Mr. Speaker, I am reminded of a story that a former member of this House used to tell when we were debating the nuclear arms race in the early 1980s. The former member for Saskatoon East, Father Bob Ogle, used to tell a story about two men in a room full of gasoline. One guy had two matches and the other guy had three matches, and the guy who had three matches thought he was safe.
I think there is a lesson in that for us here. Whenever we are engaged in a conflict, or whenever we are contemplating a conflict which has the potential that this conflict has, we need to realize that it may well be a situation, no matter what the outcome, in which there are no winners and losers but rather a situation in which everybody loses when we choose war as an alternative to diplomacy.
Having said that, I would like to pick up on what I take to be a very earnest and constructive suggestion that was made earlier by one of my colleagues, the member for Palliser, but which has also been made by some Liberal backbenchers. Have we exhausted all the diplomatic options here? It seems to me, unless I have it wrong, that a lot of this has its origin in the objection by Iraq to American inspectors.
Is it worth going to war over the constitution of these inspection teams? Is it not possible for the Americans to swallow their pride, take the chip off their shoulder, and for the rest of us, by having the Americans do that, to call Saddam Hussein's bluff and say if the American inspectors are the problem, we will have a team of inspectors without Americans? We could then see what he does and see whether there is an option here that has not been seriously considered because there is so much of the American ego wrapped up in whether they are allowed to participate in these inspection teams.
It is something that needs to be considered by the government and by other governments. I was glad to hear that coming from the other side of the House. It seems to me that is one element of a possible solution that needs to be explored further.
I waited until the small hours to get on the record to say a number of things. First, I think this is a question about which persons and members of Parliament of goodwill can disagree with each other because in the final analysis it is a matter of judgment. This is in some ways a hard call for anyone to make, as to what the response of the government should be. The position of the NDP was made quite clear by my leader earlier in the day.
What I want to do tonight is say what I think this is not about. It is not about one's feelings of loyalty or one's appreciation of Canada's contribution in past conflicts, or one's feelings about the Canadian Armed Forces and the roles it has played in various past conflicts or in peacekeeping. I have heard people get up and say these kinds of things, all of which I agree with. But the implication is that because we feel good about the things the Canadian Armed Forces has done, either in previous wars or in peacekeeping, to be critical of this particular suggestion would involve some kind of disloyalty to those institutions or lack of appreciation for what has gone on before.
Quite the contrary. I am sure that veterans across Canada, like anyone else today, are debating among themselves as to what the right course of action is. I am sure you could find veterans who feel the government is doing the right thing and veterans who feel the government is doing the wrong thing. We can probably find gulf war veterans who feel one way and other gulf war veterans who feel the other way.
So it is not a question of loyalty or appreciation of these institutions or of past conflicts. Indeed, as has been mentioned on a number of occasions, the American general who led the Americans in the gulf war in 1991 has expressed serious reservations about the advisability of proceeding to bomb Iraq and has raised the question, as others have, whether this simply would not be ineffective and in some ways play into Saddam Hussein's own plan.
I say also that this is not, from an NDP point of view, a question of taking a position rooted in an uncritical pacifism, although there may be people within our party and other parties who hold to a strictly pacifist position. I heard the member who just spoke refer to Mahatma Gandhi. I am sure Mahatma Gandhi being an absolute pacifist would have absolutely no use whatsoever for the government's position on this or for the American position on this.
But that is not the position from which we are arguing this day. As members will know, we have voted in the past and spoken in the past in favour of Canadian troops participating in various contexts, in Haiti, Rwanda and in a variety of contexts in which they might have had to engage in combat or in other forms of armed activity. We have not drawn back from that possibility when we felt that it was in the best interest of that particular country or a peace in that particular region.
Again I come back to the point that what we are really debating here in many respects is a question of judgment on the position the Americans are taking at this point which the government appears eager to approve although it is going through the motions of a parliamentary debate. We sort of woke up this morning to the secretary of state for the United States, Madam Albright, basically saying that Canada was already on board. I welcome this debate but it is hard to believe that the government really came into this debate with an open mind, that things were not already well in train.
It is a question of judgment and NDP judgment is that this proposal by the United States is not warranted and that such a proposal is even more to be criticized as so often is the case because it comes with such self-righteousness. I want to explain what I mean.
It seems to me these kinds of positions would be so much more credible if they came with a little mea culpa, if they came with a little history, if they came with a little acknowledgement of the role that the west has played in creating the situation we now face. I am thinking of a number of things that should be put on the record just so that in the end somebody might still want to argue that Canada should participate in a bombing of Iraq.
There are a number of things I would like to put on the record. For one thing, it was the west that armed Iraq to the teeth. I can remember earlier in my parliamentary life when it seemed that the west was rooting for Iraq when it was at war with Iran. There was no talk then of the evils of Saddam Hussein. There was no talk then of the danger of arming this madman of a dictator, and he was every bit as much a madman dictator then. It is just that then he was doing what we wanted him to do. I say we in the west sense. And now he is not.
One cannot help but feel there is a certain amount of hypocrisy. We need to be more consistent in our attitude toward people like Saddam Hussein and not just play politics when it suits our needs. We turn a blind eye to his nature and when it no longer suits our needs we are more accurate in our description of him and may even, when it suits us, magnify it.
