But there is one thing you do not do quietly. You do not go quietly to war.
When you are a democratically-elected government and you go to war, you do it very loudly. You engage the public, you involve all parties in Parliament, you justify the decision and — this is of critical importance — you define the mission. And then you keep the country informed on what is happening. You have to do all that because war is a life-and-death issue for the soldiers involved. It’s also a defining act for any country.
True to form, Stephen Harper has not declared himself in an open way on Canada’s disputed military mission in Iraq. He has slipped a blindfold over the eyes of Canadians and hoodwinked Parliament — going to war on a lie. And now that he has been outed, he is trying to cover himself with the last refuge of scoundrels: jingoistic patriotism. He is turning Canadian politics into a bad Kipling poem.
The resolution on the Iraq mission that passed the House of Commons explicitly ruled out ground-based combat operations. Now, Mr. Harper has deployed Canadian special forces in such a way that they have become involved in what the parliamentary resolution expressly forbade: ground combat.
The government’s defence against this egregious contempt of Parliament is fantasy fact-ball, a game in which the PM excels. Mr. Harper says that Canadians agree that our ground forces in Iraq should return fire if fired upon. That may or may not be true, but according to the latest Nanos poll, a majority of Canadians oppose involving ground troops in the fight against Islamic State.
But the real issue is that the military mission must operate under the authority of the parliamentary resolution that created it. To use the wonderful euphemism employed by Chief of Defence Staff Tom Lawson, if the mission has “evolved”, so too must the parliamentary approval.
Otherwise, it just turns into battlefield public policy, which can only mean one thing: a deeper level of involvement in the war against Islamic State that was never contemplated in the authorizing resolution of last autumn. As previous disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, commanders in the field will always lobby for more forces. They are trained and paid to believe force is the answer. Dubious; after 13 years of the War on Terror, we appear to have created Islamic State.
Consider the incontrovertible contradiction in what Lawson said last October when Canada’s air combat role in Iraq was approved in Parliament by a vote of 157 to 134, with all opposition leaders against it:
“All coalition troops on the ground in Iraq are being used in the same role — advise and assist but not accompany and not engage in direct combat. It’s very important that it’s Iraqi soldiers who do that,” he told CTV News.
So why are Canadian ground forces engaged in sniper kills of IS fighters, directing airstrikes on IS positions — 13 strikes and counting — and accompanying Kurdish forces into combat? Why are Canadian special forces spending 20 per cent of their time at the front, where they inevitably will get into more firefights? Is someone looking to sanctify this mission with Canadian blood?
These questions are vitally important because of the pettifogging and preposterous answers the Harper government has given so far about the conduct of the mission.
Consider Jason Kenney’s absurd contention there is no “front” in the Iraq War, or Rob Nicholson’s false claim that Parliament approved this ground combat role last fall. It did nothing of the kind. The most fatuous claim of all came out of the woolly mind of Government House Leader Peter Van Loan: Self-defence is not combat. It’s logic-chopping on a Clintonesque level. I did not have combat with that jihadist.
The American perspective is important in this matter because the coalition against IS is led by the United States. The Pentagon has expressly forbidden U.S. soldiers from doing what Canadian special forces are doing — because that would be a “combat” role, rather than “advise and assist”. In fact, Canada is the only coalition member whose ground forces have militarily engaged with IS — three times.
Not only are U.S. military personnel forbidden from any role that goes beyond the air campaign, planning ground operations and intelligence-sharing, their movements are carefully arranged to make sure that they are not even inadvertently put into combat situations. As Pentagon official Elissa Smith told the CBC, “We’ve been very clear that U.S. advisers are removed from actual or expected combat situations as part of our advise and assist mission in Iraq.”
Yet Stephen Harper and only Stephen Harper sends his special forces to the front, General Kenney’s quibble notwithstanding. What this government has done surreptitiously is reckless, dangerous and clearly miles beyond the scope of the parliamentary resolution that launched the mission. It also shows once again that Stephen Harper has a hard time telling the truth. Just last fall he said that Canadian forces were on the ground “to advise and to assist. It’s not to accompany.”
Mr. Harper politicizes everything he touches. Now he is playing politics with war. Playing off the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, he will stir the pot, fear-monger and falsify to leave the impression that war is inevitable — that only he knows how to practise “hard power,” to save Canadians from jihadists bent on decapitation.
As former Conservative cabinet minister Helena Guergis told me, Harper once told caucus that foreign policy is an excellent way of diverting the Canadian public from politically unpopular domestic issues. And it’s no secret the PM would rather talk about war and national security than oil prices and the economy — unlike most Canadians.
Once again, the loser is Parliament. Canadians will soon find out if Harper has managed to politicize the office of the Speaker of the House of Commons. New Democrat defence critic Jack Harris has lodged a formal complaint against the prime minister for misleading the House of Commons about the military mission in Iraq. Now it will be up to Speaker Andrew Scheer to decide if there is merit to the NDP complaint.
In order to dismiss it, as he did when the PM arguably misled the House and the media in Duffygate, he will have to find a way to torture the English language into a form that will allow these words to be consistent with what we now know is going on in Iraq: “Mr. Speaker,” Harper said, “I said ‘advise and assist the Iraqis’ … It is to advise and assist. It is not to accompany.”
While the PM morphs into George W. Bush on his publicly subsidized weekly political infomercial, 24/7, Canadians are reminded once more that truth is the first casualty of politics in Harperland.
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