Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Medicine Hat.
What we have just heard was evidence from that ambassador from the Baath party opposite that all of the Prime Minister's protestations about an end to anti-Americanism from the Liberals has had absolutely no effect. We have just heard a recitation of some of the most hoary old anti-American canards that one could hear in a sophomore Trotskyite teach-in at any college where people are reading Noam Chomsky. That was absolutely ridiculous.
With respect, this is a moral issue. People like the member opposite are going to have to be accountable and are today, to those in Iraq who are finally tasting liberty, those who are celebrating their liberators, those who are welcoming the American and British troops who have risked their lives in order to free that country from a man who is likely the most brutal tyrant in the world today.
As an example, I am going to quote from a report in today's The New York Times from Qalat Sukkar, a Shi'ite town near the Iranian border, where U.S. marines, the very ones that the member despises and would call agents of American imperialism, were welcomed with a rapturous greeting. The entire community came out of their homes and began to chant in English, “Stay, stay, U.S.A”.
According to the article:
The euphoria nearly spilled over into a riot. Children pulled at the marines, jumped on their trucks, wanting to shake their hands, touch their cheeks. A single chicken hung in the butcher's window and still the residents wanted to give the Americans something, anything. Cigarette? Money?
“You are owed a favour from the Iraqis” said Ibrahim Shouqyk, a clean and remarkably well-dressed man, considering the abject poverty here. “We dedicate our loyalty to the Americans and the British. We are friends.”
That is the voice of Iraqis, not the voice of comfortable, Canadian, Liberal, morally superior anti-Americans who do not understand that sometimes American foreign policy is flawed and sometimes mistakes are made in military action. But fundamentally, the conflict in Iraq today will lead to an immeasurably better and freer life for millions upon millions of people who have suffered under oppression now for 35 years.
I say shame on those who do not have sufficient moral clarity, who are so parochial, who are so attached to whatever twisted ideology they adopted during the Vietnam war as students, that they cannot see the moral purpose behind removing a tyrant like that from power.
That member made an appeal to the humanitarian argument in favour of the non-UN sanctioned military action in Kosovo where the Prime Minister authorized, with neither a vote of the House nor support of the Security Council, an 85 day bombing campaign on Serbia.
What preceded that according to Human Rights Watch and the United Nations itself was an ethnic cleansing campaign by Serbian paramilitaries that led to the deaths of an estimated 8,500 Kosovar civilians. That is tragic. Each one required, I agree, military action to stop those paramilitaries and the government which supported them. That member and his government were willing to suspend their much vaunted dedication to that glorious institution, the United Nations, in order to save thousands of Kosovars from that kind of ethnic cleansing.
Since 1979 over 1.2 million Iraqis have lost their lives as a result of the Ba'ath regime of Saddam Hussein. At least 145,000 Kurdish civilians have lost their lives. The member talked about genocide, but what about the genocide of 145,000 Kurds? What about the genocide of 250,000 Shia Arabs? What about the mass executions and torture and rape of tens of thousands of dissidents in Iraq arrested simply for the crime of questioning their regime?
I had a press conference in this building two weeks ago with representatives of the Iraqi exile community, one of whom broke into tears when he talked about the fact that he could not even trust his children at home. He talked about the fact that his nephew had once heard his father at home criticize Saddam Hussein and that the Fedayeen secret police arrived at the schools and interrogated children about their parents' sentiments toward the regime. This child, whether bribed with candies or threatened with a beating, admitted that his father had once criticized Saddam at home. Before that child arrived back home from school, his father was gone.
That was six years ago and he still has not come back. Who knows if he ended up in one of Saddam's acid baths or was fed to a room full of wild dogs which consume political dissidents? Who knows what happened to him?
That Iraqi Canadian, like the vast majority of Iraqi Canadians, broke into tears recalling the tyranny of a regime which that member would have continue in power to satisfy some completely irrelevant theory about the supremacy of the United Nations. He believes there is some kind of moral authority resident in an organization like the Security Council, populated by countries like France, Russia, China and Syria.
France, Russia and China sold 94% of the conventional weapons that Saddam used to terrorize his people, invade two neighbours, hurtle scud missiles against the civilians of Israel. They sold 94% of the weaponry to Iraq between 1972 and 1990 according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. France and Russia systematically violated the UN sanctions which were an effort to create a policy of containment to prevent a military conflict. They did so for commercial reasons, according to Human Rights Watch. They even opposed the creation of an ad hoc international tribunal through the UN Security Council to try to indict and prosecute Saddam and the thugs of the Baath regime because of, according to Human Rights Watch, “their extensive commercial interests in Iraq”.
He would have a country like Syria help to govern Canada's policy on the liberation of an oppressed people. I suggest there is no moral content in that position. There is no dignity in the horse trading and the advancement of national interests in the most crass fashion which characterizes the United Nations.
I am understandably upset to hear that kind of drivel. American and British men and women have died in the past weeks. So too, tragically, have Iraqi civilians died, according to their Goebbels-esque clown of an information minister, fewer than 1,000, which is amazing in a military action of this nature. Every one of those deaths is tragic, but out of those deaths will come a better life, one characterized we hope, we pray, by at least some basic human dignity, and a regime which respects fundamental human rights, which allows some action for human liberty, which instead of raping the resources of what ought to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world, directs them to human development and the development of civil society.
Liberals in Canada who talk the talk of multilateralism are not prepared to walk the walk, talk about democracy and human rights but are not prepared to bring it to an oppressed people even through a rhetorical political endorsement of the allied action, I say it is a shame and a disgrace. So too is the motion before us today, insofar as it fails to endorse the removal of the Baath regime, the liberation of the Iraqi people. It begins by endorsing the House's decision to oppose the military action and then it says, in a characteristically Liberal fashion, that we support the war objectives but we do not support regime change.
The Prime Minister said that resolution 1441 was sufficient authority to go in and then he changed his mind. Then he said that containment was sufficient while his UN ambassador was arguing for a two week deadline.
The policy of the government on one of the definitive issues of our time has been a fraud and an embarrassment to this country. That is why I will vote against the motion.