Chewing our cud in Ottawa: Canadian uselessness in Mideast
THREE CANADIAN opposition MPs go to Lebanon and suggest that maybe we should talk to Hezbollah. The Harper government freaks out. The prime minister’s parliamentary secretary, Jason Kenney, rages about how it would be like talking to Nazis. The muddled Liberals get even more muddled, and the Liberal among the three MPs resigns his post as foreign affairs critic.
...
...we’re going to talk to Hezbollah, terrorist status or not. This won’t be because either the Harper government or the Liberal party will have changed their minds, but because we’ll have to. Whoever speaks for the Western world will talk to Hezbollah in the same way as the British ended up talking to the IRA, or the French to the Algerian rebels in the time of Charles de Gaulle.How little choice we have in the matter might be indicated by this little news item. Western aid agencies trying to deliver relief to Lebanon are in a bind because, on the ground, they’ve found that the only outfit capable of distributing aid efficiently is Hezbollah, which they’re not allowed to talk to. The aid, apparently, is being distributed anyway – through Hezbollah.
There's more at the link and much of it seems eminently sensible. The author is "a veteran freelance journalist living in Yarmouth County" in Nova Scotia. Any chance the Globe and Mail could hire him to replace Marcus Gee?
The recent revelation that Jason Kenney addressed a front group for a banned terrorist organization called MEK, and that Stockwell Day had previously attended a conference organized by the same people, has garnered a lot of attention on the left side of the blogosphere. The cries of hypocrisy are well taken but I think the larger point is being missed. The issue of who's on the list of banned organizations, of who we're allowed to talk to and who we aren't, is hopelessly and stupidly politicized. The Bush administration's War on Terror™ is a war on those whose goals conflict with those of the people who maintain the list. MEK may have found its way onto the list but because their goal, regime change in Iran, aligns with White House policy, their front group continues to operate both here and in the U.S. with relative impunity.
The Bush administration is even now ratcheting up the rhetoric in support of further military confrontation in the region. Whether they really intend to attack Iran or whether it's to create an issue to dominate the mid-term elections in November remains to be seen but given the history of the people responsible for recent American foreign policy it would be a mistake to discount the former. They're crazy enough to do it. And they want the possibilities for negotiation limited. They want the other side demonized at every turn and the possibility of any kind of negotiation undermined.
It should go without saying but the discourse has become so distorted that apparently it doesn't: talking to Hezbollah isn't the same thing as giving them everything they want. It isn't appeasement until you actually, you know, do something to appease them.
At this point it seems obvious that our prime minister has elected to play the role of Dubya's Other Butler so it's no surprise that people like Kenney and Day are reading from the script with a nod and a wink towards the White House. But when all ten Liberal leadership candidates fall all over themselves to issue ritual denunciations the moment someone wonders out loud if we shouldn't re-examine our current policy in the name of securing some kind of lasting peace in the region, it indicates how well the War on Terror™ propaganda machine marketing campaign has worked. A couple of those candidates may believe what they're saying but with many of them it looks more like political cowardice than anything else.
The policies of the Bush administration regarding the Middle East, including their policies regarding Israel, have done the exact opposite of what we were told they would accomplish. The threat of terrorism is worse, the region is more unstable than ever and Iran's influence has grown. And yet not only is our current government allowing them to continue to frame the debate, but our official opposition and even much of the progressive blogosphere seems content to play along.
Good post pogge. I fear the Liberals have become a branch of the Demcocrats - equally as fearful to take a principled satand or actually oppose. Even Cherniak is now sucking up to the Cons - he is agreeing with Janke's tripe about MEK "tricking" Kenney in speaking.
Should I start calling JC Liebernam-lite?
I saw Cherniak's post and the Steve Janke post it referred to but much of what I've written here was already rattling around in the back of my mind. Even many of the bloggers who continue to be most critical of Kenney and Day seem to implicitly accept the idea that we should keep adding names to a list and refusing to talk to them. And that's even in the face of obvious evidence that the strategy isn't working. If the only people who will even talk to Hezbollah are Iranians, why should anyone be surprised that Iran's influence continues to grow?
