Ready, Aye Ready

That noble motto of the Royal Canadian Navy can now perhaps perversely be described as the modus vivendi of Justin Trudeau in his ongoing efforts to get on the right side of Donald Trump. The alacrity with which he danced to the Orange Ogre's tune on Syria after the latter launched his Tomahawk missile attack following Syria's gas attack on its own people should be a source of grave concern to all. Appeasement never works.





More and more people are discovering that there is far less than meets the eye when it comes to Trudeau's intellect and leadership. And, as always, it is heartening to know that Star readers are not letting anything slip by them:

Re: Trudeau following Trump’s dangerous path on Syria, Walkom, April 12

Trudeau following Trump’s dangerous path on Syria, Walkom, April 12

I appreciated Thomas Walkom’s clear insights into the crisis in Syria. It is important to note that the U.S. missile attack was illegal. Unilateral attacks, without UN approval or without imminent fear of an attack, are illegal

But I have been astounded at the Trudeau government’s seemingly automatic approval of the U.S. action. While spokespeople for the U.K. government, the UN and even Trudeau himself had stated that the chemical attack required investigation, that cool-headed appraisal ended quickly with Trudeau’s supplication to the U.S. and his mind-boggling reference to supporting regime change.

Other attempts at regime change around the world have yielded many failures and led to the deaths of many innocent people. But it seems that, in order to appease an erratic and suddenly interventionist president, we have jumped in to support this ill-conceived and war-mongering U.S. position.

Who would we install? How will this end? I doubt anyone can say, since Syria is a mess. There are many actors on this stage and none offer a palatable alternative to Assad.

I am outraged by Trudeau’s knee-jerk reaction. But, if I hoped that the loyal opposition might provide some balance, I was sadly disappointed. I watched Conservative Peter Kent on CPAC describe Trump’s actions as “courageous.” Disgusting.

Bruce Van Dieten, Toronto

It’s fascinating to watch Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s lightning change of heart. A few days ago, he was publicly cautioning that there still wasn’t firm evidence about who was responsible for the gas attack in Syria.

Now, despite still having no firm evidence of culpability, he is stating that Syrian President Bashar Assad is responsible and that his regime must go.

You wonder whether Trudeau’s Washington handlers yanked his leash, whether he just decided — after watching U.S. President Donald Trump in action — that hysteria is a good enough basis for conducting international relations, or whether he thought that playing the tough guy could rescue his sagging poll numbers, as it seems to have done for Trump.

Whatever the case may be, how reassuring that bugbears like evidence aren’t tying his hands, even when it comes to fanning the flames in a conflict that could tip us over into a world war.

Andrew Brooks, Toronto

Dear Prime Minister: I suggest that before you so quickly decide that deposing Assad is the way to go, take a lesson from what happened in Iraq and Libya when their leaders were deposed. Things ended up much worse than they were before. Deposing Assad is tempting, but could give Daesh just what it’s looking for: an Islamic state to call their own. At the very least, you should know who/what will replace Assad before diving in.

Al Yolles, Toronto

Heartbreaking And Shameful

Given our membership in the species, all of us should feel deep shame over the actions of our fellow humans:

The town has been under attack for years by Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces, yet the rebel fighters in Moadamiyeh won't give up; so the whole town is being punished.

Pro-regime checkpoints ring Moadamiyeh, preventing food and medicine from being brought in. Cut off, the town has become filthy. Locals say disease is spreading. The power is dead.

Siege warfare is an ancient tactic. Christian crusaders did it to Muslim towns and cities. Muslim armies encircled and strangled Christian holdouts. Kings, dukes and princes besieged each other's town all across Europe.

Now, in Syria, this medieval form of warfare is making a bitter comeback. And it's not just the regime's forces who use the collective punishment of innocent civilians to achieve their military goals. Rebel forces are guilty of the same crimes.

The Latest Atrocity Out Of Syria

How can a government treat its people like this? The question, sadly, is a rhetorical one, and the scenes that follow are hard to watch, yet another reminder of the terrible things human are capable of inflicting upon one another.

