The ISIS Crisis

In the op/ed columns of newspapers and on blogs on the internet and in commentary on television and radio, a debate is raging over the necessity of “boots on the ground”. The question is one of how to deal with ISIS – not the ancient Egyptian goddess but the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria – the Sunni jihadist organization that has seized control of a large chunk of territory on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border and which earlier this year proclaimed itself to be a caliphate. We have been hearing news stories about the atrocities this group has perpetrated, from the ethnic cleansing of the Yazidi to the mass kidnapping of Christian girls to the beheading of Western journalists, for months and for those carrying out the aforementioned debate, it is a matter of whether air strikes would be a sufficient response or whether a ground invasion is necessary. It is taken as a given by both sides that military intervention of some sort or another is necessary..

That military action against ISIS is necessary is certainly the position of our Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Last month he declared the Islamic State to be “a direct threat to the security of this country” and promised that Canada would not “stand on the sidelines and watch” in the fight against ISIS but that we would “do our part”. What doing our part entails, apparently, is the sending of Canadian CF-18 Hornet fighter jets, along with support vehicles and military personnel, to take part in an international coalition fighting against ISIS in Iraq. The House of Commons approved this action by a vote of 157-134 on October 7th and polls indicate that it has broad support among Canadians.

That support is not universal, of course, and while Prime Minister Harper’s rhetoric does raise the interesting question of what he would have proposed to do about this “direct threat” to Canada’s security if an international coalition had not already existed and neither the USA, UK, not UN showed any interest in fighting ISIS, perhaps the best argument in favour of the government’s position is to contrast it with the alternative position of the vapid and vainglorious leader of the Liberal Party, Justin Trudeau. Trudeau insists that Canada’s role in this conflict should be one of providing “humanitarian assistance” rather than combat, i.e., providing food, shelter, and other necessities to the victims of ISIS rather than helping to take out the terrorist organization that is victimizing them. This is rather akin to the man in the old anecdote about the insane asylum who proves that he is worthy of abiding in that institution by continuing to mop up a floor flooded by an overflowing sink rather than turn off the tap.

Recently, former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien weighed in on the matter, supporting Trudeau’s position, pointing to all the thankful remarks he still receives from Canadians for keeping us out of the 2003 Iraq War and saying that providing humanitarian assistance has been Canada’s way for fifty years. That is somewhat of an oversimplification, which ignores the fact that Canadians had a combat role in the War on Afghanistan authorized by Mr. Chretien himself or that we had a combat role in the original war against Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Yes, Jean Chretien was right to keep us out of the 2003 Iraq War. It was probably the only time in his life he was ever right about anything but you know what they say about a stopped clock. The invasion of Iraq began in the March of 2003, one year and a half after the attack by Islamic terrorist organization Al Qaeda upon the United States on September 11, 2001. It was this latter event that took the administration of then American President George W. Bush down a militaristic path. Now the United States, at least to any sane person, had in the 9/11 attack a clear justification for retaliation. It seemed odd, therefore, that so soon after 9/11, while its broadly supported efforts to take out the terrorist organization responsible for the attacks and the Taliban regime that sheltered them were still underway and incomplete, the Bush administration would concentrate so much effort on taking out the Saddam Hussein regime which had no plausible connection to the attacks.

The Bush administration’s official reason for toppling the Hussein regime was their claim that Hussein was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction which it was cleverly hiding from UN inspection teams. That seemed then as it seems now to be an excuse, a pretence that hid the Bush administration’s real motives. At the time those of us, left and right, who thought the Iraq War was a mistake, did so because a costly war of regime change in Iraq did not make sense when the War in Afghanistan was still underway and because we suspected that the actual motives of the Bush administration were less than noble. Whether those suspicions were warranted or not, now, looking on it from the perspective of eleven years of hindsight, another reason for considering the Iraq War to have been utter folly is apparent. Namely, that it is the removal of Saddam Hussein that made the rise of ISIS possible.

