In which I put myself squarely in the minority of NDPers
This is not to single Harper out-it's scandalous that the Liberals refused to debate the commitment in the first place. I can't understand why a vigorous debate would "weaken the resolve of our troops." Presumably, the only military engagements sufficiently controversial to cause debates so disruptive that they actually weakened troop resolve would be utter disasters like Vietnam and, I fear, Iraq II. Those are precisely the sort of conflicts we should be having huge disruptive debates about, the better to not get into them in the first place.
Afghanistan, on the other hand, was a war that I think had to be fought, given the situation in late 2001 and early 2002, and while there are serious problems with how things are going there-the return of the Taliban, for one-I think it's still the case that a continued Canadian presence in the country will have better results than a withdrawal in the immediate future. So while I'm glad to hear that MPs will be able to discuss the issue, I think we should be staying there for now.
posted by Ian Gray | 4:58 a.m.
1 Comments:
The problem with this blog is that I ignore it for a few days because there hasn't been anything posted in a while, and bang! - almost the whole page is taken up with new material, including the world's longest baseball post which, you will forgive me, I couldn't quite get through (nothing to do with your writing).
Rather than respond to old posts in the approrpriate place, I will say that I agree with you on Iran - while there is some risk to Iran getting a bomb, it's worse to ignite a war by bombing them to stop it. In particular, I think the risk is that it will spur other countries in the region, notably Saudi Arabia, to develop their own bombs. And bombs in the hands of unstable regimes are a serious cause for worry (one reason realists like stability). But the risk is if the regimes fall; the more nefarious scenario, of a regime providing a nuke to a terrorist group, is something that might concern me more if I were Israeli, because terrorists could hope with a few nukes to wipe out Israel altogether, than if I were American, because any attack would guarantee annihalation. Would the Iranian regime, having worked so hard for a bomb, give it to groups that it does not control? Would it risk nuclear retaliation from Israel or the United States? Highly unlikely. It is, as you say, a defensive project, and not an irrational one. Certainly the Iranian president's pro-genocide ravings are disconcerting, but that doesn't mean he'll act on them. If he did, his country would rightly be wiped out.
The tiny chance that Iranian nuclear weapons would ever be used is not worth the guaranteed costs of military action, especially considering the permanent damage it would do to America's standing in the world.
Paul Rilliam Roberts had a rather alarmist piece in the Globe a few weeks ago that laid out a war scenario that, while probably unlikely, was thought-provoking. I'll paste it at the end of my comment, in case you missed it when it appeared.
In response to this post - I have to disagree with you. It makes abosultely no sense to have a debate on a deployment when the troops are already in the field. All that does is send a message that we're divided and unsure. It's absolutely outrageous that the Liberals were calling for a debate when they were the ones who committed to the mission in the first place. I lost all respect for Ujjal Dosanjh. The time for a debate is before the mission is agreed to. There should have been a real debate then; there should be a real debate, and a vote, before we committ to further deployments. But having made the committment, having sent troops into the field, it does nothing but undermine the mission and make Canadians appear divided to have a debate now. What message do we send to the soldiers when we start arguing about whether they should doing what they're doing? Now, if we had agreed to an open-ended deployment, it would be different; it would be right to evaluate where we are, whether we should continue. But we didn't - we committed for a year (I think). To start questoining that committment less than halfway into it only signals our weakness and lack of resolve. The Taliban don't have to win; they just have to outlast us. If we get all wobbly over a few deaths and start crying for emergency debates (hello, Jack), they will.
And now, for a nightmare scenario:
PAUL WILLIAM ROBERTS
ESSAY: HOW TO OPEN PANDORA'S BOX
18 March 2006
The Globe and Mail
...Here's a different scenario, and the one most likely playing to thunderous applause in the corridors of theocratic power in Qom and Tehran: Iran has already promised to retaliate, and there are nearly 1,000 missiles in place that could be fired at targets around the Persian Gulf, such as ships, airbases, refineries and oil terminals. Supertanker traffic through the Gulf will thus halt for a few weeks, particularly if insurers like Lloyds of London threaten to cancel their coverage of any ship entering a war zone, as they probably will.
The ships' badly paid crews also may refuse to sail, and Arab oil workers will take time off because of the real and present missile danger, if not out of sympathy after watching Al-Jazeera's TV coverage of Muslims yet again being pounded by high-tech weaponry. (That's bound to cause riots and strikes across the Islamic world anyway.)
