The Twisting Road to Victory Over the Islamic State

Even as Canada continues to reel from its first casualty in the war against ISIS, one important question must loom in our participation in this war effort is meaningful at all:

How does Canada, and how do its allies, intend to win this war?

Obviously, we intend to win it. If we didn't intend to win it there was no sense in going. Likewise if we didn't have any sense of how we were going to win it.

But how can the war be won? The war requires an endgame. And as Canada looks ahead to discussions about the potential extension of the mission, this is a necessity that must be at the front of our minds.

So what does victory over the Islamic State look like?

In my opinion, it looks a lot like a Kurdish state.

More specifically, in my opinion it looks like Kurdistan.

There should be no question that the Kurdish people have been our strongest and fiercest dog in this fight. They turned the tide of battle from near-defeat to victory in Kobane, and are generally believed to be giving at least as good as they get.

But they're always in need. Of materiel. Of reinforcements. And to that end, we in the west are not giving the biggest, fiercest dog in the fight against ISIS as much support as they need.

In fact, at least one British woman has been arrested for planning to leave the UK to fight not for ISIS, but for the Partiya Karkaren Kurdistani -- the Kurdish People's Party. They maintain the YPG and YPJ, the people's defense forces. The YPJ, specifically, is comprised of women fighting ISIS forces.

So with that in mind you'd think the PKK isn't an obvious villain in the region. Until you keep in mind that the British government -- in fact, virtually all western governments -- consider the PKK to be a terrorist organization.

It's said that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. It's been said often enough that the phrase has nearly transcended cliche. Yet in the case of the PKK, it's an obvious truism.

Until the establishment of no-fly zones in northern Iraq following the first Persian Gulf War there was virtually no safe haven for the Kurdish people. Even after the establishment of those no-fly zones the region historically known as Kurdistan remains spread out across the states we currently know as Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.

Turkey is a particular issue in regards to the PKK. Since 1984 the PKK has conducted regular raids into Turkey, where the Kurdish population lives oppressed.

Turkey, meanwhile, is a NATO country. Which would complicate matters greatly for the UK even if it's government was sympathetic toward the oppression Kurds suffer there. The UK -- and the whole of NATO -- could not help but recognize the PKK as a terrorist organization lest it alienate an ally.

Turkey has been touchy enough about the Armenian genocide, often threatening geopolitical consequences if its western allies dare condemn it. And that was something that happened 100 years ago. Just imagine how Turkey would react were the west to condemn something it's still doing today.

So of course the UK must continue to recognize the PKK as a terrorist entity. Nor can it even partake in a serious push to reincarnate Kurdistan as a country without risking a key Middle Eastern ally.

This situation is in no small part analogous to the conditions that fomented the Israeli insurgency following the 1939 white paper. Then it was a British government dependent on Arab Muftis who ultimately controlled the flow of Middle Eastern oil to the British war effort, and placating them by limiting Jewish immigration into modern-day Israel to only 10,000. Then it was Jews -- particularly in the post-war years -- defying British law to immigrate there illegally, all so the Israeli people could have a land in which to realize their right to self-determination.

Now it's Yazidi Britons defying British law in order to repel the hordes of the Islamic State so that the Kurdish people may have a land in which to realize their right to self-determination. Them, and non-Yazidi citizens such as Aussie Ashley Johnson, who have joined the fight and in some cases even given their lives. (In Johnson's case, it's Australian law he has defied.)

In that western governments haven't arrested western fighters upon their return is indication that we have recognized the legitimacy of the PKK, at least by half-measures. We're willing to tolerate western fighters doing battle alongside them, so long as they don't intend to join full-time.

Half-measures are not even half-sufficient. While the contributions of western nations to the fight against ISIS are undoubtedly valuable, we must recognize that they are not enough to win the war.

I firmly believe that, in the end, only the Kurds can win this war. There's clearly quite a diplomatic and legal minefield that must be navigated in order to maximize the west's ability to fully contribute to that victory, but no other path to victory appears immediately feasible.

In terms of issues on which Foreign Affairs Minister Rob Nicholson could attempt to insert some leadership internationally, there are worse places he could look. There are few signs of anyone else trying to blaze this vital diplomatic trail.

The Loopy Logic of Abu Anwar al Canadi & HIs Apologists

It was almost like clockwork: no sooner had John Maguire -- aka Abu Anwar al Canadi -- released his propaganda video threatening Canada and calling upon Canadian Muslims to kill non-Muslims, opponents of Canada's anti-ISIS mission began blaming this on the government.

