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A recent Maclean’s column and a recent Vice article argue that ‘bombing ISIS is effective’ and that ‘there is no good reason [to stop bombing ISIS]’, respectively. Therefore our new government should reverse its election promise to stop the bombing a mere month after the election.
In a nutshell, Maclean’s questions whether that the Iraq war and the Libyan intervention were as "uniformly negative" as portrayed. Vice posits that "the West isn’t knocking-over some two-bit dictator to install a friendly democracy, it is offering air support for a democratically-elected government and local forces". They both add cute jibes about ‘evidence-based’ policy.
Let’s talk about ‘evidence-based’ policy.
Dear hawks, I find your shallow, populist (if well intentioned) cheerleading to be distasteful because I think it tends to fuel dangerously shallow, populist reactions
The second-last paragraph in the Vice piece read,
Justin Trudeau made a bonehead commitment a year ago, for entirely political reasons, and doubled-down on it during the campaign. Now, despite everything that has happened over the past year, he’s refusing to even reconsider it.
The National Post two days ago quoted a pre-election JT as saying,
"I don’t think that Canada has a combat role to play there. I think we’re on a slippery slope on a long engagement. And I think one of the things we’ve learned from conflicts like this is sending in Western forces in a combat role doesn’t necessarily make things any better."
I wouldn’t call that stupid.
If you’re going to advocate we take the time and care to murder people we don’t like with explosions, in both your name and mine, you need to do a better job.
Commit to specific goals with tangible results and realistic timelines. Be open to failure. Explain why, in your moral philosophy, it is optimal for us to kill Syrians we hate than to support or rescue Syrians who also don’t like the Syrians we hate.
It’s what we ended up doing to Germany and to a lesser extent Japan.
You brutally invade and/or occupy the whole thing. You systematically disarm everyone. You physically sort everyone in the country by ethnic, religious, etc, affiliation. You carve up the all land into self-sustaining-ish states, and you give everyone their piece of the pie. You put everyone bad on trial, and have some sort of truth and reconciliation process such that the new class of elites you’ve empowered gets to have tabula rasa legitimacy-wise. Finally, you provide massive amounts of aid to fund reconstruction and kickstart their economies. It’d be great for jobs, everywhere.
It’d probably kill a hundred thousand people, involve a million soldiers, cost a trillion dollars, and probably take ten years. Twenty, tops.