The Ba’ath government of Saddam Hussein was reprehensible in many ways, of course, but what it had going for it was that it was capable of keeping jihadist groups like the one that eventually became ISIS down. If what Iraq needed was a stable government, with something vaguely resembling law and order if you looked at it from far enough away, where Muslims other than those of the predominant sect, Christians, and other groups would enjoy a degree of protection and not be completely trampled on, then Saddam Hussein was the best of all possible bad options.

Whatever the non-ideological motivations of the Bush administration might have been, two overarching ideological principles can be seen to have guided its military actions. The first is the idea of “taking the fight to the enemy”, i.e., going overseas to take out the terrorists before they can attack us in Western countries. The second is the idea is that terrorism is the product of and supported by non-democratic governments which should therefore be replaced by democratic ones wherever possible. If the “War on Terror” was an expression of the first idea, the Iraq War embodied the second.

The current President of the United States has been criticized by many for his handling of international affairs. Frequently this takes the form of comparing him negatively to George W. Bush – whereas the latter was decisive, firm, and strong, Obama is indecisive, wishy-washy, and weak. However much truth there may be in this, I would suggest that with regards to international affairs, Obama deserves the most criticism for the area in which he and Bush are most alike, namely their naïve belief in democracy as a universal force for good.

By removing the dictator who kept such forces at bay in Iraq, in the name of democracy, Bush created the conditions that led to the rise of ISIS there, just as his insistence upon democratic elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip only empowered and gave a sort of pseudo-legitimacy to the terrorist organization Hamas. Obama received much criticism for not following through on the “line in the sand” rhetoric he directed against the government of Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War, but, while this did cause the United States to lose a great deal of “face”, perhaps the bigger problem was that he had thrown his support behind the rebels, when the weakening of the Assad regime is precisely what led to the rise of ISIS on the Syrian side of the border. Consistently, Obama like Bush before him, has supported rebel groups against strongman governments in Egypt, Libya and all across the Middle East and, as with Bush before him, the largest benefactor has been Islamic jihadists.

Indeed, if you are looking for a sound case against Canada’s involvement in the coalition against ISIS, ignore the twaddle coming out of the mouth of the son of our worst ever Prime Minister, the fact that Barack Obama is the leader of the coalition is a good place to start. To that, we could add that the coalition includes the biggest jihad-sponsoring countries in the Middle East but none of the governments that have effectively kept down and contained jihadist terrorism in the past. The same was true of the coalition George W. Bush put together for his War on Terror which is why that War was for the most part a sad and sick joke. Finally, we could make the case ironclad by pointing out that while our opponents, by establishing a caliphate, have sought to stoke the fire of zeal among their followers by conjuring up imagery from the earliest history of Islam when it was united, strong, and a virtually unstoppable juggernaut, we are once again marching into battle against them not under the aegis of the faith that defeated their fathers at Tours and the Gates of Vienna, but in the name of liberalism, the disease that is killing us from the inside.

Perhaps one day Western leaders will awaken to the fact that the best strategy for dealing with groups like ISIS is the reverse of the Bush doctrine. Instead of taking the fight to the terrorists overseas in the hopes of averting terrorist attacks on Western soil it would make much more sense to close the borders of the West to the Islamic world so that we do not have to involve ourselves in their conflicts over there. Despite the disturbing number of “Western” youth being recruited by organizations like ISIS, however, this strategy is less acceptable to progressive liberals and leftists like Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair than outright war. In the meantime, we should be thankful that Prime Minister Harper, however grandiose his rhetoric, placed very careful and specific limits on the military action for which he sought and obtained Parliamentary approval. The United States is not so fortunate. Their president is clearly in over his head and in the long run could potentially have them bogged down in a quagmire that would make George W. Bush’s look like a little mud puddle in comparison.

