Colorless Green Ideas

A decidedly un-Canadian response

Nearly two weeks ago, our government spinelessly sided with the US in rejecting a UN Human Rights resolution condemning Israel's actions in Gaza. A week later, Israel invaded Lebanon, where upwards of 40,000 native Canadians live abroad. 7 of them now lay dead, their charred remains left to smolder in the skeletal ruins of a residential neighborhood in southern Beirut. There were no Hezbollah militants in the region, nor was there any strategic reason to attack it, other than flat-out terrorism.

Prime Minister Harper's response? Chartering commercial ships to try and evacuate the other Canadians in the war zone. No denouncement of the attacks, no promises to help the UN stop this miserable atrocity of a war, no acknowledgement of the glaring hypocrisy of the supposed "global war on terror."

Canada enjoys its excellent international reputation due to its long-standing commitment to multilateralism and peacekeeping. Whenever sovereign nations have been unjustly attacked, a dictator oversteps his bounds, or a region lies on the brink of war, Canada has always been among the first to try and organize an international response. We have long stood for equality, peace, justice, and the preservation of human rights. We even had the noble audacity to defy the United States when its policies endangered those very beliefs.

I have to ask: where is that Canada now?

All I see is a cowardly puppet in its place; the empty shell of a once-great nation that would have risked everything to oppose this war, to put its peacekeeping troops on the ground and its food and water in the air.


The United States' grave mistake

And what about the United States, the world's only remaining superpower, the "great liberators" and purveyors of peace, justice, and democracy? The terrible tragedy of 9/11 allowed the US government to mobilize the collective passions of some 300 million people against the horrors of global terrorism, which they then shamelessly expended on an illegal war in a helpless sovereign state. Their international reputation plummeted while their national defecit soared, and many Americans found themselves questioning the government's intentions as a result. A successful anti-terrorism operation to follow-up would have saved face and helped to allay any doubts over the sincerity of the war on terror.

Stopping Israel would have been the perfect opportunity. Unfortunately, the US has invested far too much in its favorite satellite state to throw it all away now, and so they blamed Hezbollah, vetoed the UN, and continue to supply military and monetary aid to Israel as they indiscriminately slaughter civilians. People have addressed the hypocritical selectivity of the war on terror before, only to be dismissed as unpatriotic or even treasonous. Now, we have incontestable proof that the "global war on terror" isn't global at all, but a selective war on Islamists and Arabs.

There are well over a billion Muslims in this world, all of whom regard this war as being authorized and sustained by the United States - and they're absolutely right. They don't hate us Westerners because of our freedoms, as President Bush would have you believe. Anyone in the Middle East would sacrifice everything they have for just a taste of our freedom. No, they hate us because we've been trying to destroy the Arab world from the inside-out for over 40 years.

Whatever credibility the US was desperately hanging on to after its misadventure in Iraq is gone. Terrorism is a relative concept, and if you try looking at it from the other side of the Mediterranean, it doesn't take long to realize that we are the biggest threat to global security, not Islamic fundamentalists. Islamic fundamentalists don't have thousands of nuclear warheads or a $500 billion per year defense budget.

Allowing Israel to ravage Gaza and Beirut is the worst thing the United States could have possibly done. Osama bin Laden once said that he was inspired to attack the United States after watching Israel destroy Lebanon in 1982. How many future bin Ladens do you think are watching history repeat itself, hateful contempt burning in their eyes as the West once again lays seige to beautiful Beirut; the "Paris of the Middle East?"

As bin Laden himself once said, "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or Al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands."


The coming war

Ultimately, what started as a relatively minor inter-state conflict has mutated into a full-fledged regional war in under two weeks time, and now Syria and Iran are being dragged into the fray - a disturbing development that could have far-reaching consequences.

The US has been toying with the idea of launching air strikes on Iran for months, going so far as to consider using a "bunker busting" nuclear device to destroy its underground research and development labs. Now that Israel has implicated Iran in supporting Hezbollah, the US is faced with a very unique opportunity. While its armed forces are bogged down in the hopeless quagmire that is Iraq (which has seen hundreds of deaths this week alone), it can still use its considerable means to fight a proxy war with Iran.

However, Iran's allies are numerous - it has ties with the entire Arab League, as well as the rising superpowers of Russia and China, who are already deeply divided with the United States over issues such as democratic reform, respect for human rights, and the recent North Korean missile tests.

Iran has already warned Israel of "unimaginable losses" if it were to attack Syria, and such a retaliation would assuredly mobilize the war hawks in the Pentagon into action. Given the level of hostilities in the international arena right now, we could very well be looking at a new world-scale war.

For now we can only hope that cooler heads will prevail, and that the UN finally overcomes its identity crisis and becomes the functional institution that it was meant to be.

As always, more on this as it develops.

In the meantime, here are some excellent links to keep you reading:

• Lebanon Live Bloggers reporting live from Beirut under siege.
• The Angry Arab News Service Unfiltered, uncompromised reporting from the war zone.
• Antiwar.com A brilliant site with a wide array of articles, including this one about the coming war.
  

Please leave me your comments.

Tagged for technorati: Israel, Lebanon, Middle East