On Keeping Perspective

With the cacophony of voices calling for Canada to continue to "Bomb, Baby, Bomb." and Canadian miscreants retaliating against Muslims by setting fires to mosques, it is crucial for voices of reason to be heard above the din of destructive rhetoric and behaviour that is emerging in the wake of the Paris massacre. Now is not the time for the default absolutist thinking so favoured by the fearful and the vengeful, who somehow believe that you cannot deplore and combat terrorism without uncritically endorsing military action that seems not to quell the threat of ISIS, but only embolden and strengthen it.

One such voice of reason is Trevor Amon of Victoria, B.C. In today's Toronto Star, he writes the following:

Paris has suffered a terrible tragedy. More than 100 people were killed, and many more were injured. How various countries should respond to this tragedy is the question to be answered going forward.

There are four of five permanent members in the UN Security Council involved militarily in Syria, and all four have long been nuclear weapon states. Any one of these five nations could make the choice of wiping Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Yemen off of the map within the next 24 hours, but none is willing to do so. None of these four nations is apparently willing to commit to making the much smaller choice of putting significant troops on the ground either.

And of course, China is doing absolutely nothing about this terrorist situation, and you do not seem to hear very much criticism from any source about China’s inaction and apathy.
Ah, but what should Canada do? Is Canada a nuclear power? No. Does Canada have one of the top 10, or even top 20 militaries in the world? No. Canada has spent over $500 million in the last 12 months on a bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria, but are we any safer from ISIS in Canada as a result? No.

Stephen Harper found the money for a bombing campaign, but he cut money from the RCMP in an attempt to balance his budget when millions of dollars more were and are needed for the Mounties to keep Canadians safe at home.

Furthermore, the sole terrorist at the Parliament buildings in Ottawa left us with a video that explained his motivation for his actions: He was angry that Canada was military involved in the Middle East. How does our continued military involvement in the Middle East keep other radicals at home less likely to attack targets on Canadian soil?

What is our national interest here? What are our obligations to our allies? What are we trying to achieve? When will we know that we have achieved our goals?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be under pressure from many corners to do this or that in the coming days based on what has just happened in Paris. We need to take a step back here.

The Paris attacks were not of the magnitude of the Nazis marching into Poland in 1939, or the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbour in 1941, or even Al Qaeda hijacking four planes with devastating consequences on 9/11. Lots of nasty things are going on in Syria and Iraq, but there are also lots of nasty things going on in Nigeria that don’t seem all that 24/7 newsworthy, and therefore it seems that we just don’t care all that much about what is going on there.

Maybe Canada should do something in the light of the recent Paris attacks. Maybe Canada should not. Whatever Canada does or does not do there should be a reason, and the reason should be arrived at through reasoned discussion and not simply by way of emotion, ideology or perceived obligation.

The Murky Lessons Of History

Blindingly clear for some, obscure and ambiguous for others, the lessons of history need to be given close scrutiny these days, especially by our chickenhawk prime minister. Like so much else that his regime brays and sputters about, Stephen Harper's recent tough talk about the Ukraine and the Middle East conceals, minimizes, dismisses or entirely overlooks some very inconvenient truths.

Perhaps still smarting over having missed out on the first Iraqi war, which he supported, Harper seems to be eagerly embracing the latest opportunities fate has brought him. Fortunately, The Star's Thomas Walkom is there to remind him and us of some things best heeded.

During the last Iraq war, many nations, including Germany, France and Canada, officially chose to stay aloof.

This Iraq war is supported by a large array of Western nations including France, Britain, Italy, Australia, Germany — and Canada.

And, unfortunately, the opposition parties seem to have drunk from the same poisoned well as Harper:

In 2003, Canada’s Liberals and New Democrats vocally opposed going to war in Iraq. Eleven years later, both opposition parties seem onside.

Incited by the recent gruesome and unspeakably barbaric beheadings of two American journalists, historical perspective seems to be lost.

But Walkom points out a salient reminder that not all monsters are or can be dealt with with dispatch:

First, the world contains many monsters. The West studiously avoids direct military involvement in Congo’s brutal civil war for instance, even though the atrocities committed there are equally barbaric.

Second, Islamic State militants are deliberately trying to draw the U.S. and its allies into the quagmire of Syria and Iraq.

