Butchers and dictators can’t be touched. Canadians? Let the war crime trials begin | Full Comment | National Post

by Matt Gurney - from the National Post

Here’s a disturbing report. It’s speculative at this point, but should set off alarms for Canadians all the same:

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court says that if the federal government won’t look into how Canadian soldiers handled detainees in Afghanistan for possible war crimes violations, he’s willing to. … “We’ll check if there are crimes and also we’ll check if a Canadian judge is doing a case or not . . . if they don’t, the court has to intervene,” Moreno-Ocampo told filmmaker Barry Stevens in his documentary called Prosecutor.

In other news, Syrian soldiers are gunning down their own civilians … but the country still just got a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. Well, I guess someone had to pick up Libya’s slack. And why was Libya given the boot? Oh, yeah, they sent soldiers to gun down their own civilians. Hmmm.

Yes, the UNHRC and the International Criminal Court are not the same bodies. But how much faith we should have in the ICC is directly linked to how much faith we should have in heavily bureaucratized international institutions. The answer? Not all that much. Once the ICC has found a way to haul Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir in on the war crimes and genocide warrants they have had out on him since February of 2009, maybe then they should check in on Canada again. Or, perhaps, having given up on being able to actually punish countries that won’t want to be punished, the ICC has decided it’s easier just to go after the nations that do generally adhere to international law? It’s a lot easier that way.

Canadian soldiers should not be above the law. There are rules in war, and when those rules get violated, there should be punishment. It’s one of the downsides of fighting for ideals, rather than territory, resources or glory of the king/God/whatever. You need to fight in a way roughly suited to your stated objectives — in our case, usually stability, democracy and the rule of law. That doesn’t mean the gloves can’t come off (a la Hiroshima and Nagasaki), because war does have its own brutal calculus. But it means that whenever it’s possible to honour rules and laws of war, it should be done, and when it’s not possible, it needs to be made plain to the world that the only other options were even worse.

Canada has shown a willingness to hold itself to a high standard of conduct on the battlefield. Just ask former Canadian Forces captain Robert Semrau, who was thrown out of the military (and nearly imprisoned) after allegedly shooting a mortally wounded Taliban soldier to put the enemy out of his misery. Such an act of mercy was contrary to the laws of war and to Canadian military laws and codes. It was probably the right thing to do, morally. But it was against the law, and the Forces almost destroyed Semrau’s life upholding their own rules. Read more...

Butchers and dictators can’t be touched. Canadians? Let the war crime trials begin | Full Comment | National Post

Libby Davies as a Minister in a Layton government?

    Tim Powers published an article today in the Globe and Mail speculating on who might be in the cabinet if Jack Layton were to form a government.  I just about choked when he mentioned Libby Davies as Minister of Foreign Affairs.  This is, after all the NDP MP who demonstrated a remarkable ignorance of history when she stated that the Israel has been occupying Palestinian territories since 1948 (the year Israel came into existence) and that "it’s the longest occupation in history".  She was caught on video making these comments at an anti-Israeli government protest in Vancouver on June 5, 2010.


    Now, were Ms. Davies to have checked her history, she would have found the Israeli military didn't move into the West Bank and Gaza until 1967, as a result of an imminent threat of attack by Jordan, Egypt and Syria.  So, for example, Tibet, which has been occupied by communist China since 1950, has been occupied far longer.  In history, other longer occupations include the German annexation of Alsace-Moselle (from 1871-1918), the Russian (Soviet) occupation of the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia)(1940-1991, broken by the German occupation of the area from 1941-1944), and the Allied occupation of Berlin (1945-1990).


    She also would have found that from 1948-1967 the West Bank and East Jerusalem were occupied by Jordan. 


    The key point here is that, for all that Jack Layton wants to show his party as being ready to lead, this is a party which has not yet shown itself to be "a government in waiting".  Had a member of the Liberal or Conservative caucus displayed such blatant bias against the existence of the state of Israel, along with a ridiculous lack of knowledge in the areas of history and geo-politics (and an apparent unawareness of the existence of Wikipedia, where she could have checked her facts before embarrassing herself), said member would have at the very least been publicly admonished and demoted by the leader of their party.


   
Instead, the only member of her party to call her out was Thomas Mulcair, who earned the enmity of other NDP MPs and supporters for his efforts.  And the question also must be asked - was Jack Layton's refusal to remove her from the post of deputy leader (a position she holds to this day) a sign of tacit agreement on his part with her basic views (if not her blundered exposition of same)?  Is an NDP government one which would take the side of Palestinian radicals (aka Hamas) against Israel, for all the talk of "even-handedness"?


    The fundamental question the voter is led to is this:


Is the NDP under Jack Layton fit or competent to lead Canada as Prime Minister?  The evidence says not.