Madam Speaker, what I found particularly revealing in reviewing Ambassador Paul Cellucci's speech of last week was not so much his expression of “disappointment” and “upset” with Canada's decision not to join the war on Iraq, but his reference to Canada as “family”.
For a country like Canada that had felt ignored in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when U.S. President George Bush did not appear to number Canada among U.S. friends, more oversight than advertence, the reference to Canada as family ought normally to have been encouraging in its characterization.
What Ambassador Cellucci's statement appears to reveal is a deep sense of psychological hurt on the part of the United States, and one grounded more in the harmful, if not hurtful, statements made by some Canadian MPs than in the actual decision or policy of the Canadian government.
For the essential truth is that we are family, that the ties that bind are many and meaningful on multiple levels, on levels of family itself, security, community, culture, environment, economy and the like.
It is no less true that despite the ties that bind, we may often differ domestically speaking, as the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra put it, in our attitudes to health care, gun control, capital punishment, social policy and the like, just as we have differed internationally on a variety of matters, including treaties respecting children's rights, landmines, climate change, the ICC and, now most recently, on the timing and conditions precedent for action to disarm Iraq.
Simply put, we differed, in my view, with our American counterparts not on principle, such as the imperative of disarming Iraq or the evil represented by Saddam Hussein or the imperative of bringing Saddam Hussein to justice, but we differed on the means to achieve this.
The difference, then, was one of judgment, on our belief that all remedies short of war had not been exhausted, that the requisite international support had not yet been assembled, that the case for war, which might have in any case ended up being inevitable, had not yet ripened. I use that term in its juridical as well as a factual sense.
And so we sought, through a bridging proposal, to identify clear disarmament benchmarks, to set a deadline of March 28 for compliance, and to include a provision for automaticity, an automatic trigger for the use of force if the disarmament benchmarks were not complied with by the deadline, a notion of automaticity which the U.S. acknowledged at the time was not present in UN Security Council resolution 1441.
The United States' judgment on timing, conditions and context, including imminence of threat, was different, but it is important we appreciate that there is a shared judgment on matters of principle as reflected in the motion before the House.
It is important again, as my colleague the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra put it, that we avoid simplistic notions of for and against, of all right or all wrong and once and for all, that we avoid these types of characterization on matters which do not lend themselves to oversimplified characterization and partake of a shifting context and set of conditions.
Accordingly, I would like to share some perspectives, if not principles, of partnership that may underpin our approach not only to the war in Iraq and beyond, but to our ongoing relationship with our neighbour.
First, we need to understand, to show understanding of, the impact of 9/11 on the American psyche and politics, for 9/11, and I sense this on each occasion on which I visit with colleagues in the United States, had a transformative impact in America. For America the world was changed. The post-9/11 configuration of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and rogue states not only dramatized for the United States the changed threat environment, but also transformed for it the United States national security doctrine that needed to result from it.
Second, we need to reassert, indeed reaffirm, our commitment to the struggle against terrorism, which is as much, in this sense of recommitment, of symbolic as well as substantive value and which speaks to the post-9/11 prism that underlies the American security doctrine.
I am not saying that we should take the same approach as the United States does to the struggle on terrorism. I know we have different appreciations, both domestically in our approach to an international criminal justice optic to that of the United States in its more national security oriented optic, and internationally it has an armed conflict model resulting from 9/11 that is not yet part of our doctrine.
What has to be appreciated is that the war against terrorism is an organizing idiom of American public policy, both domestic and international, and finds institutional expression in the initiation and organization of the department of homeland security, almost the most radical transformation of American governmental organization in years.
We need to appreciate, therefore, the American mindset, not that we have to agree with it, and give expression at the same time to what is indigenous to our own approach to the struggle against terrorism. I am referring to our juridical commitment to the struggle against terrorism which has characterized our approach, which includes as well the appreciation that what underlines everything here has to be the promotion and protection of human security, of the security of democracies and the protection of the most fundamental rights of inhabitants of that democracy: the right to life, liberty and security to a person.
