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Rich-guy Romney needs to span the culture gap

January 19, 2012 by Matthew Bondy

January 19, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury

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Ready, aim, misfire.

When asked by the moderators of the Fox News Republican debate in South Carolina on Monday whether he’s taken in any hunting since his last presidential bid, former Massachusetts governor and presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s gun fell silent.

“I went moose hunting – not moose hunting, I’m sorry, elk hunting – with friends in Montana,” he said. “I’ve been pheasant hunting. I enjoy the sport and when I get invited I’m delighted to be able to go hunting.”

This son of privilege, this northeastern pragmatist, this venture capitalist, is “delighted” to go hunting.

Of course, your average conservative Republican — especially when he’s on about his guns — doesn’t talk like that. Richard Nixon’s archetypal “Joe Six Pack” voter doesn’t talk like that. Feelings of unrestrained delight are for royals and dandies and the la-di-da crowd.

And rich guys.

Romney’s rich-guy persona continues to widen the cultural gap between himself and the folks doing the voting in November.

For example, only a rich guy cozies up to voters in the key primary state of New Hampshire by reminding folks he and his (perfect) family have a summer house — not a cottage, mind you, a summer house — in the Granite State.

Only a rich guy fluffs off his earnings from the speaker’s circuit — he typically pulled in about $40,000 per jibber-jabber — as “not much” when asked about his annual income.

Only a rich — or pampered, or timid or temperamental — guy would whine to debate moderators to intervene when his opponents land a rhetorical punch and follow it up with a little rough and tumble.

And only a rich guy would challenge a debate partner, on live cable news, to a $10,000 bet over competing versions of the truth.

Of course, Romney’s problem isn’t that he’s rich. Romney’s problem is that these missteps and many others signal a tin political ear and an inability to fit in with those “real” Americans that wealthy politicians often talk about but seldom understand.

Knowing that, one suspects that the Republican brain trust is earnestly searching out a running mate that can bring out the best and most personable in their candidate. Romney needs a vice-presidential sidekick that can help His Richness tone down the hoity-toity and connect with average Americans at the gut level.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, an early and energetic Romney supporter, probably and properly sits atop the shortlist. Christie is everything that Romney’s not, in the former’s ability to speak plain American English and engage voters in a remarkably authentic way.

Christie’s personality would not only balance against Romney’s, but may prove so infectious that it actually brings out the normal in the Massachusetts governor, helping prospects with middle class voters in the electorally rich regions of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other competitive states.

If Romney’s personality wasn’t so impressively liable to turn off American voters, Christie might not be the right choice. Christie, like Romney, is a northeastern moderate; and Christie fails a key VP-candidate litmus test in that he can’t obviously deliver a major swing state like, for example, Republican Senator Marco Rubio might be able to deliver Florida.

But Christie might help Romney in a way that is more important, and more fundamental, than any other political calculation: he might help Mitt Romney become the kind of candidate you’d want to sit down and have a beer with.

And, hey, at least he’s buying.

 
 
 
 

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Republicans need to apply the Buckley Rule

January 19, 2012 by Matthew Bondy

November 17, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury

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Nominate the most electable conservative. To the late William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the popular National Review magazine and America’s most consequential conservative intellectual of the last century, it was that simple.

Simple, it surely is. But easy, surely not — at least not in the realm of Republican primary politics, where presidential candidates need the support of their party’s base, which is anchored significantly to the right of the centre.

So who’s electable?

Of the entire bevy — which includes several governors, a former House speaker, several House members, a former senator and retired pizza restaurant magnate — only a few satisfy the criterion of electability.

Mitt Romney, a weak front-runner stuck at about 25 per cent support among Republican primary voters, checks this box. He looks and sounds like a president, whatever that means. He’s a successful Republican governor from Massachusetts, which gives him cred with the Democrat-leaning industrial states in the northeast and midwest, and he’s a polished operator – suspiciously so, to some – who rarely makes big gaffes or gets thrown off message.

Arguably the only other contender with serious national viability is former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who also served as U.S. ambassador to China. Along with Newt Gingrich (see: conservative, not electable) he is an intellectual heavyweight, and his foreign policy expertise and executive experience make him a genuinely qualified presidential candidate.

Who’s conservative?

It depends on what the word means in its application to the Republican party of 2011. If conservative means right-wing to the point of caricature and recklessly partisan, then there’s quite the line-up. Former House speaker Gingrich fits the bill, as does congresswoman Michelle Bachman, former restaurateur Herman Cain, and sitting Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

If conservative means traditionalist on social issues and hawkish on foreign policy, you’re looking at Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, whose national electability is aptly measured by his current poll standing of about three per cent. Or, if you mean conservative in the sense of heeding America’s long-standing opposition to government intervention in citizens’ lives and in the marketplace, then you’ve got yourself the admirable but unelectable-on-spec Ron Paul, a congressman of Texas.