Mr. Obama's War

Fall is almost upon us, the kids are heading back to school, the farmers are in the fields taking in their harvest, and the air is full of the sound of rattling sabres. For two and a half years now, Syria has been wracked by civil war as jihadist insurgents have sought to unseat the Ba’ath government of Bashar al-Assad. As this sort of thing happens all the time in the Middle East until now few people have seen much of a need for the rest of the world to involve itself in Syria’s internal power struggles. Then, on August 21st 2013, something happened to change that, something which has world leaders outraged and US President Barack Obama determined that he will not go down in history as the only liberal Democrat President since the beginning of the twentieth century other than Jimmy Carter not to get the United States into a major war. (1) Over the Labour Day weekend, Obama announced his belief that America should bomb Syria and his intention to ask for approval to do so the reconvening houses of Congress.

What happened on August 21st that has the president of the meaningless slogan of change and the empty rhetoric of hope beating his ploughshare into a sword and setting aside the olive branch of Irene so as to take up the spear of Mars?

Well, according to the August 30th press release from the White House, the Syrian government launched rockets into the Kafr Batna, Jawbar, ‘Ayn Tarma, Darayya and Mu’addamiyah in the Ghouta suburb region of Damascus. These rockets are supposed to have contained chemical weapons such as the sarin nerve toxin and to have killed over a thousand people including children.

There seems to be a strange sense of déjà vu attached to this story. The villain, an authoritarian Ba’ath government, is accused of using WMDs against its own people, therefore providing the excuse whereby the hero, the president of the United States, can justify his intervention by way of blowing things up and killing even more people. Where have we heard this story before?

It would appear that the United States is preparing for the military equivalent of a cheap Hollywood sequel.

Wars always have their supporters and their detractors, their hawks and their doves. Pacifists, who for religious or philosophical reasons are opposed to all wars on principle, have also been around for a very long time. During the Cold War, however, a new type of peacenik entered the scene who was neither a traditional pacifist nor merely an objector to a particular war. Instead, his shtick was to always condemn the United States in particular or Western civilization in general as the aggressor in every conflict and to always takes the side of the enemy. Declaring himself a realist, he affected to find a commercial motive behind all American/Western military action and to treat that as sufficient proof of the righteousness of the other side. Although Soviet infiltration undoubtedly played a part in creating this new type of peace activist he has survived the collapse of his patron and has continued to oppose all American and Western military action in the decades since the Cold War ended. It is to no credit to him that more often than not that military action deserved opposition and it is more than a little ironic that if any American president could be said to be his president, i.e., the president who represents who he is and what he stands for, it is the man currently beating the drums for war in Washington D.C.

That irony, I am afraid, will not be enough to put a smile on the faces of Syria’s Christian minority. Ten years ago, when the American government against all common sense and reason went into Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s Christians paid a terrible price for George W. Bush’s decision to bring the blessings of liberal democracy to their country. Should the United States take out the Assad government the same fate will befall Syria’s Christians as yet another Middle Eastern country falls under the control of jihadists.

Not that such considerations are likely to affect Obama’s decision. A little over a year ago he told the press that the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” which, if crossed by Assad would mean that the United States would intervene in the civil war. By making this remark he thereby informed the Syrian insurgents of exactly what they would have to do to get the United States to enter the war on their side, i.e., stage a chemical attack and blame it on the government.

The White House has dismissed this interpretation of the events of August 21st, saying “We assess that the scenario in which the opposition executed the attack on August 21 is highly unlikely” (2) just as Obama is now trying to pass the responsibility for his remarks off on everybody else by saying “I didn’t set a red line; the world set a red line.” (3) Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, the Rockford Institute’s foreign affairs expert, however, has made a compelling case that the attack was, in fact, a false flag perpetrated by the insurgents. He argues that Assad had no reason to use chemical weapons because he was winning the war and every reason not to use them because UN chemical weapons experts had just arrived on the scene. The insurgents, however, had plenty of reason to conduct a chemical attack and try to pin it on Assad and have a history of attempting to fake such incidents to garner world sympathy. (4)

These arguments make a lot of sense – certainly a lot more sense than the Obama administration’s case for bombing Syria. The Russian government maintains that the rebels were behind the attack and claims that it presented evidence to the UN earlier this year about the Syrian rebels having used chemical weapons – sarin gas specifically – in Khan al-Assal, a suburb of Aleppo last March. (5) Alternatively, there are reports that the Syrian rebels have actually admitted being responsible for the attack in Ghouta, claiming they had mishandled chemical weapons given them by the Saudis. (6)

Even if Assad’s forces were proven to be behind the chemical attacks, however, it would make little sense to bomb Syria in response. “We don’t want you to use chemical weapons to kill your own people so to punish you for doing so we are going to kill even more of your own people by dropping powerful explosives upon them.” What kind of insane reasoning is that?