Rebutting the course of action that Wrzesnewskyj suggested is one thing. Shouting him down and shunning him is something else again. There are conversations we should be having that aren't taking place and we ought to consider who really wins when that happens.
Surette is a great journalist.* And of course he is right. Hezbollah is not al-Qaeda. It is one of three organizations I can think of, off the top of my head, among our government's "Currently Listed Entities" with whom "we" (ie: some representative of the Western world or the UN) will inevitably have to negotiate, as the British are doing with the IRA. Hamas -- the duly elected government of the people of Palestine, many of whose cabinet ministers and whose deputy premier have recently been kidnapped by Israel -- and the Tamil Tigers would be the other two.
Well: the negotiations will happen, or there will be vast slaughter. All those groups have indicated -- by sustained good-faith action, too -- that they are (sometimes) willing to negotiate. Because they are all "non-state actors," it has been easy for the "state actors" who oppose them to wiggle them into the Bush administration's greasy "war on terror," although none of them has anything to do with conspiracies against the people of the U.S. And those kitchen-sink categories have made it easy for the state actors at least to match if not to outdo any terrorist outrage against civilians who happen to be on the other side of the line.
So it would be good to see an end to the mindless overgeneralizations and the cant. No, we can't live with some of the Hezbollah or Hamas rhetoric about Israel as they retail it right now, but that's what negotiation means. They are certainly not going to stop expressing general hostility to Israel or the rest of the West as long as they are being imprisoned or pulverized by propagandizing bullies they have no reason to trust.
Hezbollah are the legitimate representatives of about 40 per cent of the people of Lebanon, and at the moment they have even broader support than that. Hamas are an elected government.
The Tamil Tigers are another story for a separate post, but it is worth reading very closely the column that Bob Rae and an associate published a week ago in the G&M about the renewed fighting in Sri Lanka. The time of thoughtless demonizing that we have been living through has got to end.
*About Surette: There's an article of his that I have remembered fondly for at least thirty years, an article about Alvin "the Red" Hamilton, agriculture minister in John Diefenbaker's government -- not sure where we could find it now. But it was a good old-fashioned Red Tory rant. "No deep integration with the U.S.!" That was the general message, even then.
pogge...
I'm a CPC supporter, having morphed from a die-hard Trudeau-Liberal supporter for a variety of reasons that don't matter to anyone but myself.
But I agree with your sentiments as posted. Given that Hezbollah is clearly entrenched as both a military and political power in (at least) south Lebanon, it is obvious that they have to be part of the inevitable dialogue that will lead to some sort of demarche in the region.
In my view, at least, pragmatism, and facing up to the reality of a given situation, generally always has to trump ideology, at least with those using their brains.
The alternative is to continue with failing policies (and we all know the definition of insanity...repeating the same action expecting differing outcomes etcetcetc)
What with the work of Purple Library Guy here, and others elsewhere, I'm open to removing Hezbollah from that list if it's unquestioned that they 1. Originated as a Lebanese liberation force during the Israeli Occupation 2. Have targeted primarily military targets 3. Have only inadvertently killed or injured civilians. (If Israel wants to join the list as a rogue state for having "inadvertently" killed or injured civilians, then we can put it on the list.) 4. Their occasional incursions over the Israeli border are directly related to the illegal incarceration of their fellows by the IDF.
As for the G&M replacing Marcus Gee just because there is someone better who can do the job, ... don't hold your breath. There are literally hundreds of thousands of Canadians who could do a better job than Marcus Gee. There are few who could be so shamelessly stupid and loyal as him. (Actually, those are a dime-a-dozen too, now that i think about it. But why switch horses for no reason?)
The G&M is giving lots more space this morning to Stockwell Day's repetition on CTV yesterday of Kenney's comparison of Hezbollah to the Nazis and criticism of Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj. Still no G&M mention of Day's appearance at the MEK conference last December, but there is a nice little howler from Day, as you would expect, of course, any time he is unleashed to speak, especially about history. You should know that Day was born in 1950:
You should also know, as his Wikipedia entry tells us, that Stockwell Day got his start in public life defending the curriculum of the religious school he taught at 1978-85, "which caused some controversy for its alleged anti-semitism."
And the Niagara River flows ... um, uh ...