The mission against ISIS fails the national interest test

[CHIMO]

“We must do our part,” declared Prime Minister Stephen Harper to justify Canada’s decision to participate in the aerial campaign against the Islamic State or ISIS.


Why this mission? The world is not short of brutal regimes that make use of child soldiers, kidnap girls, use rape as a strategy of terror, unleash poison gas against their own people, and behead those convicted of crimes in trials that bear no resemblance to a proper judicial proceeding. The idea that Canada is morally compelled to involve itself in this particular operation at this particular time is bogus.


The United States did not choose the current mission because the atrocities, real though they are, are more appalling than atrocities being committed elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa or Central America.


American intervention grew out of the Obama’s Administration’s assessment — in line with Washington’s thinking for 70 years — that the region in question is strategically vital to the United States. Moreover, the rise of ISIS is intimately related to the outcome of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the wreckage of the Iraqi state and society left in the aftermath of that invasion. If the issue was rescuing people from horrific regimes, the United States could have intervened in South Sudan or Somalia. Or why not in Saudi Arabia?

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/10/14/the_mission_against_isis_fails_the_national_interest_test.html