Terry Glavin
More from Terry Glavin
Published on: August 20, 2014Last Updated: August 20, 2014 5:47 PM EDT
OTTAWA CITIZEN
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird singled out Russia in harsh remarks Monday.
To properly describe the jihadist depravities engulfing Syria and Iraq at the moment, the usual lexicon of civil war, local unrest, regional conflict and so on just won’t do. What we’re facing is a global, existential struggle. It’s going to be with us for some long while, and it’s hubris to imagine that Canada can or should play some kind of “neutral” role in it all.
This was the clearest and sturdiest view articulated by Foreign Minister John Baird during a wide-ranging conversation the other day. At the very least, Baird’s remarks shed some helpful light on the Conservative government’s rationale for abandoning the antiquated habits that Canada’s comfortable foreign policy establishment has cultivated for itself in recent decades.
“The great struggle of our generation is terrorism and radical extremism. It’s more than just one country or two,” Baird said, adding that the unspeakable suffering lately endured by the Palestinians of Gaza — more than 2,000 mostly civilian Gazans dead and 10,000 wounded since Israel’s Operation Protective Edge began in July — is a function of that same global struggle.
This summer’s tragedy in Gaza is not merely another chapter in the ongoing and seemingly interminable conflicts between Israel and Palestine — or between Israelis and Palestinians — over land, jurisdiction, and borders, Baird said.”This is not a struggle between Palestinians and Israelis. This a struggle between a liberal democracy and a terrorist group. We’ve got to be strong and unequivocal.
“Some may expect this honest broker line, as though Canada were put on this earth to be the world’s referee. Well, we’re not going to be a referee between an international terrorist organization and a like-minded liberal democracy. We’re in favour of democracy. We’re on the side of freedom.”
On a broader canvas, Baird painted an arresting picture, with several bright spots — the advance of democracy and liberal-democratic values in Mexico, much of South America, and Indonesia, for instance. But these are situated against a disturbing, dark background, complicated by an enfeebling tendency in public debates to assert a “moral equivalency” between unaccountable jihadist fanatics and tyrannies on the one hand, and democratically representative nation states on the other.
“I think we’re up for these great struggles, but the challenge in 2014 is that many of us want immediate gratification,” Baird said. “You can order a pizza at your house in 30 minutes or it’s free … but the world doesn’t work that way, and security doesn’t work that way.”
John Ibbitson, currently a senior fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, says the Conservatives’ “big break” with the foreign-policy style of its Liberal Party predecessors is consistent with the Conservatives’ departure from a crumbling “Laurentian Consensus,” settling upon a new power base in suburban voters, immigrant communities and the western provinces.
That would explain a great deal: Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s approach doesn’t exactly suit the preferences of a foreign-policy establishment that has long nurtured Canadians in a self-flattering view of Canada as an “honest broker” on something called “the world stage,” and otherwise cleaved to the United Nations’ formerly glamorous reputation. Baird said those days are gone, and Canada has to adapt in order to stay useful: “The notion that somehow every Canadian diplomat should run around in a white-striped uniform with a whistle around their neck is ridiculous.”
Baird said the Conservative style is built on sturdier stuff, and the times call for it.
“Just like in the struggle against fascism in the Second World War, and just like we did during the Cold War, we are not some neutral Switzerland,” Baird said. “No, we were on the side of freedom, because we believed our values would triumph over evil.”
But Baird’s accounting of his government’s foreign-policy approach goes a bit sketchy on the question of the jihadist convulsions erupting throughout Syria and Iraq.
Canada has been noticeably generous in contributions to help alleviate the suffering of Syrian refugees who have fled the mayhem by pouring into neighbouring countries like Jordan and Lebanon. Canada has also provided a safe haven for perhaps 20,000 Iraqi refugees in recent years, and just last week the Royal Canadian Air Force joined a mostly European effort to transport arms and supplies to besieged Kurdish forces in Northern Iraq. All to the good.
Baird is also well aware that nearly half of the 50,000 or so “fighters” who have joined in the jihadist lootings, rapes, crucifixions and mass executions unfolding in Syria and Iraq are as likely to be from Alberta or Tashkent as from an Arab country. The executioner of American journalist James Foley this week spoke with a distinct British accent, making Baird’s point, in the ugliest way, that this struggle is indeed global.
But it was at Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s direction two years ago that Canada shunned the Syrian democratic revolutionary forces that presented the greatest challenge to the jihadist “Islamic State.” Said Baird: “I think the decision not to recognize the [Syrian Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces] as the sole and legitimate representative of the Syrian people was a wise one.”
That decision can also be read as easily now as an embarrassing mistake. The Islamic State has since gone on to carve off huge chunks of Iraqi and Syrian territory as the sole possession of its bloodthirsty and pyschopathic caliph, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Canada’s effectiveness in joining what Baird calls “the great struggle of our generation” is in any case sharply circumscribed by the overwhelming influence of the United States in NATO, and Barack Obama’s White House rarely gives any evidence of fire in the belly for the global struggle that Baird describes.
“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” was how Obama described Al-Baghdadi’s throat-slitters as recently as last January in an interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick. That jayvee (junior varsity) team now controls a multi-billion enterprise the size of Portugal with its own fleets of humvees, anti-aircraft weaponry and oil fields.
“We want to see a strong America, projecting its values on the world,” Baird said.
“That’s a good thing. We don’t want an America in retreat.”
But these days, an America in retreat would be putting things charitably.
Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.
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“We want to see a strong America, projecting its values on the world,” Baird said.
“That’s a good thing. We don’t want an America in retreat.”
What do you think?
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