It is not at all unreasonable to assume that no oil will leave the Persian Gulf for at least two weeks, stopping some 25 per cent of the world's supply. Anti-U.S. oil producers such as Venezuela also may add to this with sympathy reductions in their exports.
This will not be welcomed by U.S. allies such as Germany and Japan, which import all their oil. India and China are not just major consumers of Iranian oil, they are major investors in the country, and so will be especially miffed.
Now, China and Japan are America's biggest creditors, so they could easily vent their displeasure by dumping a few billion dollars from their foreign currency reserves to help offset dollar-based oil prices by forcing a weak dollar even lower.
You also can be sure that, three years after that invasion, things next door in Iraq won't quiet down for the new war. The resistance will step up attacks because U.S. planes will be busy over Iran — which may explain why U.S. forces there have been consolidating their bases recently. This effort includes the shifting of a whole brigade to protect Kuwait City's port, which is barely 100 kilometres from the Iranian border. Since the 1979 revolution, Tehran has often muttered darkly about its right to Kuwait's oil fields.
Iran will presumably have little compunction about sending the Iraqi resistance fighters killing machines much more advanced than what they currently provide them. Thus far, they have been cautious not to send anything easily trace- able, I was recently told by a member of the British SAS stationed in Basra, because they don't wish to give the Americans a way to link them to terrorism.
But clearly they haven't been cautious enough, since this week President Bush said components from Iran were being deployed in the powerful roadside bombs being detonated in Iraq, and last week Donald Rumsfeld said Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel had been detected crossing the border. However, America's top soldier, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later told a Pentagon briefing there is still no proof that Iran's government is responsible for such incursions.
Once the bombs fall, though, the gloves will come off, and we can expect to see in Iraq such weapons as .50-calibre rifles able to punch through body armour, multiple rocket launchers, and newer kinds of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. The American death toll will grow.
Iran may well shut down Persian Gulf ship traffic entirely, by blockading the Straits of Hormuz with sea mines and small attack boats, and by sinking ships. Around 40 per cent of the world's crude passes through this two-mile-wide channel, where Iranian forces are already situated, ashore at the head, and on heavily fortified islands.
Such a move has in fact been feared for decades, and a good deal of U.S. military planning focuses on options to counter it. When Rear Admiral L. E. Jacoby, director of naval intelligence, testified before the U.S. Senate's armed-services committee in 1999, he noted that Iran had deployed its new Russian-supplied Kilo-class submarines as part of a plan to block the Straits in times of crisis. The subs were to be used to lay mines and fire advanced torpedoes at ships attempting to enter or leave the southern Gulf.
“Iran, making maximum use of the advantages afforded by geography, has developed a sophisticated, layered defence plan for the southern Gulf and Straits of Hormuz, designed to deny access to this critical area in time of crisis,” the admiral said, describing such a defence as one “which includes minefields, anti-ship cruise missiles and swarming small craft.”
Nearly all U.S. military supplies to Iraq are also shipped through the Persian Gulf, it is worth remembering, so the U.S. forces would be among the first to suffer the effects of a blockade. If the Iranians sank a few ships there, it could well take weeks to remove them, which would happen only after the straits had been secured by U.S. military.
That would not an easy job, since it would require a major amphibious landing to capture island and coastal defences that Iran has had fortified for decades. The effort would need somewhere around 30,000 U.S. troops and involve a few weeks of bloody combat — possibly even more, since there will probably be no time to lay waste to Iranian defences by air.
When these problems are taken into account, it makes military sense to secure the Hormuz Straits before any action is taken by the Iranians. But the U.S. Navy won't contemplate such an operation until all of Iran's submarines have been sunk, which might take a week or more.
Furthermore, any seizure of the Straits will require ships to operate within the range of Iranian anti-ship missiles. One can imagine the outrage and woe of reactions back home to the spectacle of a sinking U.S. Navy warship on CNN.
But, assuming the straits can be easily secured, what will the U.S. military then do with them? An occupation lasting decades seems the only answer, and under constant threat of attack from Iranian artillery fire. Besides, Iran could still menace the Gulf with anti-ship missiles and fire artillery from many other places along its ample coastline.
What would happen, though, if the invasion stalled and the straits were not reopened swiftly? The emergency oil stocks utterly vital to the economy of the industrial world would begin to run out, along with supplies to some 150,000 U.S. troops stranded in Iraq and Kuwait. It is then not at all far-fetched to contemplate history's most ignoble and empire-quashing retreat through the deserts of Iraq and Jordan and into Israel, particularly if thousands of Iranian soldiers pour into Iraq to assist in the attacks on U.S. military camps. ...
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