So if the so-called conservatives aren’t electable, are the electables conservative?

Again, it depends what you mean. Romney has been accused of flip-flopping more than once. His former liberalism on social issues — he once ran to the left of Ted Kennedy on social issues in a Massachusetts senate election — is not forgotten by the party’s very active and influential evangelical constituency. But he ran a solid campaign for the Republican presidential nod in 2007-2008, and his policy positions on key issues of conscience, economics and foreign policy have been tightly aligned with the conservative consensus at least since the beginning of his post-gubernatorial political career.

Huntsman is a conservative more in the traditional sense than in the rigid, purist, tea party sense. He favours facts on the ground over air-tight ideologies on issues ranging from national security decision-making to climate change. His approach is incrementalist, as inclusive as possible, and imbued with the conventional trappings of statesmanship not often seen and less often praised in modern American politics; virtues like magnanimity, fair-mindedness and intellectual acuity.

Huntsman is also — sadly for America and embarrassingly for the Republican party — polling only marginally above absolute zero.

If Romney clinches the Republican nomination, Buckley’s rule will have been satisfactorily applied, as Romney passably, but only passably, meets the broadest range of criteria as an electable conservative.

If Huntsman were to rally and roar to the top of the party ticket, something greater even than the electoral prescription of Buckley will have been served: the restoration of American conservatism itself.

 
 
 
 

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Obama’s re-election

January 19, 2012 by Matthew Bondy

October 20, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury

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Blame the mess he inherited. Blame the financial crisis. Blame the Republicans if it makes you feel better. But whatever the root cause, make no mistake about the corresponding effect: U.S. President Barack Obama’s incumbency is unusually vulnerable heading into the 2012 election cycle.

Like him or not — and most like him — the core electoral metrics aren’t shaping up for the president.

For starters, Republicans don’t fear him. Sounds petty, maybe, but that’s life, and that’s politics.

The increasingly far-right and populist Republican party rarely even dignifies Obama with a tough, fair-minded negotiation any more.

During the debt ceiling debacle this summer — during which Obama repeatedly said he was prepared to take “significant heat” from his own party to strike a grand deal on deficit reduction and entitlement reform — the GOP, led by House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, responded with one simple syllable: “No.”

And when Obama sought permission from Congress to deliver an address on jobs and the economy — the commander in chief technically can only give a speech to congress if he’s invited, even speeches like the state of the union — Speaker John Boehner expressed an only slightly more elegant disinclination to oblige his president.

In both instances Obama could have thrown a punch but didn’t.

Lately, he’s been more fiery and confrontational, but most of it has backfired already. He recently addressed the congressional black caucus, and told them — to their very mixed subsequent reaction — to stop complaining about his presidency’s lack of progress.

It was like watching a Quaker driving a tank. He gave the “tough” thing a shot and ended up hurting himself.

But the lack of an Obama fear factor in Washington isn’t the only troubling measure of Obama’s electoral prospects. The economy is still in the tank, and historically, presidents don’t make re-election with a national unemployment rate of eight per cent or higher.

The U.S. continues to register poor growth and historic market volatility, and incredibly inconveniently for the president, the European debt crisis is hanging over the U.S. financial sector like the sword of Damocles. Pair that up with the business community’s reluctance to make new investments and new hires due to uncertainty over the administration’s plan to raise taxes on certain segments of society, and you’ve got a recipe for flat or negative medium term growth.

But it’s not all bad news. Obama has performed well on security, blunting what is normally a Republican advantage.

Obama has drawn America’s profile and investment in Iraq down to new lows. He personally assembled and continues to oversee a strategy to preserve gains and reduce exposure in Afghanistan. He’s been remarkably tough and aggressive on terror, and he’s moved the Democratic party rhetorically and conceptually in line with the realist-based school of foreign policy normally associated with tough, hard-headed conservative policy-makers.

As we head toward the 2012 cycle, the presidency is very much up for grabs, with Obama ahead on security, behind on moral authority, vulnerable on the debt issue, and with Americans feeling generationally weak as a nation and an economic community.

Soon — either just before the Republicans declare a nominee or immediately after — the GOP’s line of attack will start to emerge.

Watch for the Republicans to hammer away on Obama’s high-tax, high-spend, high-debt Democratic profligacy, and for Obama to defend himself on the basis of extraordinary circumstances calling for extraordinary fiscal measures and a long-term vision for fundamental economic change.

And then watch the American people ask the only timeless and universal political question: “Which is worse?”

 

 
 
 
 

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Republicans retreat from Bush-era interventionism

October 2, 2011 by Matthew Bondy

September 15, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury

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So much for the neocons.

“Bring our troops home,” Republican presidential hopeful and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said recently at the third Republican presidential debate, to pronounced applause.

If any George W. Bush administration alumni were watching the GOP presidential forum — particularly the speechwriting team that positioned the Bush White House as the spearhead of human freedom — they must have wondered what happened to the Republican party’s neoconservative wing, so triumphantly ascendant since the 9/11 terror attacks and so conspicuously silent this election cycle.

