In 2003, Stephen Harper wrote a servile letter to the Wall Street Journal, apologizing to Americans because the Canadian government of the day had refused to become embroiled in the Bush/Blair War in Iraq. Twelve years later, he has achieved his ambition: to play Stephen the Lionheart, Crusader.
He talks transparency, but misled parliament in October 2014 about Canada's engagement in the Middle East. He preaches law and order, but has broken international law. He has acted outside the remit of the United Nations and ignored his NATO partners. His only active, non-Muslim ally in this misbegotten adventure is the United States. Saudi Arabia, flogger of bloggers, beheader of witches, is now Harper's comrade-in-arms.
He has shown an appalling ignorance of the riptides and cross currents of centuries old, tribal, religious and territorial conflicts stretching from Peshawar to Aleppo.
He cannot support Syrian President Assad against Sunni Muslim ISIS because Iran-backed Assad, a Shia Alawite Muslim, is an enemy of Sunni Saudi Arabia. He cannot support the opposition to Assad because it is aligned with al-Qaeda. He cannot support the anti-ISIS Shia militias in Iraq because they are subsidized by Shia Iran, the religious adversary of the Saudis, to whom Harper just happens to be selling $15 billion worth of armaments.
It all seems very complex, but apparently not for our prime minister. With a blinkered, biblical certainty - and an eye to October's federal election - he has dragged us into a conflict with 20,000 religious fanatics who are proxies in the Iran-Saudi Arabia power struggle and who have simply filled the geo-strategic power vacuum created by the Bush/Blair War of 2003: 500,000 Iraqi men, women and children dead since then, and the Iraqi nation's total degradation, a human catastrophe for which Harper has given his tacit, but unequivocal, support.
In the last analysis, he has led Canada into a war which is, in reality, Harper's personal crusade which has no credible or legal justification, is unaffordable, is constantly changing and has already escalated, has neither well-defined objectives, nor boundaries, nor exit strategy.
And for which there is no end in sight.
JC VallanceFernie, B.C.