Mr. Speaker, there are not that many times in the life of a parliamentarian when we get to speak on the issue of sending men and women in uniform into harm's way. I am appreciative of the privilege.
I regret that more colleagues are actually not able to stand in their places to talk about the significance of this moment. However, it is what it is, and the government has chosen to limit the amount of commentary on this matter.
The rush to war is frequently done in terms of these being the good guys and those being the bad guys. The problem with this entire conflict is that the good guys and the bad guys are a bit of a mix.
I thought we should do a canvass of the countries that are in the immediate area. For instance, one of the allies, the so-called good guys, is Saudi Arabia. Now, Saudi Arabia is the spiritual home of Wahhabism and Salafism. That is the touchstone, the spiritual home, of ISIS.
Within Saudi society, there is a great deal of conflict. Some argue that wealthy Saudis are those who sponsor ISIS. That puts the House of Saud, the government of Saudi Arabia, in a very difficult situation.
I join with our ambassador for religious freedom, who called upon Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and a variety of other countries in and around that Middle East area to deal with this particularly pernicious form of Islam.
These kinds of internal conflicts within our allies undermine the effectiveness of our presence. I would say that we are responding to a moral imperative. In that respect, all members of this House are on the same page. Having said that, our interventions in this part of the world have not gone well in recent history, and even in history further back.
Saudi Arabia is a society that does not tolerate forms of religious expression other than a very strict form of Sunni Islam. Indeed, it is known that there are beheadings if, in fact, this kind of rebellion against this kind of Salafism or Wahhabism takes place in Saudi Arabia. This makes it very difficult for us, as a western society, or even as a country motivated for the best reasons to intervene, because there is this spiritual support for the founders of ISIS.
If we go around the horn a bit, there is Iran. Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the Bush Iraq war. Baghdad is a satellite office of Tehran. That is, arguably, some of the source for ISIS: the grievance of Sunni Muslims against Shia Muslims.
Up until recently, much to the chagrin of the U.S. and other western powers, the manipulation of Baghdad by Tehran has in some respects created the difficulty ISIS is responding to. That, in and of itself, makes it very difficult.
Until recently, it was the view of the current government that Iran was the chief sponsor of state terrorism. It was considered to be the number one state terrorist threat in the world. Now Iran is apparently going to be our ally in fighting the ISIS threat.
As members know, Iran has been the supporter of Hezbollah, and Hezbollah has been the chief Shiite terrorist entity, threatening Israel on the one side and Lebanon on the other. It has joined in with President al-Assad in the Syrian conflict, which has created literally hundreds of thousands of refugees and literally hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Until recently, the papers were full of what President Assad had done to his own people, including gassing them, so it becomes a little complicated, since the chief sponsor of Hezbollah, and therefore the supporter of President Assad, is now our ally in the support of this conflict with ISIS.
Then we can just move over beside Iran to Turkey. Turkey has been in a 30-year fight with the PKK, which is a supporter of the Peshmerga. The Peshmerga are the chief fighters on the ground resisting ISIS, so Turkey is in a difficult position, shall we say, because it has had this conflict over quite a number of years and it regards the PKK as a terrorist entity.