I have heard a lot of talk this evening, particularly from the Reform Party, about trusting our allies. Why should we have some uncritical trust of our allies? That is not a Canadian tradition. It is not the tradition under which Lester Pearson operated when he questioned President Johnson on the Vietnam War. Should we have trusted our allies in Cambodia, in Vietnam, in Panama and in a variety of other situations? Just because we are allies of the United States in NATO does not mean that we have to be uncritical allies in everything else it does, that we have to share its perception of every problem that arises in the world. The one case in which we do not do that is with respect to Cuba.
Therefore there should not be this uncritical argument offered that we need to simply trust our allies. If we are allies and good friends then, as good friends will do, we need to be able to ask the tough questions of our good friends, whether this is the best course of action.
We hear a lot about the importance of the UN. I would feel a lot better about all of this if it were actually the UN asking Canada to participate in this. But it is not the UN, it is the United States. The call did not come from the secretary-general of the United Nations. The call came from President Clinton.
Here we are, seven years later after the last gulf war, in exactly the same position. The UN is no stronger. It is arguably weaker than it was then and at that time we were all able to identify the problem that the UN was not strong enough to act on its own and therefore had to almost contract out its work in that case to this coalition, a coalition which incidentally does not really exist any more because the agreement that existed at that time does not exist today. I think that is important to keep in mind when the government tries to give us the impression that it is simply following what the UN wants it to do based on resolutions with respect to the ceasefire that came out of the 1991 situation. The agreement that existed in 1991 clearly did not exist in the security council or on the rest of the world today.
Let us talk about the UN. One of the things the government could have been doing over the last several years is working to strengthen the UN. I am sure that is what the government has in mind but the fact is there have been no serious proposals for UN reform that would enable the UN to have a capacity of its own to deal with leaders like Saddam Hussein who chose to violate its resolutions.
Instead, seven years later we are still in the position of the UN's being so weak as to create a context in which the United States takes upon itself the determination of what the UN says will be enforced.
I argue that it is not just Saddam Hussein and others who are weakening the UN. Obviously by disobeying the UN this is to be deplored. However, what is also to be deplored is the way in which the United States has weakened the UN over the last 10 to 15 years by consistently refusing to meet its payments to fund the UN.
The attack on the UN comes from many directions and for many reasons. The last thing we need is anybody getting in the context now of wanting Saddam Hussein to respect UN resolutions, to get on their high horse about how much they love the UN.
I can appreciate that coming from Canada because I think Canada's record with respect to the UN is impeccable. I do not always agree with the positions we take there, but our support of the UN has been consistent. That cannot be said about the United States.
Let us not tolerate from our American friends a lot of self-righteousness about the United Nations because the United Nations comes under more criticism in the United States of America than almost any other place that I can think of.
Again, with respect to UN resolutions, I agree that UN resolutions should be enforced. One cannot help but get the impression that some resolutions are more important than others, that some resolutions have to be enforced. Other resolutions can just lay there collecting dust decade after decade after decade. There is no mobilizing of the international community to enforce these resolutions.
I say again, just a little humility when it comes to this so that we can avoid this sort of jingoistic, uncritical attitude which, as soon as we get into this kind of situation, all of a sudden our side, our civilization, we can do no wrong, we have always done things the right way, we have never done anything wrong, we are the good guys.
I think we are the good guys in comparison to Saddam Hussein, but we are not the good guys in the sense that we have contributed to the situation in which we now find ourselves in a variety of ways.
Again, with respect to the question of respecting international judgments, UN resolutions. We have a World Court ruling on nuclear weapons. Do I see the nations of the nuclear club of this world saying there is an international judgment? They have ruled nuclear weapons to be criminal, but no action on that front.
We saw the World Court rule that the mining of the harbour in Nicaragua was illegal. Did the United States pull up stakes and stop what it was doing in Nicaragua?
The list goes on and on and on of occasions when the United States has not shown respect for UN resolutions and for other international judgments that have been made about its behaviour.
That does not make what the United States wants to do in the case of Iraq wrong on the face of it or in principle. All I ask is just a little more humility when it comes to these things and some acknowledgement of the fact that when it comes to respecting international judgments, the Americans are very much in a position of not being in a position where they can rightfully cast the first stone.
There are a number of other things, the position of the Kurds. Any resolution of the Iraqi situation has to deal with the reality of the Kurdish people but we do not see any action on that front on the part of the Canadian government. Why? Because of our NATO ally, Turkey, which does not want to deal with the reality of the Kurdish people as a people.
Our hands are tied there with respect to the Kurds so that the Kurds, whether in Iraq, Iran or in Turkey, are being persecuted. Finally with respect to weapons of mass destruction, Iraq is not the only country with weapons of mass destruction. There are many countries with weapons of mass destruction.
What we need is a global arms control regime that will deal with this because surely the solution is not bombing every country that has weapons of mass destruction and will not get rid of them.
That is not the solution and may not be much of a solution from a scientific point of view because I am just a lay person when it comes to this. If there is anthrax stored somewhere, is bombing it a solution?
My idea of when things get bombed is that things explode and things get scattered all over the place. The idea of anthrax and everything else being scattered all over the place as a result of bombing does not seem to be a very good idea. We may very well be getting into a situation that we cannot anticipate.
That is all the more reason every possible avenue should be explored before a military solution is sought. We in the NDP do not feel that has been done which is why we are taking the position we are in Parliament today.