Picking the Right Fight

The Prime Minister and Conservative Party are beating the war drums in Ottawa today, offering a motion on the floor of Parliament to have Canada supply warplanes in support of the US mission against ISIS. A vote on the resolution will pass sometime next week, enjoying the support of a broad majority of Canadians. It will commit more than 600 Canadian Forces, six CF-18 fighter-bombers, two CP-140 surveillance planes, one aerial tanker aircraft to a six-month “limited mission” of air combat. The cost of this war has not been estimated; but Canada’s seven-month air war in Libya, which involved similar force and equipment commitments (650 personnel and 7 fighter jets at the mission’s peak) cost Canada $347 million.

ISIS is hardly the only source of bad, scary news these days. The ebola epidemic is on-pace to kill more people than ISIS ever could and has the likelihood of a much broader global calamity.  By all accounts, the international response has been way too small and way to slow. Canada’s contribution to “humanitarian and security interventions” addressing the ebola outbreak total a mere $5 million, although Canada pledged last week to spend up to an additional $30 million. The United Nations and World Health Organization have estimated that it will cost nearly $1 billion over the next six months to fight the spread of the epidemic.

Here’s an idea for Canada: take all the economic and military resources we are so ready to spend in Iraq and Syria and deploy them against the ebola catastrophe. Canada could exercise real leadership in this fight, thereby re-establishing its moral credibility on the global stage and demonstrating that it chooses its international engagements thoughtfully.

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Reassessing the Pottery Barn Rule and the Way Forward in Iraq

Before the Bush administration decided to go to war in Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell urged caution in US policy, citing the apocryphal Pottery Barn Rule: you break it, you own it! Well, the mess has been made and, like it or not, America now owns it. But for how long?

The anti-war movement has become reenergized; and the hawks are only one step behind. The political debate in America is becoming familiarly polarized around the question of what to do next in Iraq. Everything is running true-to-form: liberals demand an instantaneous pull-out, conservatives spout dribble about “supporting the troops,” Republicans stay on-message to “stay the course,” and Democrats can’t decide what to think about anything.

The present situation in Iraq is terribly fluid. It is also terribly terrible. This latter aspect so captures our attention that we seem incapable of analyzing the dynamic complexities of the present – or of developing a strategy for the future. The cacophony of opinion does not impress me as helpful in framing the issues, much less in properly assessing how to move forward. Both the pro-war and anti-war factions need to reexamine their positions and, if they cannot constructively contribute to the formulation of policy, shut their pie-holes so that others can.