Their argument? Terrorists would not be attacking Canada if we hadn't sent our forces -- first military advisors to the Iraqi military and now CF-18s -- to fight ISIS.

It's not a strong argument: one that suggests ISIS should be able to dictate Canada's foreign policy just because we're afraid that some Canadian Muslims have taken up ISIS' cause. It's an inherently cowardly argument: a suggestion that Canadians should submit to living under de facto occupation by the Islamic state.

That's a bad idea.

Anyone who thinks that such a strategy would protect Canada from attacks are sadly mistaken. And if they're using al Canadi's speech to support that argument they didn't listen closely enough.

From the treasonous little monster's speech:

"Have you forgotten that Allah tells us how the disbelievers will behave towards the believers? Allah says that the disbelievers will never cease fighting you, they will never cease fighting you until they turn you back from your religion, if they are able to do so. 

So, the mujaheddin continue to call you to one of two options: hijra [migration to the Islamic State] or jihad.

You either pack your bags or you prepare your explosive devices. You either purchase your airline ticket or you sharpen your knife.

You either come to the Islamic State and live under the laws of Allah or you follow the example of brother Ahmad Rouleau and do not fear the blame of the blamers."

Al Canadi -- he has comically taken a name meaning "the light of Canadians" -- has declared that Muslims in Canada must kill non-Muslims essentially just for being non-Muslims. He argues that non-Muslims will not refrain from oppressing Muslims and preventing them from practicing their religion, so it is permissible for them to kill us.

This is false and al Canadi knows it. The fact that he was not prevented from converting to Islam while in Canada is proof of it. The religious freedom of Muslims is guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That freedom does not exist in lands dominated by ISIS, not even for Muslims. In the so-called "Islamic State," it's Islam or death. Hell, it's one specific sect of Islam or death.

There are thousands of murdered Christians, Kurds, and even Muslims of what ISIS deems to be the "wrong sect" scattered across ISIS-occupied Iraq and Syria to attest to that. Many among them are children.

And al Canadi somehow musters the gall to accuse Canada of committing atrocities... all while he knows full well that his ISIS friends have been murdering children.

In short: Abu Anwar al Canadi is a liar. When al Canadi is not lying he's making claims -- that ISIS only threatens and attacks Canada because Canada fights them -- that even if he actually believes them cannot possibly be true.

They're relying on the lies and demonstrable absence of logic in Canadi's speech in order to justify their position. And in doing so I'd argue that they're effectively giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The Canadian passport bearing the name John Maguire has now been revoked. There are only two ways he can ever return to Canada: either in handcuffs, or with a bullet embedded between his eyes.

Personally, I prefer the latter.

The Unberable Lightness of Michael Harris, Part 2: Mowat Logic

Michael Harris' Party of One has finally arrived. And as Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not been the sort of politician that provokes impartial thought -- very few media types have been up to this task, and many who lay claim to a reputation for impartial thought most certainly haven't -- very few impartial reviews of the book are available.

But when I first set myself to the task of examining Harris' "journalistic" work at iPolitics, I made a prediction: that given how stale, banal and amateurish his work at iPolitics was, we could expect his book to be pretty much more of the same.

The book either hasn't disappointed, or has disappointed, based on whether or not you think more of the same stale, banal and amateurish work is a bad thing. Today, the following page of the book was tweeted by a critical reader:

In this excerpt from the book, Harris invokes Farley Mowat -- who served bravely as an officer during the Second World War, God bless his soul -- to rage against the very idea, often attributed to Harper, that Canada is a "warrior nation."

Earlier in the book, Harris makes the case that this so-called "transformation" of Canada into a "warrior nation" was rationalized largely around Canada's participation in the Afghanistan War. Harris also blathers a little about the War of 1812 -- apparently he's rather disturbed that the Canadian government would commemorate a key anniversary in Canadian history -- and a little bit about Libya, but it's mostly about the Afghanistan War.

Mowat fumed that "this son of a bitch incited Canada into becoming a warrior nation."

The logic is altogether absent. If Canada truly has recently become "a warrior nation" -- and has not always been at least partially so all along -- and that transformation was predicated on the Afghanistan War, then that transformation pre-dated Harper's time in office.

After all, it wasn't Harper who was Prime Minister when Canada committed its troops to the decade-plus-long conflict. It was Jean Chretien. He did so without a Parliamentary vote, and without any significant debate. Quite the contrast to how Harper handled the extension of the Afghanistan mission, the Libya mission, and the now-ongoing Iraq mission.

(So much for Harper the anti-democrat.)

