Michael Den Tandt: NDP, Liberals in losing fight with Tories over Canada’s combat role in war against ISIS
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/01/michael-den-tandt-ndp-liberals-in-losing-fight-with-tories-over-canadas-combat-role-in-war-against-isis/
Michael Den Tandt | February 1, 2015 | Last Updated: Feb 1 5:05 PM ET
More from Michael Den Tandt | @mdentandt
More from Michael Den Tandt | @mdentandt
DNDMembers of the Force Protection team conduct a weapons handling drill in Kuwait, during Operation IMPACT on Jan. 18.
The
Opposition parties are doing yeoman duty holding the Harper government
to account over its shifting and garbled descriptions of what,
precisely, 69 Canadian special forces soldiers are doing in northern
Iraq. Here’s what good that will do the Liberals and New Democrats
politically: Zero. This is a battle they can’t win. They can only hope
to survive it.
Have the Conservatives been ham-fisted, secretive and dishonest about the so-called evolution of the ground mission in Iraq from mere training last October, to directing air strikes and killing enemy combatants, presently? Well, sure. Quite obviously.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Chief of the Defence Staff Tom Lawson, Defence Minister Rob Nicholson and others are free to declaim, like medieval theologians debating how many angels can twirl on the head of a pin, about the ultimate meaning of the word “combat.”
They are isolating a term of art, with exquisite nuance. A firefight, though combat on its face, may occur outside the rubric of a combat mission, if combat isn’t the central objective. The fact that Canadians happened to find themselves in a place where they happened to get shot at, and therefore were required to shoot back, was “unfortunate,” Conservative James Bezan, Nicholson’s parliamentary secretary, said without irony Saturday morning on CBC Radio.
This will strike the average, reasonable adult as a load of lawyerly hogwash. In the initial American assault on Afghanistan in 2001, U.S. special forces moving on horseback famously “painted” targets with lasers for the bombers above. This is a critical function in modern integrated warfare. That Canadians are doing this in Iraq now means the 69 are not mere mentors, but engaged in the fight, even as they train others. They are in combat.
The emerging criticism of the government’s new anti-terrorism legislation, inextricably linked to the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, is also fair. Bill C-51, for all that much of it reads like common sense in the face of a terrorist threat that is real, amounts to a dramatic untying of the hands of the security agencies. Cops and spies with broadly increased freedom of action, but no additional accountability or transparency: Hmm. What could go wrong?
But here’s why none of that will amount to a hill of beans, politically – and why, indeed, more strident criticism from Liberals and New Democrats, not to mention the media, will only strengthen Harper’s hand. Very simply, it’s about ISIS itself, and the way in which perceptions of the threat it poses to Canada have evolved since last September.
Over that time, terrorist attacks in Sydney and Paris, Nigeria, Yemen and Pakistan, and of course St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., and Ottawa last Oct. 20 and 22, have merged into a single, global narrative. Meantime, ISIS’ rabble of losers and sociopaths in Iraq and Syria continue to butcher their captives, most recently Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, broadcasting the executions online for maximum shock value.
These are villains out of central casting, worse than the most odious caricatures ever produced by Hollywood. For that reason many Canadians, in numbers that extend far beyond the Tory base, have apparently moved past the Afghan-war-era dialectic of combat versus humanitarian aid, to a simpler one of wanting ISIS and its fellow travellers wiped out – the sooner, the better.
At the end of December, Global News reported, more than 70 per cent of respondents to an Ipsos Reid/Global poll said they supported doing “everything possible” to defeat the so-called caliphate, even if that meant deploying ground forces, with the highest support coming from Canadians 55 or older. A recent poll by the Globe and Mail and Nanos Research found broad backing for enhanced security powers to combat terrorism. This dynamic is not likely to change any time soon, for the simple, if unfortunate, reason that there are bound to be more attacks.
Combine this with the fact that the coalition air campaign against ISIS has had some success, pushing it back from the Kurdish enclave of Kobani, that there have been no Canadian Forces casualties, thus far, and the relatively modest numbers of foot soldiers deployed, and you have a recipe for robust popular support for the course the prime minister has charted.
And there’s this: It’s clear whenever Harper speaks about Islamist terrorism that his views are heartfelt. As with the Ukrainian conflict, the moral starkness of the situation provides solid ground for him. Tactically, he’d benefit from nothing so much as for the Liberals and New Democrats to bleat incessantly about combat, non-combat and the rights of accused terrorists well into the summer, the louder the better.
