Mr. Speaker, I am displeased that I have to rise in debate on this motion because this is, I think, the fourth time now that an opposition party in this Parliament has had to bring the issue forward.
We have been debating this matter for several months and in that period not once has the Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, or the Minister of National Defence come before the House and briefed us on Canada's policy, on how its interests are at play, on the disposition of our military or on any of the details of our cloaked foreign diplomacy in this matter. This compares to the Westminster parliament where week after week senior ministers reported to their parliament, where votes were put to their parliament, serious votes which, yes, may have divided parties but had a real democratic result.
The conduct of our House under the leadership of the government is evidence of how shamefully the House and the government treat matters of vital international interest and international security.
Let me begin by addressing the complete absurdity and hypocrisy of the government's shifting position on this matter. The government claims that we are not participating and it will not vote for this motion when we are not participating in the action to enforce resolution 1441 and the 16 preceding UN Security Council resolutions, that we are not participating in the action to liberate the Iraqi people from the world's most brutal dictator because this did not have the explicit sanction of the United Nations. Let us look at the record.
In 1990 when this House was faced with the first gulf war and resolutions 660, 678 and 675 had been passed by the UN Security Council by votes of 14 to 1, the then leader of the opposition and now Prime Minister, cared not a whit about UN sanction and he opposed Canadian military action in the gulf at that time. He did not care about a UN sanction in 1990. At the last minute when he saw public opinion supporting our troops, he crawled halfway to supporting Canadian participation but only so long as our troops were not actually engaged in any military action.
Then in 1998 when it was clear that the Iraqi regime was not cooperating for the umpteenth time with weapons inspectors, that Iraq was nine years past its legal obligation under the ceasefire agreement of 1991, had violated by that point 12 Security Council resolutions and the UNPROFOR team had left Iraq, the Prime Minister then supported Operation Desert Fox. He supported the use of a major military force to try to compel the Iraqi regime to comply with UN resolutions. He did so even though such a force had absolutely no sanction explicitly by the United Nations.
Then in 1999 when we faced the genocide in Kosovo, of course we all know the Prime Minister ordered without the consent of this House and against a threatened veto of the Security Council, the Canadian air force to participate in bombing runs against Serbian targets for three months without UN sanction. He gives not a whit about UN endorsement of military action.
Indeed for the past nine years the Marsh Arabs and Shia in the south of Iraq and the Kurds in the north of Iraq have been sheltered from genocidal attacks by the Baath regime in Iraq only because of the brave and costly operation of no-fly zones by British and American air forces without any explicit UN sanction. I have not heard a peep of objection from the government on the purported illegalities of that military action to defend the Iraqi people from their own regime.
There is no consistency when it comes to the government. There have been many opinions expressed about the legality or illegality of this action. I would refer members to the legal opinions proferred by the right hon. the attorney general of the United Kingdom, by the Liberal attorney general of our Commonwealth ally of Australia, or to any number of legal opinions which make it patently clear that the terms of the ceasefire agreement, which included a 15 day deadline for disarmament in 1991, have been violated.
That is a legitimate casus belli , 4,300 days following their failure to comply with that ceasefire which was a condition predicated for the cessation of hostilities in 1991. That resolution 678 authorizes the use of force for the implementation of subsequent UN resolutions regarding Iraq. It is absolutely clear. Of course, the pièce de résistance was 1441, unanimously passed under chapter 7 of the UN charter, finding Iraq in material breach of 16 resolutions and providing it with a final opportunity for full, immediate and unconditional co-operation.
No one here could possibly argue that such a standard was met. The test for the United Nations and the international community at that time, and today, was whether the words of the United Nations meant something or whether it had become an irrelevant talking shop, the chatterbox like the League of Nations which allowed Mussolini to march into Abyssinia without action and which became completely paralyzed and unable preventively to stop Adolf Hitler from his aggressive designs in Europe.
We find ourselves today in an analogous legal situation to the one that Europe found itself in 1938. Europe and the civilized world failed that test. Thank God some countries have learned from history. It is to our shame that we do not count ourselves within their number.
The government says that Kosovo was a humanitarian urgency. Therefore, we could suspend the government's punctilious legal attitude toward legality of UN sanction for the use of force. Let us be clear about this, as Kenneth Pollack, a liberal foreign policy advisor to former President Clinton, now perhaps the leading expert on Iraq and author of the principled book on this subject, has said, “Saddam Hussein is one of the most terrible dictators of the last 50 years”. He said that he could be compared to Hitler and Stalin in brutality. He went on to say that in Kosovo “some 8,000 persons had been killed in Milosevic's ethnic cleansing campaign by the time NATO intervened”. He said that it was a tragedy that he did not for a moment dismiss and that in fact, he supported military intervention.
He goes on to say:
--as many as a million Iraqis have died at the hands of Saddam Hussein over the last 25 years, and they've died in horrific fashion. War can be justified by the need “to rid the world of this degree of inhumanity”.
We intervened to save a few thousand people in Kosovo. Let us again be clear, there has been ongoing military activity in Iraq without UN sanction for the past 10 years on humanitarian grounds.
As Walter Russell Mead has argued in the liberal Washington Post , that given the number of people dying as a result of sanctions, which are part of the government's callous policy of containment in Iraq, that if Saddam were to live for another 10 years in control of that country where no dissent in broached, at least another 360,000 Iraqis would die, 240,000 of whom would be children under five, not even considering the thousands of Iraqis who would die as a result of his genocidal policy against the Kurds, the Shia, the Marsh Arabs, not considering the brutality that he would visit upon dissidents in his regime.
Let me close by saying that I have had before the House now for six years a motion in support of the creation of a special international tribunal to indict and prosecute Saddam and his worst cronies in that Fascist regime for crimes against humanity, for war crimes and for genocide. I do not need to go through the evidence of that.
The Government of Canada has done precisely nothing to support efforts to create such a tribunal through the United Nations. The International Criminal Court does not apply because it only considers crimes committed after July 1, 2002.
Is it not interesting to note that it is Russia and France, according to Human Rights Watch, that have threatened to veto UN Security Council resolutions to create an international tribunal to try Saddam and his henchmen.
I submit that when members of the UN, particularly permanent members according to Human Rights Watch, take a position motivated by “their extensive business interests” and override the very demands of the United Nations when it comes to security and the humanitarian needs of populations like the Iraqi people, that does not constitute a legitimate reason for a champion of democracy and human rights like Canada to stand on the sidelines and to take a holiday from history. Shame on this government for what it has done to our 50 years of proud activism in foreign policy.