Not to mention that Liberals were supportive of the deployment of CF-18s against Muammar al-Ghadaffi in Libya, and against ISIS in Iraq. While Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has chosen to play politics with the latter in hopes of picking up a few stray votes from the NDP, the fractures in his party are crystal clear. It's obvious that were political roles reversed Canada's contribution to the two conflicts would be every bit the same.

So there's a rather glaring factual and logical error. Perhaps we can expect that from Mowat, who for all his writing talent and his iconic Canadian writings was also known to be a little eccentric -- and who was apparently enamoured enough with Pierre Trudeau so as to gift him a dog -- but as a journalist, part of Harris' job is supposed to be to mediate such remarks against facts and against at least basic logic. He seems to have made no effort to perform that vital task in these pages.

Perhaps because if he had the natural and unforced conclusions would hurt his narrative.

All the same, I get the sense that Michael Harris' book has had its 15 minutes of fame. Booksellers don't seem to be especially enthusiastic about it, and I imagine the anti-Harper nutjobs who are the totality of the book's intended audience have already bought their copies.

I don't expect to hear much about the book in future. Excerpts such as the one above make it clear why.

Unforgiven: Defeatists, Partisans & Peaceniks Need to Put a Sock In It

Today Canada was the victim of a low-grade 9/11-style coordinated terror attack. Shots were fired at four locations in Ottawa, including Parliament Hill and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. One Canadian Forces member is dead. So is his killer, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, reported as Canadian-born and a recent convert to Islam.

Many have taken to social media to insist that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is to blame for this: that Canada is under such attack only because we have sent CF-18s to bomb ISIS militants in Iraq.

The logic is flawed, and the greater implications of it are nothing short of alarming.

The attack in which Zehaf-Bribeau participated is only one of two in the past week. Martin Rouleau, also a Canadian-born convert to Islam, attacked Canadian Forces members in what many have described as a Lee Rigby-style attack. (In actuality, Ahmad de Converti -- Rouleau's chosen name -- was far more cowardly than Rigby's murderers, who at least stayed to face the police who arrived to shoot them.)

Not long ago I wrote a blogpost noting that we're fighting ISIS in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them here. Well, as it turns out they're already here, and now we are fighting them here.

While I remain adamant that we must not treat Canada's Muslim populations as if they are all ISIS members or even as if they're potentially ISIS members, we can no longer deny that fighters for the Islamic State are walking amongst us. Perhaps not many, but clearly some. Two attacks within a week, with two victims, speak for themselves.

So suppose that we were to do what the various people who want to pin the attacks on Harper seem to want us to do: withdraw our warplanes from Iraq, abandon our alliance with Israel, and essentially allow them to dictate our foreign policy to us in order to placate these ISIS fighters already hidden in our midst. What would we have just done?

We would have just submitted to living under de facto occupation. Perhaps living under occupation by a force that we may not otherwise be confronted by, but under occupation no less.

We would have handed to ISIS, on a silver platter, Canada as their first conquest in an empire of fear.

I'd be tempted to tell these assorted defeatists (who seem to think we cannot defeat the Islamic State), partisans (who simply point the finger for political gain) and wannabe peaceniks (who seem to miss the detail that there can be no peace with organizations such as ISIS, by their own accord) that they're welcome to live like this.

But if they live like that, so do we all. So they aren't interested in it. And if they aren't content to face the reality of today's events then they just need to put a sock in it.

Fighting Them Over There So We Don't Have to Fight Them Over Here

In regards to fighting terrorism and Islamic extremism, it's the oldest line in the book, so much so that it's at risk of being dismissed as an exhausted old cliche: we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.

There's actually good reason why this line is so frequently discounted as utterly hackneyed: it's been uttered by ever proponent f of the War on Terror who, when challenged on the necessity of the conflict, had no better answer. We're fighting them over there in Afghanistan, in Iraq, so we don't have to fight them over here.

With the United States, Britain, Canada and others set to open a new offensive against ISIS in Iraq, that line will be repeated again. But this time it's more true than ever before.

Let's look back a week: British aid worker Alan Henning -- not a soldier -- was beheaded by ISIS in cold blood. In response, The Independent ran a solid black font page. It read: "On Friday a decent, caring human being was murdered in cold blood. Our thoughts are with his family. He was killed on camera for the sole purpose of propaganda. Here is the news, no the propaganda."

It's a heartbreaking story. And sadly for Britain, it's not the first cold-blooded murder they've experienced at the hands of such extremists.

Let's look back a year: Just a little more than a year, actually. Lee Rigby is murdered in the streets of London, hacked to death by two Muslim extremists. Unlike Henning, Rigby was a soldier. Off duty, unarmed, beset upon by a pair of extremists with machetes in broad daylight. They then stood by Fusilier Drummer Rigby's corpse and professed their extremist beliefs until police arrived and promptly shot them (though unfortunately did not shoot them dead).

