Mr. Speaker, while I agree with the hon. member that multilateral action is preferable to unilateral action and that while war is not desirable and it has many deleterious consequences, I must take the strongest exception to the member's assertion that war “never solves anything” and that war “does nothing but breed war.”
I submit to my hon. colleague that for the Jews, who were rescued from the death camps in Nazi Germany in 1945, the war solved something for them, namely the salvation of their lives. Without our participation in that war, a war which began because an international organization called the League of Nations refused, after years and years of warnings, to take action. Sixty million people lost their lives in that conflict because action was not taken by an international agency.
I would like the member to comment on the following. Her own government, and presumably she, supported an active war against Iraq in 1998 through the United States and United Kingdom air force bombings of Iraq without specific authorization of a UN Security Council resolution and did so in order to try to enforce the 16 outstanding UN Security Council resolutions vis-à-vis Iraq.
Further, her government supported, with the explicit veto of the UN Security Council, NATO acts of war against the government of Serbia in order to protect the innocent civilians of Kosovo. This was another instance where regrettably war is sometimes necessary to protect lives, to protect the innocent and to maintain order against unjust aggressors.
Will she not agree with me, at least in principle, that sometimes war is necessary to save the innocent and, further, that her own government has supported acts of war even in the last five years, including one against Iraq, without the specific authorization of the United Nations Security Council?