Madam Speaker, I could restate the member's question and the government's position by quoting from an article by Andrew Coyne this week in the National Post where he says:
[The government's position is] as clear as day. Regime change is not authorized by the United Nations. We do not support regime change in Iraq: After all, if we're going to go knocking off every genocidal dictator with a taste for weapons of mass destruction who has invaded two of his neighbours and defied 17 UN resolutions over a dozen years since a ceasefire that was never honoured in a previous war duly authorized by the Security Council, well, where do you stop?
That is the position of the government, that this would be a dangerous precedent. I do think these are all different situations strategically, legally, and politically. We cannot apply the same remedies in every instance. Yes, there are other rogue regimes which are in danger of becoming proliferators of weapons of mass destruction but none of them to my knowledge are guilty of having demonstrated hostility by invading their neighbours. None of them to my knowledge actually have used weapons of mass destruction on their own citizens in a mass context or on their neighbours. None of them are guilty of violating 17 UN Security Council resolutions. None of them are in violation of a solemn ceasefire obligation to disarm and destroy the weapons of mass destruction within 15 days of the conclusion of hostilities in a war authorized by the United Nations. Further, none of them, not even North Korea as nasty as that Stalinist dictatorship is, are guilty of nearly as many abuses of human rights and acts of genocide as that in Iraq.
Finally, while that is the case, Iraq is a separate and particular situation. I believe the use of preventive force ought to have an extraordinarily high threshold and I believe Iraq meets that threshold. I believe that the just and legal use of force there will be a cautionary lesson to other rogue regimes that would be tempted to violate the will of the international community not to develop weapons and programs of this nature and to proliferate. This is an important precedent and a high threshold which the situation in Iraq clearly has met.