Mr. Speaker, I was not planning to speak in this debate but I was inspired to speak tonight by the statement made late last evening by the member for Cumberland--Colchester, a member incidentally not of my own party. He said anytime we talk about taking an action that will result in somebody's death, we need to have a sober second thought. I wanted to comment on that perspective.
A few years ago Shimon Peres, the current foreign affairs minister for the Israeli government, former prime minister of Israel and former minister of national defence, spoke at the Canada-Israel committee dinner and I will badly massacre the words of a very eloquent spokesperson. In essence he said that for generations we have sent our children, our young men and women off to war to die. “I have done it,” he said, “and we have to stop doing it”.
War has changed. It has become sanitized and remote. We can launch bombs from thousands of miles away by the press of a button on a helicopter. We never have to face the reality of the pictures we saw of the second world war and of what it means to be involved in hostilities.
I went back and reviewed what I said in January 1991 when our country had just joined the United States and others in Iraq in desert storm. I want to quote part of what I said:
Does the 24-hour TV docudrama we have witnessed...show us any of this reality? Have we seen one dead child? Have we seen one drop of blood? Do we know how many people have died? Have we been allowed to see the reality of this war? No.
What we have seen is sanitized science fiction, Star Trek with bright lights flashing off into the universe. The Enterprise goes off into the darkness, sparkling explosions filling the sky...but obscuring the reality of thousands of living beings, breathing in a living city. People quiver in fear.
As we deliberate what Canada's role should be in dealing with the situation in Iraq, we have to remember the consequences. As war has changed, the victims of war have also changed. It used to be that 90% of the casualties of war were people in the military on both sides. That has changed dramatically. The casualties of war now are 90% civilians, 80% of whom are women and children. As we talk objectively and rationally here in this chamber let us remember that dead women and children are the potential consequences of our actions.
I cannot help but be concerned about what a terrible precedent we set if we buy into the argument that it is alright for one government to decide to take out the government of another sovereign country, no matter how terrible that government may be. What is the next government a country in this world may not like and may decide to take out? To talk about essentially assassinating the leader of another country no matter how evil we consider him, no matter what destruction we feel he may rain, can we really accept that as a reasonable, rational reaction in a supposedly civilized world by supposedly civilized countries and leaders of democratic states? I do not think so.
We cannot afford to buy into that argument and legitimize the right of a nation in this world no matter how close an ally, no matter how close a friend, no matter how important a trading partner, to say, “I and I alone will decide that a government does not deserve to continue in existence”.
I want to refer to something else I said because here we are 11 years later dealing with the same situation. We are dealing with the fact that there is a country which we believe has weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical and nuclear, capable of wreaking terrible damage on other people in other countries. In 11 years we still have not addressed where those weapons came from.
Where did Iraq get them from? How did it manage to build these stockpiles? We know the Soviet Union, the U.S.S.R. at the time, was regretting that missiles made in the U.S.S.R. were being used against Israel in the course of the gulf war.
As I said at the time, what is the country of origin of the droplets of nerve gas that may strangle the children? What is the country of origin of the biological warfare that may be unleashed on allied forces and innocent civilians? Who are the nations that have armed the madmen of the world? Who are the governments that have based their economies on weapons and technologies of destruction and death, where every year their economies prosper on a new toy of war and markets have to be found for last year's model? Who are the merchants of death who do not care where their products end up as long as their dividends are up?
We are facing the same situation we faced 11 years ago because we still have not dealt with the answers to those questions. Saddam Hussein is supplied by countries outside, by countries we call civilized, with the components of what now is such a threat to all of us.
There is a lot of discussion about what are the real motives. I believe Canada has a very important role to play. We are not seen as having motives of dominance or control or wanting to secure our own supply of energy or wanting to complete a task started 11 years ago and not completed at the time. We have a role to stand apart to assist to the ultimate to seek other solutions. Our role is to do our best through the United Nations, through inspections to ensure that if it is the weapons of mass destruction we are concerned about that they are rooted out and destroyed. We must ensure that that is our objective, not the destruction of a particularly heinous leader, or a state or a government and not the securing of our own selfish interests or those of our allies.
I have talked about the perils of war and about considering the huge consequences of the kinds of decisions we make about the terrible things that will happen to other people while sitting here in nice comfortable surroundings. Yet in the last half of the 1930s we also learned the perils of sitting back and doing nothing as evil and the threat to democracy and the threat to human life around the globe grew to the point where it dominated the world for six years. We have to balance that. We have to consider the consequences of inaction as well.
However, let us not just take action without considering the very real consequences for tens of thousands of people of the actions we take. Also let us examine our own motives.
Let us examine if we are prepared to take the same action against every country in the world that is amassing weapons of mass destruction. Think where that would take us before we decide where we are going on this.