There are those who maintain that Obama has to bomb Syria in order to save face and maintain American and Western credibility. Oddly, this position always seems to go hand in glove with the counsel of haste – bomb first, ask questions later, the longer you put it off the more credibility you will lose. What will happen to American credibility, however, if Obama bombs Syria and it is later conclusively shown that the rebels were behind the chemical attack?

What happened to American credibility ten years ago when the hidden weapons of mass destruction for which the Bush administration had pled an urgent necessity to depose Saddam Hussein failed to materialize?

When the Cold War ended, the first president Bush announced the dawn of a “New World Order”, in which a coalition of the free nations of the world, led by the United States, would police the world against aggressors. The first test of this new Pax Americana was the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. The Americans ended that occupation in Operation Desert Storm with a broad international coalition behind them. Since then, every subsequent American administration has followed the precedent set by the first Bush and continued his policy of using American military might to police the affairs of the nations of the world. With each successive administration, the coalition of nations standing behind the United States has shrunk as international support for her leadership has dwindled.

Today, Obama can count on the support of our own Prime Minister, Stephen Harper and of French President Francois Hollande. British Prime Minister David Cameron would like to support Obama but the British Parliament has said no. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wishes to see the Americans take out Assad and Turkey is taking a similar line. There is notably less support for bombing Syria today than there was for invading Iraq ten years ago.

In fact it is difficult to see why Obama has even this much support. Bombing Syria will not accomplish anything other than more death and destruction and could create worse problems in the form of a larger conflict with Iran and Russia. Should the United States use its military might to depose Assad, as Israel’s Netanyahu wishes, the new government is unlikely to be an improvement, except perhaps from the perspective of Islamic fundamentalists.

Of course it remains to be seen whether Obama will actually do anything. When he announced that he was seeking Congressional approval for the air strikes he made it clear that he believes he is within his constitutional rights to order such strikes upon his own authority. Whether or not that is actually the case, having sought Congressional approval, he is unlikely to order the bombings if such approval is withheld. He has scheduled an address to the American nation for next Tuesday, in which he will explain why he believes bombing Syria is the right thing to do and why Congress should give him the approval he seeks.

Perhaps in that speech it will suddenly become clear that bombing Syria is the thing to do, that it ought to be done without delay, and that all objections are moot and pointless. Perhaps the American president will provide incontrovertible evidence that the Assad government was actually behind the chemical attack of August 21st, that he did not actually stick his foot in his mouth when he gave that “red line” ultimatum last year, and that if bombs do not immediately fall upon Damascus Assad’s agents will unleash sarin gas in Washington DC, New York, Tel Aviv, Ottawa, London, Toronto and Paris.

For some reason I am not holding my breath in anticipation of that.

(1) Woodrow Wilson got the United States into World War I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt got them into World War II, Harry Truman into Korea, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Lyndon Johnson got them into Vietnam, and Bill Clinton got them involved in the various ethnic conflicts of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, including the Kosovo War of 1999.

(2) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/30/government-assessment-syrian-government-s-use-chemical-weapons-august-21

(3) http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/4/obama-says-red-line-on-syria-belongs-to-the-world/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

(4) http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2013/08/27/syria-a-classic-false-flag-atrocity/

(5) http://www.wnd.com/2013/09/russians-rebels-used-sarin-in-aleppo/

(6) http://www.mintpressnews.com/witnesses-of-gas-attack-say-saudis-supplied-rebels-with-chemical-weapons/168135/