Madam Speaker, I think not. I do not think he is that kind of an expert so why should his own citizens, not to mention Canadians and the rest of the world, accept his simple black and white view of today's world?
For those of us who are regularly exposed to American culture, his opinions seem to be more reflective of an American movie plot than the real complex world in which we live. I agree that there are certainly many rogues in this world but it is deceptively simple to paint one as a demon worth destabilizing the whole world.
In the same vein I question the idea of an axis of evil, three states that are evil and threaten our peace. From the perspective of a western democrat, there are many nations whose values and practices conflict with our ideals. Are we to go to war with them all? How ridiculous. President Bush has tried to link Iraq with September 11 and al-Qaeda but has failed to produce any evidence of such a link. This is sowing the seeds of a dangerous confusion about the relationship between al-Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Attacking Iraq would not be a continuation of the war against terror, but a deviation from it. Why? Because Iraq and al-Qaeda are natural enemies. A central tenet of al-Qaeda's jihadist ideology is that secular Muslim rulers like Saddam and their regimes have oppressed the true believers and plunged Islam into a historic crisis. To contemporary jihadists, Saddam Hussein is another in a line of dangerous secularists, an enemy of their faith. Saddam Hussein himself has long recognized that al-Qaeda represents a threat to his regime.
In 1998 the National Security Council concluded and found no evidence of a noteworthy relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Now does Iraq have weapons of mass destruction? There is no evidence of this.
Scott Ritter, former senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq and ex-marine, who testified in front of one of our standing committees, has stated repeatedly that as of December 1998 Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed and possessed no meaningful weapons of mass destruction. In 1998 the International Atomic Energy Agency certified that Iraq no longer had a viable nuclear weapons program.
In my view our minister and the international community are on the right track by reinstating the weapons inspection process and Iraq has agreed. We have a plan; let us follow it.
It is true that Saddam Hussein killed his own people in 1988. Did members know that in that same year the U.S. government provided him with $500 million in subsidies to buy American products? The next year after his campaign against the Kurds, the American government doubled its subsidy to $1 billion. Is it not a little late to pass moral judgments 14 years and $1.5 billion later?
It is also hypocritical when the western world did not prevent a subsequent genocide that killed 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994. It is also true that Iraq invaded Kuwait. The world rightly condemned that aggression and drove the Iraqi army back within its own borders. Since then Iraq has stayed there.