Mr. Speaker, I am surprised that the opposition would want to interrupt a debate which is profound to the parliamentary governance issue. For members of Parliament to stand in this place and vote on something as profound as whether we go to war, surely we would want to have a debate on the merits of that. I am surprised at the member. He simply wants to say yes or no today to that issue. This seems to be part of the Alliance's basic foreign policy, that we should go to war based on a simple yes or no. It is not as simple as that. We are talking about something very profound.
What is the long term agenda? What happens when we make that decision, when we vote in the House and vote for confrontation? What is the long term result of that situation in the Middle East? What happens when a hundred thousand Iraqi citizens are killed? If we have this great build up of military might in the Middle East, there must be some other rogue regimes there with which we are not very happy. Where does it all end? It is not as simple as saying shall we vote on having a war today. We have to think of the long term consequences of that.
Quite frankly, the whole motion may well be hypothetical because we are not even at the stage of discussing whether Canada should enter this conflict. Maybe the House leader will put some of those arguments before us. I question whether the motion itself, because of its hypothetical nature, should be voted on in the House.
We are debating the motion before us today. I am happy to go back to looking at the consequences of the policy the United States has entered into, this so-called national doctrine. I hear people in this town in particular say that anybody who objects to that must be anti-American. I do not believe that for one moment. I think we are pro-American.
When the word conflict is added to the fear and the combination of religion and poverty in that part of the world, we enter into a significant period of aggression. The kinds of detriment that could be caused in this country and others are not from nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. Rather, anyone who has a paint factory could create chemicals which could annihilate huge sections of populations wherever they may be.
I and my constituents are very concerned. I am before the House representing my constituents. I want to convey to the House the concerns of the people of Durham. Not only do they not want to go war, nobody ever wants to go war, but they also do not want to be committed to a long term aggression where their personal safety is also on the line and where the safety of our men and women in our armed forces is in jeopardy over an issue such as this.
The United States is not talking about disarming India. India and Pakistan are probably more of a threat to world peace than Iraq. We know North Korea has nuclear weapons and we are not talking about a war on North Korea. We are talking about war on Iraq. The issue with Iraq is these people are more of a threat to their own people than they are to the rest of the world, and that was my point.
We have to give the United Nations greater time to work and our responses to that have to be proportional to the threat of war.