Somebody said that I was getting picky. I do not think I am getting picky. I am noticing what was going on because I was asking a lot of those questions and I listened to the answers.
Push came to shove for the Prime Minister when Canada could not, either by itself or in concert with others, get a resolution that would do the two things that seemed to me to be the goal of Canadian policy at the United Nations over the last three weeks, which was to preserve UN unity no matter what and if it meant providing a fig leaf for a war on Iraq that the United States wanted in any event, then that is what Canada was prepared to do. It is only because the government failed in its attempt to do that, that we have the position that the Prime Minister has taken today.
The Prime Minister had a choice when the Canadian strategy failed. He could have said that we would go with the Americans anyway, without the fig leaf and without unity at the UN, but he did not do that. We are really grateful for that but we are also grateful to the millions of Canadians who marched in the streets of our cities and towns on February 15, and on other occasions, demonstrating that they did not want their country to be part of a war that they saw as unjustified and illegal in terms of international law.
All those Canadians who were at the Manitoba legislature where I spoke on February 15, or at other legislatures and other places where Canadians gather, did not have the same position on everything but they were united. Their unity was in saying that they did not want their country to either be part of a war on Iraq or contribute to the logic of war at the United Nations.
Up until today I think a case could have been made that the Canadian government was still participating in the logic of war, that the unity and the resolution that it was seeking was to extend the time a little bit more but that we must make sure that in the end we do have a war but it is a war that has the fig leaf of the United Nations approval.
I do not think we should be sad, and by we I mean those of us who have been critical of the shifting Canadian position over these last several weeks, that there is no unity at the United Nations. If unity came at the price of the UN giving its approval to a war for which there was no real justification, when the weapons inspection process could have been allowed to continue, when we still had progress being reported from Mr. Blix, et cetera, it would have been a real shame to have had the United Nations, for whatever reason, be cornered into supporting such a war, because there is no case for a pre-emptive war of prevention. If this is the logic behind the United States' action against Iraq, this is a whole new development in terms of international geopolitics. It is a whole new doctrine for the United States, one that was announced on September 20 of last year, and it is one we should all be very worried about. What if everybody took that view? There is no case for a pre-emptive war of prevention. There is no case for a war to bring about regime change.
After listening to the Prime Minister carefully, it seemed to me that I first began to think he might do the right thing last week or so when he started to say that regime change was not what Canadians were interested in, that a war in the interests of regime change was unjustified. Therefore, no case for pre-emptive war prevention, no case for a war to bring about regime change, no case for bringing the weapons inspection process to an end because progress was still being reported, and no case for a war on the basis of this being part of the war on terrorism because no case has been made for links between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda.
I think the Prime Minister came to see all those things, reluctantly. I understand, in some ways, that reluctance. He wanted to be able to do both. He wanted to be able to save, and I use the word save here loosely, the UN and the United States all at the same time; save the UN through finding something that could unify the UN and save the U.S. through providing a United Nations fig leaf for what the United States was going to do anyway.
The poison pill in all of this right from the beginning, which made it so hard to listen to all the rhetoric about the United Nations coming from President Bush, was that right from the beginning the president basically said to the United Nations, “Either do what we want you to do or we will do what we want to do anyway”. Now that is not multilateralism. That is not taking the United Nations seriously. That is seeing the United Nations as a political tool to confer legitimacy on something that one has decided to do anyway.
In any event, we now believe that the Prime Minister, if he is to be consistent with his position that Canada should not participate in a U.S. led war on Iraq with the coalition of the willing, or the bullied and the bribed, or whatever one wants to call them, if he feels that Canada should not participate in this particular war, then I do not think Canadian Forces personnel, those who are on exchange with particular American units that are going to be involved in this war, should be allowed to participate in the war either. It would be inconsistent and hypocritical on our part.
I am not talking about the ships in the gulf. They are there as part of the war on terrorism. We may have had our disagreements with the government at the beginning on this but that is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about the 30, 35 or however many there are on normal exchange that may now be participating in the war on Iraq. If this is a war that we are not participating in then those people should be called home. It just makes common sense to me and it seems to me it would to other Canadians as well.
The NDP position is that these people should be recalled until such time as there are assurances either that their units are not participating in the war on Iraq or that their units are no longer participating in the war on Iraq. If the Prime Minister wants to be consistent he should be saying that, instead of what he said to me in the House earlier today when I asked him the question that I asked in question period.
What should Canada do now? It seems to me that Canada should now, given the Canadian government position, be urging the United States to change its mind. Maybe it is too late. It certainly seems that we are indeed at the 11th hour. Half an hour from now President Bush will address the nation and the world, so to speak, but it seems to me that it is never too late for a friend, however damaged our relationship with the United States might be, although I heard the American ambassador say only last week that he did not feel there would be any lasting damage to Canada-U.S. relations. It seems to me that if the Prime Minister really believes in the position that he articulated today in the House the follow through on that should be to urge President Bush to reconsider his position.
Failing that, there are a number of other lesser things we could be urging upon the Americans. Our foreign affairs critic, the member for Halifax, mentioned one of them today in the House, and that is that at the very least we could be urging upon the United States, if it insists on having a war on Iraq, that it should not be using depleted uranium. The Canadian Forces do not use depleted uranium. I believe I am right in that assertion. However the American forces do use depleted uranium. They used it in Kosovo and certainly in the gulf war of 1991. This is a completely unacceptable form of weaponry in the sense that it has a long term effect on people far beyond anything that is created as an immediate consequence of the war. I would urge the Canadian government, the Prime Minister and the responsible ministers to communicate to the United States in strong terms that depleted uranium should not be something that is part of the U.S. arsenal.
If we as a Parliament have the opportunity, perhaps through a resolution approving the government's position, but also doing this, urge Saddam Hussein to rethink his position.
In this eleventh hour perhaps Saddam Hussein could say, “If it comes to choosing between my vanity and my regime and having my people blown to hell by the strongest military machine on the face of the earth, maybe I will take a walk, maybe I will leave”. If he wants to cite the ancient verities as he sometimes does, let Saddam Hussein have the wisdom of the real mother in the story of King Solomon and the two mothers who wanted to lay claim to one baby. The king said, “The baby cannot belong to both of you so I will cut the baby in half and one of you can have one half and one of you can have the other half”. It was the real mother who said, “That is fine. She can have the baby”, because in the end she cared more about her baby than she did about her particular claim.
This is the kind of wisdom I would pray that Saddam Hussein has tonight, that he would put the welfare of his own people, given what we know is already fixed in the mind of the American administration, that he would have the welfare of his own people so much in mind that he would be willing to take the walk that he is being called upon by President Bush to take.
Perhaps that is our only hope at this moment. Let us hope that something happens for the good and that war can be avoided even at these last moments.