The Opposition, of course, can see the pen into which they’re being herded: Which is why both Liberals and New Democrats have been restrained in their responses to C-51, and why the Grits, at least, will be under terrific pressure to vote in favour, while holding their noses at the lack of oversight. Thanks to the vagaries of geopolitics the Conservatives, against all odds, have reclaimed the initiative. It’s a curious state of affairs, for a government beset by trouble on all sides.
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Have the Conservatives been ham-fisted, secretive and dishonest about the so-called evolution of the ground mission in Iraq from mere training last October, to directing air strikes and killing enemy combatants, presently? Well, sure. Quite obviously.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Chief of the Defence Staff Tom Lawson, Defence Minister Rob Nicholson and others are free to declaim, like medieval theologians debating how many angels can twirl on the head of a pin, about the ultimate meaning of the word “combat.”
They are isolating a term of art, with exquisite nuance. A firefight, though combat on its face, may occur outside the rubric of a combat mission, if combat isn’t the central objective. The fact that Canadians happened to find themselves in a place where they happened to get shot at, and therefore were required to shoot back, was “unfortunate,” Conservative James Bezan, Nicholson’s parliamentary secretary, said without irony Saturday morning on CBC Radio.
This will strike the average, reasonable adult as a load of lawyerly hogwash. In the initial American assault on Afghanistan in 2001, U.S. special forces moving on horseback famously “painted” targets with lasers for the bombers above. This is a critical function in modern integrated warfare. That Canadians are doing this in Iraq now means the 69 are not mere mentors, but engaged in the fight, even as they train others. They are in combat.
The emerging criticism of the government’s new anti-terrorism legislation, inextricably linked to the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, is also fair. Bill C-51, for all that much of it reads like common sense in the face of a terrorist threat that is real, amounts to a dramatic untying of the hands of the security agencies. Cops and spies with broadly increased freedom of action, but no additional accountability or transparency: Hmm. What could go wrong?
But here’s why none of that will amount to a hill of beans, politically – and why, indeed, more strident criticism from Liberals and New Democrats, not to mention the media, will only strengthen Harper’s hand. Very simply, it’s about ISIS itself, and the way in which perceptions of the threat it poses to Canada have evolved since last September.
Over that time, terrorist attacks in Sydney and Paris, Nigeria, Yemen and Pakistan, and of course St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., and Ottawa last Oct. 20 and 22, have merged into a single, global narrative. Meantime, ISIS’ rabble of losers and sociopaths in Iraq and Syria continue to butcher their captives, most recently Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, broadcasting the executions online for maximum shock value.
These are villains out of central casting, worse than the most odious caricatures ever produced by Hollywood. For that reason many Canadians, in numbers that extend far beyond the Tory base, have apparently moved past the Afghan-war-era dialectic of combat versus humanitarian aid, to a simpler one of wanting ISIS and its fellow travellers wiped out – the sooner, the better.
At the end of December, Global News reported, more than 70 per cent of respondents to an Ipsos Reid/Global poll said they supported doing “everything possible” to defeat the so-called caliphate, even if that meant deploying ground forces, with the highest support coming from Canadians 55 or older. A recent poll by the Globe and Mail and Nanos Research found broad backing for enhanced security powers to combat terrorism. This dynamic is not likely to change any time soon, for the simple, if unfortunate, reason that there are bound to be more attacks.
Combine this with the fact that the coalition air campaign against ISIS has had some success, pushing it back from the Kurdish enclave of Kobani, that there have been no Canadian Forces casualties, thus far, and the relatively modest numbers of foot soldiers deployed, and you have a recipe for robust popular support for the course the prime minister has charted.
And there’s this: It’s clear whenever Harper speaks about Islamist terrorism that his views are heartfelt. As with the Ukrainian conflict, the moral starkness of the situation provides solid ground for him. Tactically, he’d benefit from nothing so much as for the Liberals and New Democrats to bleat incessantly about combat, non-combat and the rights of accused terrorists well into the summer, the louder the better.
The Opposition, of course, can see the pen into which they’re being herded: Which is why both Liberals and New Democrats have been restrained in their responses to C-51, and why the Grits, at least, will be under terrific pressure to vote in favour, while holding their noses at the lack of oversight. Thanks to the vagaries of geopolitics the Conservatives, against all odds, have reclaimed the initiative. It’s a curious state of affairs, for a government beset by trouble on all sides.
CLICK TO READ MORE
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