And this, of course, has happened before, with disastrous results that should have surprised no one:

Provoking America into overreaction was Osama Bin Laden’s aim in 2001. He succeeded masterfully, provoking not only the West’s ill-fated adventure in Afghanistan but George W. Bush’s subsequent and even more ill-fated invasion of Iraq.

In 2011, NATO’s military attacks on the forces of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi gave Islamic militants another victory.

Not only did NATO warplanes leave Libya in political chaos. They also allowed militants to seize weapons from Gadhafi’s well-stocked armories — weapons that have been used by Islamists throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

Yet a collective amnesia and hysteria seems once more to have taken hold on the world stage, an amnesia exploited by warmongers like Harper. In his Manichean world, the good wear white hats and the bad, black. Suggesting anything more subtle and nuanced would, I suspect, be entirely lost on him.

Avoiding Another Imbroglio: A Mound Of Sound Guest Post

This note from the Mound of Sound accompanied the post that follows:

Some of the course material I’ve been going through lately got me thinking about the conflicts raging in Syria and Iraq. I got thinking about them in the context of water and food security as well as climate change. Our corporate media really drops the ball in these situations. They look for one convenient villain, give it the pack journalism treatment, and then serve it up for public consumption. I have been writing for some time about growing tensions between Iraq and its upstream neighbours, Turkey and Syria, over conflicting demands to the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. Today I got out the maps and looked at water security in the context of the anticipated breakup of Iraq. The map that I have appended reveals how a hostile, Sunni breakaway state could wreak havoc on the Shiite south.

NATO’s former Supreme Commander Europe (Saceur) recently urged NATO states to come to the rescue in the turbulent Middle East. He didn’t overtly suggest that NATO forces be deployed on the ground in Syria or Iraq but he did argue that we need to reinforce and secure our fellow NATO partner Turkey against the insurgent forces just over its borders.

Two words that need to be kept in mind today – “mission creep.” Yes we have a clear duty to Turkey under the NATO charter, at least if it actually is attacked, but we must not allow that to extend into military campaigns beyond Turkey’s borders. The Middle East is becoming a cauldron of unrest and instability that they’re just going to have to sort out for themselves. As Western forces demonstrated so clearly in Afghanistan and Iraq, deploying “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” into that theatre yields lousy results and may even make the situation worse in the long term.

The Middle East appears to be at full boil with civil war raging in Syria and Iraq, suppression of democracy in the Gulf States, the reinstatement of military rule in Egypt, insurgencies blossoming across North Africa. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Unrest in the region could get far worse before it gets any better and the worst could last for generations, especially if outside states begin manipulating proxies in the region to expand their own geo-political spheres of influence. Cold War II could be waged along the Sunni-Shiite divide. No thank you.

Religious extremism is just one of the stressors fuelling instability across the greater Muslim world. Add to that the Iranian Shiite and Saudi Sunni sectarian rivalry. These religious tensions are compounded by the ongoing impacts of Western meddling in the wake of WWI when Britain and France carved up the Ottoman empire according to their European interests without regard to ethnic, tribal and religious realities on the ground. It never worked except at the muzzle of a gun. We needed monarchs, royalty real or imagined, and tinpot dictators to wield the sort of brutality needed to keep our newly demarcated states under control. Syria, Iraq and Iran are all products of Western meddling in the Middle East just as India, Pakistan and Afghanistan are all Britain’s doing in South Asia.

We get a lot of news reports about the civil war raging in Syria and Iraq today. The situation is so confused that it’s unclear whether it’s actually two civil wars or just one civil war being waged against two state actors. Our focus is drawn to Sunni Islamist radicals alternately known as ISIS or ISIL or al Qaeda in Iraq. Today the narrative of Western choice is that this is really all about the long-festering religious dispute between the Shiite and Sunni factions of Islam and today it’s the Sunni extremists poised to destroy Christendom (see, it really is all about us).

Back in 2003, the Muslims we feared were the Shia. Remember Muqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army? Remember the Badr Brigades? They were the intractable nasty shits that absolutely, positively needed to be wiped out if we were ever again to have a peaceful night’s sleep. So what happened? Well, the majority Shia got control of the Iraqi government and Muqtada decided to go back to his real passion – eating. His gang got absorbed into the new government’s security apparatus and got busy oppressing their former Sunni masters. Another squall in a much larger, more powerful storm yet to pass through.

