists and are crazy bad. International law is bad when it gets in the way of doing what we want militarily; international law is good when it helps us sell our exports.
Canada is good; at least the Harper government is good.
And so we are off to war in Syria.
Keeping it simple, the government has portrayed its decision to join the American-led mission against Islamic State — and now to extend our reach into IS-held Syria — in stark terms.
Islamic State is a brutal menace with worldwide ambitions. They are beheading people over there and, so the logic goes, if we don’t stop them they will come over here and do it too.
This week, Stephen Harper said that Islamic State’s territorial spread has been thwarted but that it remains a global threat. Specifically, it is promoting terrorism right here in Canada.
Well — surprise, surprise — it’s not that simple.
First of all, there have not actually been any terrorist attacks in Western countries planned by Islamic State. There have been so-called “lone wolves” who attached themselves to the ideology, but smothering IS is hardly likely to stop other models of vicious radicalism from popping up.
As you may have noticed, when Westerners are recruited to Islamic State they tend to go to Raqqa and burn their passports. Coming back here and doing dastardly deeds is the last thing on their minds. At the moment, anyway, it seems well beyond Islamic State’s capabilities (if not its ambitions) to wreak havoc here.
Islamic State is an existential problem if you are living in the Middle East. Especially if you are living in Iraq or Syria. It is a nearly overwhelming problem, too, if you are a neighbour, in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan or Iran.
For Canadians, not so much. At least it is not a problem remotely on the scale of, say, smoking, car crashes or gun accidents.
But let’s imagine for a moment that I am wrong, and that an unchecked Islamic State will grow and metastasize and become an everyday threat here in Canada on the scale of accidental poisoning — to choose another example — which kills hundreds of Canadians every year.
Will the current mission against Islamic State in Iraq and now Syria actually help?
The Harper government would have us believe that we are on the side of the angels. Islamic State wears the black hats. We and our allies wear the white hats.
Gosh. Welcome to the Middle East. It turns out it’s a little more complicated than that.
I want you to pause for a minute here and contemplate this graphic by the superb David McCandless, summarizing the relationships among the main players in the Middle East right now. Return when you feel everything is clear.
Okay, you are back, and I trust it is all making sense now.
But let me remind you of a few complexities the graphic doesn’t quite capture. Right now, the immediate territorial objective of the Iraqi government’s fight against Islamic State is the capture of the city of Tikrit. For the first part of this battle, the United States and its allies, including Canada, stayed well away. Why? Because the ground forces included Iranian troops led by Major-General Qassim Suleimani, whom the Americans consider a terrorist.
That would be the same Iran from which Canada righteously withdrew its ambassador in 2012 because of the Harper government’s commitment to holding the “perpetrators of terrorism … accountable.” Simple. Terrorism bad. Accountability good.
Before the Americans would agree to add their air power to the siege of Tikrit, they insisted that Maj.-Gen. Suleimani exit the battlefield. Even so, after the U.S. bombardment began, the Iranians claimed a U.S. drone strike killed two of their Revolutionary Guard military advisors. I don’t know whether you call that ‘friendly fire’ or not.
The recent history of American military involvement in the Middle East is that it takes the field as another faction in a region riven with factions — tribal, religious, ideological, national and just plain power-driven. The United States is a big, muscular, brute of a faction, capable of transforming the landscape, but it is deeply afflicted with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Since the fiasco of Vietnam, the United States has rightly been obsessed with question of “exit strategy”. That was one of the keys to the so-called Powell Doctrine that informed the relative success of the first Gulf War over the Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
But the concern with exit strategy captures a deep truth about American military power nowadays. It will come, it may seemingly change everything — but then it will probably go away again, and before too long.
I will not get into the debate here about whether Islamic State is, at its root, attributable to something wrong in the genetic code of Islam, or a legacy of George W. Bush’s failed War in Iraq. But it is undeniable that Islamic State is the direct descendant of Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaida in Iraq (AQI), which emerged and flourished when American forces were the closest thing to a sovereign power in Iraq.
AQI was deeply compromised during the period of the American “surge” in 2007.
And then the Americans began to leave.
As Secretary of State, Colin Powell famously warned about the “Pottery Barn principle” in Iraq: You break it, you own it. The Americans are back in Iraq now because they broke it.
Why is Canada there? Who knows? Perhaps we are there to “degrade” Islamic State (Stephen Harper). Maybe to “destroy” it (Jason Kenney).
How will we know when we have achieved our mission? I guess they’ll tell us.
But if the Americans are a faction in the region, we are a mere sub-faction. At some point, we will leave. And those other factions — the ones who live there, the ones for whom this is a real existential struggle — will pick up again where we left off.
It’s just that simple.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Paul Adams
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