It was the most brazen terror attack in British history. Not during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, not even on 7/7 did terrorists so readily stand by their handiwork.

And the Rigby murder was not an isolated incident. They're threatening to do it again, right in the streets of Britain.

Peace-loving Muslims -- the ones who came to Britain to escape the barbarism of these extremists, the ones so frequently overlooked at times like these -- reacted now as they did then: with outrage over these heinous acts. They know as well as anyone what fighting this kind of savagery really means. As with their extremist counterparts we may not necessarily know them to see them, but we will know them by their actions. If they haven't already, they will let us know where we stand. We should be wise enough to embrace them when they do.

Canada would at least seem to have been far more fortunate. Islamic terror plots here have been thwarted. The RCMP and CSIS will likely have to be every bit as vigilant as they have been to date in order to ensure this remains the case. Judging from Britain's example we can't expect to continue to be so fortunate by fate alone.

We know who we're fighting. We've seen their handiwork. And we fight them in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them here.

It's not a cliche anymore.

Whip Out Your Ideas, Justin Trudeau: Let's See How Big They Are

“Why aren’t we talking more about the kind of humanitarian aid that Canada can and must be engaged in, rather than trying to whip out our CF-18s and show them how big they are?” Justin Trudeau asks.

Hoo boy. Leave it to the Liberal leader so simultaneously dump on the professionalism of the Royal Canadian Air Force -- as if they specialize in global pissing contests -- and provide an idea that, while it seems on the surface to be the sort of sunny response to a global situation that Liberals are known for, also turns out to be entirely half-baked.

Not that he really has any ideas.

In the course of a speech given to the Liberal-organized Canada 2020 conference, the only thing Trudeau would commit to in terms of ideas is that he hasn't made up his mind. He has no idea how to respond to the ISIS threat in the Middle East. He has no ideas, but he insists that Canadians shouldn't listen to the ideas of the other guys.

Good gawd. This is the guy who wants to be Canada's next Prime Minister. Who Liberals want to be Canada's next Prime Minister.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will roll out his government's proposal on how Canada will deal with ISIS tomorrow. The debate will be on Friday. Yet he and his party are acting as if they'd rather debate the matter this minute... with a leader who hasn't made up his mind yet.

This could only come from the Liberal Party and be passed off as if it were a tenable position. They've learned the easy way to not expect a lot of Canadians to think even once, let alone twice, about the base fatuousness of this position. Perhaps with good reason: one cannot think about the shortcomings of even the meagre offerings Trudeau has already mustered and still maintain that narcissistic sense of unjustified intellectual vanity that so often comes with being a Liberal.

Suppose that Canada were to do as Trudeau suggests, and send only a humanitarian mission to Iraq. How has ISIS already embraced aid workers there? They beheaded British aid worker David Haines. So if we provide aid to the two million people currently displaced within Iraq -- as well we should -- but do so without any boots on the ground to protect aid workers, what happens?

ISIS takes the heads of any aid workers they can get their hands on, and probably kills a good number of the people who those aid workers are intended to help. Hell, ISIS has placed that genocide on their agenda already.

Then ISIS takes aid supplies and turns it to their own use. Whether he intended to or not, Justin Trudeau would have just provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Not by treason, but by naivete.

No wonder Justin Trudeau won't talk about any ideas he may have. And I wouldn't expect him to anytime soon. No. Instead, he'll talk about the past: he'll talk about how Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2003 (when he wasn't yet Prime Minister) being taken by bad intel regarding the status of Saddam Hussein's ongoing quest to procure weapons of mass destruction.

Two million refugees in Iraq would happily -- if not cheerfully -- explain the difference between the 2003 and 2014 scenarios to Justin Trudeau if given the opportunity.

It's not likely that Trudeau is talking to many of them. No, he's too busy impugning the professionalism of the RCAF and making juvenile dick jokes to get around to that.

It's with the detail that the polls are currently in Justin Trudeau's favour that one of his vaunted advisors -- perhaps General Andrew Leslie -- should pull him aside and tell him to get his head in the game. Should he become Prime Minister he won't have the luxury of kicking back and making penis jokes while global events unfold. If, right now, he wants to become Prime Minister then he'd better start showing Canadians he's ready for it.

The time is now, Justin Trudeau. If you have any fully-baked ideas for how Canada should respond to ISIS, whip 'em out. Show us how big they are. But they'd better be bigger and better than what you've produced to date.