Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pursue a question I asked on October 3. It seems that so much has happened in this place since that day. My question was following on the Prime Minister's announcement that CF-18 bombers were going to be launched in an effort to fight ISIS. I asked the question, to which I had a response from the Minister of National Defence. I wish to take up some of the themes I raised on that day.
First, it has to be said that any discussion of ISIS has to be framed around the reality that we have never seen a terrorist organization as ruthless, sadistic, and brutal as ISIS, but that by itself, and I think we can all agree on that in this place, does not justify military action unless we are certain of a few fundamental prerequisites. Now that I have more time than I have had in the House before this moment, I would like to outline what these would be.
The first prerequisite is that whatever we do is legal under international law. Despite references in the speeches put forward by government ministers to a UN resolution on the matter of ISIS as a terrorist organization, there has been no UN declaration to justify military action by Canada in Iraq, nor is there any such declaration that would justify military action by the U.S. in Iraq, and so on.
We need to observe the rule of law globally. We cannot allow international action and the rule of international law to descend to a level of collective vigilantism: get the posse together, and we will all ride off. This is a serious, complicated, and difficult situation. We will only make matters worse if we ignore international law.
This is the second of my prerequisites. In confronting the threat of ISIS, we should ensure that whatever we do does not make matters worse. We have had some good advice from many very knowledgeable people that we, in fact, will be making matters worse. Such advice has come from the former ambassador to the United Nations and former deputy minister of National Defence, Bob Fowler, who himself knows quite a lot about terrorism, having been kidnapped himself. Bob Fowler said very clearly in The Globe and Mail that the current attempt, which he described as a “flaccid attempt”, “will undoubtedly make matters worse”. We should not engage in anything that would make matters worse. Things are quite bad enough.
Let us look at what we have done historically in the region. History matters here a lot. There was George Bush's illegal war in Iraq, which has created much of the instability that led to ISIS.
We have seen western forces make matters worse. In Libya, unfortunately, tragically, Canada's good intentions in going into Libya, using the cloak of responsibility to protect to start launching bombing campaigns, morphed from protecting the Libyan civilian population from Muammar Gaddafi to taking sides and deciding that we needed to side with the rebels and recognize them as the legitimate government of Libya, even though we knew that those rebel forces included al Qaeda.
I warned at that time in this place that there were warehouses full of weapons belonging to Gaddafi and the Libyan army and that if we allowed rebel forces, including al Qaeda, to take Tripoli and topple Gaddafi, without a peace plan in place, without the rule of law, those weapons would end up in worse hands. In a statement just the other day by Brigadier-General Alawki, of the Syrian Free Army, he said that is exactly what happened. The weapons that were in the Tripoli warehouses have ended up in the hands of ISIS. We made matters worse. We must not do so again.