Seeking To Intervene

"The Canadian government portrays itself a major player in the Iraq war but that isn't the case."
"Much of the heavy lifting is being done by Iran."
Peggy Mason, president, Rideau Institute, Ottawa

"The push to Tikrit is an independent push undertaken by the Iraqi security forces."
Royal Canadian Navy Capt. Paul Forget, Canadian Joint Operations Command

Shi'ite fighters fire a rocket during clashes with Islamic State militants in Salahuddin province, Iraq, March 3, 2015. REUTERS/Ahmed Al-Hussaini

Well, in fact, the Shia-led government of Iraq intentionally did not call upon the U.S.-led coalition air command to take part in the Iraqi offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham, ensconced within former tyrant Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit. While Iraq is dependent to a degree on the air coalition to help it in its battle against ISIS which has taken possession of at least a third of the country as part of its caliphate, it has no wish to manipulate a situation where the Islamic Republic of Iran meets head on with the U.S., its Western and Sunni allies.

The U.S. feels it has too much invested in Iraq to abandon it completely to Iran. This is a situation where the United States has truly tripped over its own large footprint. When a minority Baathist Sunni government overwhelmed and oppressed the majority Shia in Iraq, Saddam went to war with Shi'ite Iran and in that protracted conflict a million Arabs and Persians died. Now, Iran is set on a conquest of which it is assured, with the Shia-majority government of Iraq firmly in Iran's orbit.

And the U.S. finds itself reversing its traditional Middle East position of supporting the Sunni sect with whom it found much in common, their shared interest in oil; and now it is the Shias that are ascendant with the considerable but unacknowledged assistance of the United States. America's foremost enemy in the region, Tehran's Ayatollahs, responsible for the deaths of thousands of U.S. military, and still actively engaged in threats against America finds itself supported by the United States.

An Iraqi soldier looks on as smoke rises from oil wells in the Ajil field east of the city of Tikrit in the Salahuddin province, March 4, 2015. REUTERS/ Mahmoud Raouf

There are the two most obvious fronts; the nuclear file where a vile and violent, human-rights-abusing government aspires to attain complete command over all the nations in the Middle East with the export of their Islamist Revolution, Shi'ite-style, and its absorption with its aspiration to become a nuclear power to top off its grandiose dream of showing the world that the Middle East is capable of producing a super-power. In both of these areas, despite glowering belligerence against the U.S. the world's single existing super-power has become an ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Canada under its current government in particular, has an uncompromising view of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a nation whose government exemplifies the most egregiously vicious, human-rights-insulting country threatening the stability of the world order. A country whose support for proxy terrorist militias has created atrocities on a frightening scale internationally and which shows no sign of relenting in its pursuit of domination.

With Iranian general Ghasem Soleimani, commander of the elite Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force leading the Iraqi military -- buoyed by the presence of tens of thousands of Shi'ite militias with ferocious reputations for human-rights abuses themselves equal to the fearsome reputation of ISIS, aligned with Iranian fighters in Iraq -- Canada would do well to relinquish its role with the U.S.-led coalition fighting in Iraq.

The focus on Iraq by the coalition, leaving Syria's Bashar al-Assad free to conduct terrorist-style attacks against his Syrian-Sunni opponents, former citizens whom he has wholesale deprived of their citizenship, remains a decision beyond puzzling. The Conservative-led Canadian government, though at odds with its American neighbours over trade and border issues, still remains loyal to its traditional stance of supporting the United States in its military missions.

And while that support appeared on first glance to be justified, given the extent and depth of the barbaric atrocities committed by the Islamic State upon Christians in Syria and Iraq, and other ethnic and religious minorities, the Byzantine and often beyond-explicable politics of the Middle East has produced on this occasion an unpalatable coalition between Iran and its neighbouring Shia-majority neighbours that transcends acceptability taking into account its larger, dominating aspirations.

Taking into account as well that almost universally in the Middle East, governments are as brutal in their lawful punishment and their reaction to opposition, as the Islamist terrorist jihadis that threaten their rule and threaten as well the very concept of humanitarian regard for other human beings. To insert Western values into the cauldron of Islamic sectarian hatreds and tribal slaughters is to confuse moral obligation with the inhumanity of barbaric viciousness.

Liberal democracies respecting the rule of law and the obligation of human beings to one another's welfare find it difficult to interpret the 'law' of the Bedouin Islamist jungle where the fittest in terms of sheer brutality survive and the victims are those unable to defend themselves. Do we really have a place in that maelstrom of hatred and dysfunctional failures?