Climate change is also playing a big role in destabilizing the Middle East. The crowds of young people who flocked to Cairo’s Tahrir Square might have been after democracy and an end to military dictatorship but they probably would have been crushed pretty quickly if it hadn’t been for a lot of their countrymen being furious at the government over high food prices and food insecurity, nepotism and the lack of opportunity, and various other complaints. Grievances are like a bag full of magnets. They attract and become attached. We look at the top magnet and say, “well, see, there’s the problem.”

Climate change actually sparked the brutal civil war in Syria that continues to rage. Drought triggered famine that triggered unrest among Syria’s Sunni majority. They weren’t getting a fair deal from the Alawite (Shia) government of Assad and they finally had enough. The al Qaeda bunch joined in after the uprising was already well underway. They piggybacked their religious war atop what was really a food security-driven civil war.

It should come as no surprise that climate change is also a significant stressor in the unrest in Iraq. The ‘fertile crescent’ of Iraq depends on the waters of two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. From those rivers was born the ‘cradle of civilization,’ ancient Mesopotamia. It is from their waters that Iraq irrigates its farmland. Those rivers are fed from the mountains of eastern Turkey, an area also hit with drought. The rivers pass through both Turkey and Syria and, when a region is plunged into drought, it’s never good news for the downstream countries, in this case Iraq. The Euphrates leaves Turkey to bisect Syria before passing into Iraq. The Tigris enters Iraq where Turkey and Syria meet Iraq. Within Iraq, the rivers pass through the Kurdish north and the Sunni central part of the country. The majority Shia are concentrated in the south, the end of the line for the Tigris and Euphrates. This map should give a pretty good hint at what could lie in store for the Shiite south if the Sunni extremists in central Iraq get control of that territory.



If, as many expect, Iraq dissolves along sectarian lines, this could leave the Shiite south at the mercy of their historic, Sunni nemesis in central Iraq. It could go pretty hard for the Shia at the bargaining table. Shiite Iraqis might have no choice but to seek the protection (and muscle) of Iran and, should that happen, all bets are off. The Shiite-Sunni divide could just be the next Iron Curtain for Cold War II between the Russians and Chinese backing Iran, Shiite Iraq and Syria versus the West as reluctant defender of a gaggle of rapidly destabilizing Sunni states. No good can come to us or them by allowing ourselves to be drawn into that sort of quagmire.

The conflicts underway and those to come in the Middle East will likely be multi-generational, another good reason for us to keep our distance. As we showed in Iraq, Afghanistan and, before that, Vietnam, we don’t do wars without end. To us, ten years is a stretch. and, if we ever needed a reason to wean ourselves off our addiction to fossil fuels, this one’s a dandy.

Syria: Iraq Redux

Rachel Maddow is hated by the right and all who peddle propaganda as truth. The following video illustrates why:

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Michael Ignatieff on Syria

The former Liberal leader and professor has a thoughtful article analyzing the situation in Syria with an interesting solution to the problem of Bashar al-Assad's demonic destruction of his people.

The Courage of the Few, The Cowardice of the Many

This story of how a Syrian refugee risked his life to post and smuggle video of atrocities to the West should make us all feel just a bit ashamed as so many of us seem to treat our democracy so lightly.

Syria's Torture and Murder of Its Children

Despite this being an age of almost instant communication and information, it has become very easy for us to isolate ourselves from the larger world, ensconced as we are in our protective shell of flat-screen televisions, blu-ray players, and myriad other technological wonders. Once in a while, however, the reality of that larger world breaks through that shell and throttles us.

One of those moments occurred last night while I was watching Anderson Cooper 360 as he presented graphic video depicting the kind of brutality we may have become inured to in movies but not in real life. I should warn you that this video, showing beatings and shootings of unarmed Syrian citizens, is difficult to watch; even more horrifying is the segment that deals with the torture, mutilation and murder of Syrian children, their only 'crime' being their participation in peaceful protests.

As well, if you really want to think about it, the Syrians' thirst for democracy and freedom and what they are willing to risk for it puts our own cavalier attitude toward democracy, as evidenced in the recent federal election, to shame.