Back To the Future

In a speech today lamenting Canada’s failure to achieve a seat on the UN Security Council, Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff set out his vision for Canada’s foreign policy direction. John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail described Ignatieff’s plan as “turning back the clock”. Ignatieff’s suggestions look alarmingly like the policies of Jean Chretien, Prime Minister from 1993 to 2005. Here are the back to the future policies as Ibbitson described them, and the flawed, morally bankrupt ways in which the Chretien government and subsequent Liberal leadership has handled them.

·         A renewed commitment to peacekeeping operations, which Canada largely abandoned to concentrate on the war in Afghanistan. 

Canada’s departure from the peacekeeping scene occurred largely on the watch of the Chretien government. Canadian peacekeepers in Bosnia and Croatia during the Balkan wars were repeatedly handcuffed by idiotic rules of engagement and often under fire from all sides, watching helplessly sometimes as ethnic cleansing played out over years. Peacekeeping missions in Somalia – begun under a Conservative government - ended in utter failure for the “human security” agenda, as well as disgrace for the Parachute regiment given a mission with no chance of success. The final disgrace to the idea of peacekeeping as it was practiced on the Liberal watch was the murder of a million Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, as a powerless Canadian commander of UN forces looked on, as Belgian peacekeepers were gunned down, and as the UN Secretariat under Kofi Annan sat on its hands. The concept has been discredited, and trying to revivify it will not change the new security environment, the threat of terrorism that the Conservative government has tried to address. 

·         Spearheading efforts to ban cluster bombs 

The most dangerous thing about cluster munitions is their capacity for inflicting harm – after the battle – on civilian populations. It is a fair and civilized notion to seek their reduction or elimination. But an even more ethical approach is to call out and criticize countries and non-state actors like Hezbollah in South Lebanon who operate from and hide within civilian neighborhoods, and who launched thousands of rockets at the one million plus people of the northern Galilee from these areas, drawing defensive fire using these and other munitions on the launch sites. The Conservative approach was to do just that, while some Liberals were marching in demonstrations under Hezbollah flags, and Mr. Ignatieff himself (though he later apologized) was describing Israel’s response as a “war crime”.

·         Repudiating the Conservative government’s refusal to repatriate Omar Khadr from his Guantanamo prison. 

It has now become clear that Mr. Khadr was indeed the individual who threw the grenade that killed a US army medic; that he was involved in the placement of IED’s; that he was still reveling in his accomplishment well into his incarceration; and that his presence on the battlefield was at least as much a result of volition as of indoctrination. Notwithstanding the question of his status as a combatant, he is now an admitted murderer, and as such, as Minister Cannon’s spokesperson has said, he will have to engage in a process with no guarantees of repatriation as any other murderer might do. Like it or not, that is in keeping with existing jurisprudence. Mr. Ignatieff might do better than to adjudicate from the commons, as it were.

·         Renewing Canada’s commitment to limit global warming to within 2 degrees C.

The limitation of global warming will start and finish with the conversion of emerging massive economies like China, Brazil and India from dirty carbon-based fuels and energy production to cleaner alternatives like hydro-electric and nuclear energy. Canada’s commitment, while admirable, will be meaningless if these countries don’t stop building coal fired plants at the rate of 2 or 3 every week. Any representation Ignatieff makes that ignores these realities is disingenuous. It speaks to the inaction of former Liberal leader Stephane Dion, who as Environment Minister ignored the Kyoto protocols until it was too late, exclaiming “It is not Fair!” and then trying to blame his successors when the Liberal governments of Chretien and martin left them with a legacy of doing nothing.

·         Increasing the number of African countries receiving aid.

Most international endeavours in providing aid to Africa have encountered gross mismanagement, corruption, delay, and failure in the past five decades. UN agencies have proven inept and unaccountable. Hunger, disease, civil strife, war, and social disintegration still plague many parts of Africa. In Congo alone, over five million people have died in the fighting in the last fifteen years. In Darfur, the international partners Mr. Ignatieff would like to return to have refused to describe the horrors perpetrated by the Sudanese government as genocide. In Zimbabwe, Mr. Mugabe’s government continues to slowly strangle the country, without relinquishing an iota of control over the distribution of aid. The Liberals have fallen prey to the oldest of mistakes – doing things the same way and expecting different results.  

·         Rebalancing the emphasis on the Middle East to focus less on defending the rights of Israel and more on promoting the rights of Palestinians.

Looking around the world, the Palestinians do not suffer from a lack of advocates for their cause. Indeed, Mr. Ignatieff, both in personal conversation with me last November and in public statements has insisted that there is no daylight between Conservative and Liberal support for Israel. And yet, with the exception of one autumn under Paul Martin,  recent Liberal governments have voted with grave inconsistency on Israel in the UN General Assembly. Their MPs, from Colleen Beaumier to Carolyn Parrish, from Borys Wrzesnewskyj to Denis Coderre have used many opportunities to not only advocate FOR Palestinian and Arab causes – which is entirely legitimate, but to advocate AGAINST Israel and its defensive actions. In 2002, Liberal MP and Foreign Minister Bill Graham berated hundreds of Jewish leaders in an Ottawa speech for their support for Israeli intransigence and disproportionality at a time when Palestinian terrorists were lynching lost reservists, blowing up buses and gunning down families. If that is the kind of rebalancing Mr. Ignatieff is interested in, Canadians with conscience, fortitude, and perspective will say no thank you.

I have no doubt that Mr. Ignatieff is a man of goodwill, good intentions, unquestionable intelligence, and great erudition. He has the rare quality of focusing all of his attention and his formidable gaze on the individual he is conversing with, and in the conversation I was part of, his words were well considered and precise. He is, however, anchored to a bankrupt mindset which supports a broken international system focused on a corrupt and hypocritical world organization known as the United Nations. It is time for a Liberal reevaluation of the realities of the international system and Canada’s place within it. The Conservatives have already made that evaluation, and found that principle once again has primacy of place in making foreign policy.