How can we be useful in the Middle East?
If you think we should just attend to "problems of our own," you have nothing to contribute to the conversation.
In the National Post last Friday, Time for Canada to step up again to help the Syrian people, I make the case that the greatest hope and the greatest peril in the Greater Middle East lies in Syria, and that everything either awful or favorable to the cause of democracy and stability in the region now radiates outward from Damascus.
I set out why Canada is well positioned to make some small use of itself in the cause of building a functioning Syrian democracy from the country’s mass graves and rubble heaps. Reconstuction costs alone are estimated at $400 billion, and Canada has committed a paltry $100 million or so to date. The Post subheadline: We provided refuge for 100,000 Syrians during Bashar Assad's barbaric rule. Now that the dictator has been vanquished, we can assist again.
What I left unsaid involves the rapidly diminishing returns of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, and the unimproved prospects for regime change in Iran, in spite of Israel’s 12-day war last month.
I’m open to criticism of the analysis. Set aside whether there’s anything even recognizeable as “Canadian foreign policy” at the moment and whether it would even matter. The thing is, Canadian foreign policy should matter, and we could be making ourselves useful.
But straight off the top, I have no patience for the boring, wilfully stupid we have enough problems of our own sort of response that tends to bubble to the surface of any discussion involving pro-active diplomacy, humanitarian aid or foreign intervention generally. So let’s get that out of the way.
“Problems of our own”
Quite apart from its moral indecency and the implications for broad-scale geopolitical instability, the impulse to ignore the wider world and its agonies always ends up creating far more and far worse “problems of our own” than we’d otherwise find ourselves contending with.
Because of Barack Obama’s self-confessed “mistake” of walking away from Libya in 2011 following the uprising that overthrew Moammar Gadhafi, Libya was transformed into a human-trafficking hub that ended up ferrying hundreds of thousands of migrants into Europe. The overall numbers of migrants crossing the Mediterranean in rickety vessels has dropped, but the broad disquiet, social disruption and ugly polarization that mass migration has understandably stirred in Europe hasn’t subsided.
Tunisia has now outpaced Libya as a point of departure for Mediterranean crossings, with asylum seekers coming from Nigeria, Sudan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, among other places. More than 100,000 migrants were registered for asylum in the United Kingdom alone by March of this year, more than double the number from the European migration crisis of a decade ago. This year alone, 15,212 people have already crossed the English Channel, a hike of 35 percent from this time last year.
Then there’s the matter of squandering all the blood and treasure the NATO countries poured into Afghanistan for 20 years. Things haven’t quite turned out as planned, and now Iran has joined Pakistan in expelling millions of Afghans who fled the Taliban after the unforgiveable abandonment of the Afghan people by the United States, and by the rest of us, in 2021.
Over the past five weeks, half a million Afghans in Iran have been driven back across the border into the arms of the Talibs in “one of the largest forced expulsions in modern history.” The regime in Tehran says it intends to cleanse Iran of as many as four million Afghans, many of whom have lived in Iran since the time of the Soviet atrocities in the 1980s.
Obama encouraged Americans to focus on problems of their own when he abandoned Syria to the Russians, to the Khomeinists and to Bashar Assad’s barrel bombers, back in 2013. A failed American policy of appeasement and “nation-building at home” allowed Iran to build its so-called Axis of Resistance across the Middle East. By the grace of God and the bold determination of Israel’s Defence Forces, the axis is coming completely unglued. For more about that, see The Peacemongers who gave us war.
The United States has quite a few migrant-related problems of its own just now that have been severely exacerbated by the bipartisan consensus to leave Venezuelans to the mercy of the Bolivarian dictatorship. At last count, 6.2 million Venezuelans have fled their country.
Canada’s unprecedented immigration crisis should be well understood by now. Paradoxically, it’s less a matter of displaced people finding asylum here than the result of the Trudeau Liberals’ deliberate “open borders” enthusiasm for hiding Canada’s economic inertia and the collapse of Canada’s per-capita gross domestic product behind an indefensible “post-national” annual newcomer target exceeding 1.2 million people.
All dressed up in altruism and preening self-regard, the policy was pleasing to investor-landlords and the property industry, minimum-wage big box stores and fast food franchises, stripmall colleges and the bloated budgets of Canada’s universities. The whole-of-government policy made just about everyone else completely miserable.
But I do digress, and in any case, my piece in the National Post wasn’t an argument for encouraging more Syrian refugees, which is what quite a few people who never read past headlines appear to have concluded.
I referred to tens of thousands of refugees are now pouring back into Syria from a scatterd refugee population of more than six million, fully one fourth of the country’s population from the days before Assad began waging war on his own people. I understated the case. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reckons that since Assad and his entourage decamped to Moscow last December, two million Syrians have already returned home.
My point was, for reasons I get into in the Post, Canada is understood as a friend of Syria in good standing, so Canada has a unique opportunity to make some diplomatic use of itself, in the Greater Middle East, by paying attention to Syria. If you like, you can take this observation as a backhanded way of saying Canada is unfortunately in no position to make any use of itself anywhere else in the region where it matters, certainly not in Gaza or Iran.
Sometimes journalism matters, in ways you’d never expect
In the National Post I led by recalling the story of little Alan Kurdi, and how the shocking photograph of his lifeless body on a Turkish beach caused the world to stop in its tracks and pay attention to Syria’s dismemberment, which was at the time the 21st century’s most obscene humanitarian catastrophe.
What I left unreported involves the backstory to the way the death of Alan Kurdi became a Canadian scandal of global proportions, by which I mean my own misfortune - I think I can call it that - in having broken the story. I got into a bit of that here, in Macleans magazine, where I confessed that I had no idea that my overnight dispatch about the child’s story would cause such a tectonic shuddering in the federal election of 2015, specifically, and in Canadian politics generally.
This is what I filed in the wee hours of September 3, 2015, to the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen: Alan Kurdi and the one photograph that mattered. After a brief sleep I was awakened by my editor at the Citizen, Andrew Potter, who told me over the phone that my story had changed everything about the federal election campaign. Then I noticed that my email inbox was filled with nearly two dozen interview requests, from the BBC, Al Jazeera, the Independent, and so on.
Because the photograph had burned itself into the consciousness of so many people around the world, every journalist wanted to know who the boy was, and what the story was.