The big international
news of the day is the investigation into the crash of Germanwings flight
4U 9525 into the French Alps this Tuesday past. Current evidence from the
voice recorder and the profile of the flight supports the idea that the co-pilot
locked the pilot out and then deliberately plowed the plane into the
mountainside. It is a reflection of our
times that there is a fair bit said about the co-pilot’s religion or lack of
it, and we all know what religion it is they’re tiptoeing around.
We may never know why
this guy murdered everyone on board, but that’s life sometimes. We have a whole bunch of murderous buggers
whose intent is clearly announced to us, and there should not be a lot of
debate about what we need to do about that.
Certainly debate about “how”, but nobody who can be bothered to know
what is going on can honestly suggest that there is any other (useful) solution
to these Da’esh etc. Salafists than a bullet in the head apiece.
And yet what have we
in Canada’s House of Commons? (Legislative branch of Canada’s govt’t in case
you didn’t know) There we
see members of the opposition parties splitting hairs about whether Canada has “UN
authorization” to bomb Da’esh targets over the now-notional Iraq/Syria border.
The Prime Minister has
mocked them pretty effectively (says I; and they say Harper doesn’t have a
sense of humour) but the mendacious and clueless tripe being spewed by Mulcair
(who’s smart enough to know better) and Trudeau (who, well, doesn’t appear to
be) won’t cut much ice with the general public.
Most people see enough of what’s happening over there to know that
something has to be done about it.
The idea that this
seems to be moving toward is a (cursory) examination of why we would intervene
here as opposed to any number of other places.
One comment I saw was about how it must be oil since people are
constantly being slaughtered in Africa and we don’t get involved there. Yes, we get some oil from the general region,
but we will not roll in there and pump the place dry due to our military
action. If everything was “about oil” we
wouldn’t have an embargo against Iran, and in any event we could get by without
ME oil. If we did, however, the same
people bleating here would be braying that we’re extracting our “dirty” oil
sands (and building pipelines for it) to replace the light, cleaner stuff our
east coast refineries get from Saudi and Algeria.
As for Africa, there
is plenty of stuff we’d like from Africa, far rarer than oil. Economic motivations are insufficient for
Canada to commit armed force; that much we just won’t do. Millions of people are slaughtered in Africa (by
other Africans), but they aren’t proclaiming a world-wide empire and declaring
war on us (Boko Haram’s declaration for IS aside) so no, we don’t have pressing
interest in their insoluble problems.
One reason, sufficient
in itself I’d say, is that we simply can’t help out everywhere, but that doesn’t
mean we should sit idly by and do nothing.
Rwanda should be enough evidence to the chattering classes that having the
UN’s approval for being somewhere is not equivalent with doing what needs to be
done; the opposite is more likely as far as I’m concerned.
We could do much more
for the Kurds et al than we are, and our troops would think it worth
doing. This won’t happen, but a Battlegroup
such as we had in Kandahar would make a massive difference in stabilizing that
area. We’d lose some people, but
soldiers are paid for those sorts of risks, and in this case it’s not a lost
cause (as opposed to Afghanistan), at least as long as you circumscribe the
mission appropriately. More of our boots
(and tracks) on the ground would make short work of any IS forces who tried to
come at us (or got in our way) while the nastiest city fighting could be left
to the indigenous troops; it’s their fight at the end of the day. This provides worthwhile and much appreciated
support while not putting our troops and equipment through a meat grinder like
Mosul or Tikrit.
We could probably do
other things too. We could help the
French (more than we already have) in the Sahel, we could sort out South Sudan
(maybe) or, my own pet project; a change of regime in Zimbabwe. Bad things are happening to one degree or
another in all of these places and many more, but intervention in any of them
is neither easily practical nor sufficiently critical to our National Interest
(remember that, anyone?) to justify us being there.
So, where’s the line
for intervention? What are the criteria? This is an art, not a science, so it’s not
easy to quantify these things; what’s worth fighting for, more importantly what
worth dying for, is extremely
subjective. In the case of Kurdistan,
there are people there who a) want our help, b) need our help, and even more
importantly c) will appreciate it. I’ve
said all of this before, but it’s worth saying again. It occurs to me to put it into a rough
equation for determining where we should help out (where L=locals):
[(LWant + LNeed + LAttitude + Probabillity of Mission Success) x National Interest] > [Risk + Expense] = Intervention
An algorithm/flow
chart would do this better, but you get the idea. Weighting of factors is fraught, but if I
were to apply this to our post-2002 involvement in Afghanistan, it would not
have passed, mainly due to the PoMS and NI factors being essentially nil. If anyone with more math than me wants to refine this, go for it. It won't change anything, but I think it visualizes the thought/risk analysis process pretty well. I'd be interested to see a representation of the thought process of people who know what I know yet still think we shouldn't be helping in Iraq/Syria, especially in light of the assembled coalition. Doubt I could make sense of it though.
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