Third, we need to engage with the United States and Britain in the reform of the United Nations, lest the UN become yet another casualty of the war on Iraq. This would include the rethinking of international law in a post-9/11 universe, in terms of the rethinking, for example, of the doctrine of self-defence; of hosting a conference on international humanitarian law; of addressing and redressing situations where the United Nations system becomes hijacked by rogue states; of the consideration of the formation of a democratic caucus; and more.
Fourth, we need to appreciate the importance of combating the financing of international terrorism, the soft underbelly of the terrorist threat environment, which makes possible the recruitment, training, harbouring and launching of acts of terror.
I am pleased that we did ratify the international convention on the suppression of the financing of terrorism and that we enacted domestic legislation for the purposes of implementing that international commitment. We have to keep a watching brief so that we are sure that we put the best application, such as in Fintrac and otherwise, which has been excellent in its performance and application in this struggle.
Fifth, we need to take the lead, and we are well positioned by our commitment to international justice to do so, to establish an international criminal tribunal for Iraq, the same way we did with respect to an international criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, so that we can bring Saddam Hussein and his co-conspirators to justice. Indeed, it is a tragedy that we did not do so in the early 1990s at the same time as we established the international criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Just as the international criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia led in its juridical expression, I believe, to the delegitimatization of Milosevic, to regime change, so might we have achieved a regime change in Iraq by juridical means. At the same time, I believe we would have been able to pre-empt, if I can use that term, to prevent the continuing criminality of Saddam Hussein.
The very fact that in the aftermath of the Iraqi genocidal Anfal campaign in 1988 and in the aftermath of the genocidal campaign against the Marsh Arabs in the south of Iraq at the end of the first gulf war, we still could not bring ourselves to set up an international criminal tribunal for Iraq which allowed Saddam Hussein to interpret from our inaction, if not indifference, that he could continue with his Nuremberg criminality.
The fact that some states, such as Russia and France, continued to trade and invest in Iraq while this Nuremberg criminality was going on, was a mockery of international law and a mockery of international morality.
Six, we need to participate in the provision of emergency humanitarian relief. I am pleased that we have allocated $100 million for that purpose.
Seven, we need to assume our rightful responsibility in the post-war reconstruction of Iraq, the rehabilitation of its citizenry and the re-establishment of the rule of law that is our best guarantee for the promotion and protection of the human security of the Iraqi people.
Eight, we need not equivocate or appear ambiguous about the prior and continuing anti-terror and military presence we have in the Persian Gulf as we have also in Afghanistan. We need not apologize for our role in the AWACS system, in our military exchange agreements or for our ships in the gulf area. To withdraw that now would be to take sides, and on the wrong side. To refuse to acknowledge this presence is to appear diffident or indifferent to the presence and fate of those sent there at our direction.
Nine, we need to emphasize the importance of border security, not just in trade terms but in security terms. This is, after all, not just a matter of economics but of human security.
Ten, we need to eschew and reject any notions of moral equivalences between the U.S. and Iraq and eschew any indifference about the outcome of this war, which we trust will conclude with a minimum of civilian harm, the averting of humanitarian catastrophe, the prevention of regional instability and the protection against hate and incitement. The objective in this war is the disarmament of the Saddam Hussein regime, not the armament of the constituencies of hate and terror.
Eleven, we should intensify parliamentary track II diplomacy, not abandon foreign policy to the executive level. We should enhance our parliamentary contacts with the U.S. and use our good offices in the multilateral parliamentary arena for post-war diplomacy.
Finally, we should internalize the Hippocratic oath of “Do no harm” in our discourse with our neighbours. We should guard against harmful and hurtful language, and neither indulge nor acquiesce in any such gratuitous expression. This is not to say that we will not disagree with our neighbours, and this is not to say that we should refrain from any critique of any policy of our neighbours with which we disagree and where we consider it warranted, but it must be done on the merits and not ad hominem.