“It is the policy of the United States,” the 43rd president proclaimed in 2005, the high-water mark of Bush-era foreign policy zeal, “to support the growth of democratic movements and institutions… with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Bold stuff. Big picture stuff.

So why would the GOP stop now? Iraq is increasingly free and stable, thanks to the ongoing U.S. presence; al-Qaida has been significantly degraded both in the Afghan theatre and globally; and freedom-seeking uprisings are convulsing the Middle East in precisely the way Bush’s foreign policy team hoped and envisioned they would.

But invoicing the American taxpayer for stabilization missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is hard enough, and raising the spectre of new or broadened military engagements would fall out of bounds with the economy-centred message of the Republicans’ 2012 presidential campaign.

So the party’s conservative base is prioritizing fiscal consolidation over its vision for a more free and democratic planet, and it’s taking the Republican presidential field along with it.

Even front-runner Mitt Romney has traded in his uber-hawk bona fides in exchange for membership to the realist school of foreign policy — the pro-military but non-interventionist approach that drove Republican foreign policy right up to the Reagan era.

In 2009, Romney said, “We must confront threats to freedom and sustain the capabilities we need to sustain the cause of liberty.”

Today? “Our troops shouldn’t go off and fight a war of independence for another nation.”

Not all conservatives, however, are on board with the realistic Republican retrenchment. In fact, one hawk’s feathers are ruffled more than those of the others. In June, when the Republican presidential race was in its infancy, erstwhile White House contender and leading foreign policy guru Sen. John McCain called the presidential contenders to task for flirting with isolationism.

“There’s always been an isolationist strain in the Republican party,” the feisty Arizonan said. “But now it seems to have moved more centre stage.”

Thing is, McCain’s overreacting. Yes, mainstream Republicans have shifted away from the freedom agenda back toward traditional conservative turf, signalling ebbing party support for pre-emptive war, supercharged rhetoric and divisive diplomacy.

But true isolationism would require a massive withdrawal of U.S. military positions worldwide, especially in east Asia, the Middle East and Europe — and only perennial presidential also-ran Congressman Ron Paul of Texas is interested in going anywhere near that far.

The Republican party of 2011 is simply getting back to basics, back to its foreign policy roots.

Isolationism it ain’t, even if some hawkish Republicans — and perhaps even the odd opinion columnist — would caution against too swift a shift.

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Obama must make it morning again in America

August 11, 2011 by Matthew Bondy

August 11, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury.
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America’s 44th president was always going to lose the expectations game. The youthful Democrat’s soaring rhetoric and refreshing faith in the universal appeal of principled compromise predestined it.

But the ominous events of these last few weeks are more than a string of tactical disappointments; they show the strategic vulnerability of a now-sideways presidency.

The summer started positively enough for the administration. The Republican presidential field looked generationally weak; the Republican-dominated House of Representatives’ push to repeal Obama’s signature health-care initiative seemed out of gas; and U.S. forces finally brought Osama bin Laden to justice, on Obama’s own daring and decisive orders.

And then. . .

And then House majority leader Eric Cantor, the legislative chieftain of the populist tea party movement, and Republican House speaker John Boehner decided to politicize a piece of housekeeping legislation.

The U.S. government’s debt limit — an arbitrary, self-imposed cap on Washington’s credit limit — needed a bump, like it’s been bumped tens of times during recent presidencies. But instead of raising the cap, House Republicans took the full faith and credit of the United States hostage, securing a handsome ransom.

Obama inked a debt deal that includes no tax increases, leaving leading Republicans to gloat that they negotiated their hostage situation (they actually used those words) masterfully, weakening the president as he heads into an election year.

Turns out the hostage was still hooked up to the bomb, though. Last Friday – well after the crisis had cleared – leading credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s indicted American creditworthiness by lowering its long-held triple-A rating.

Tragically, later that same day, further magnifying America’s mortality, 22 U.S. commandos plus support crew were killed in Afghanistan, representing the single largest loss of coalition life since the war began a decade ago.

What a week. What a horrible week.

The true victims of these twin tragedies are the families of those brave servicemen, and the citizens and businesses and nations whose financial security is now that much weaker due to America’s urgent economic woe.

But the Obama presidency is also a victim. It is victim of a global economic crisis it had no part in creating; victim of a dangerous political movement willing to risk America’s basic economic order, and a victim of the vicissitudes of a tragic, complex, noble and protracted conflict, with political liabilities payable on demand.

Perhaps most troubling, it is victim of the ghost of another president from another time, whose administration was swallowed by the same dangerous tide. Jimmy Carter’s failure in Iran, his shaky economic stewardship, and his loss of the American public cost him the Oval Office, leaving it to a feisty challenger named Ronald Reagan to reignite American confidence, and restore American prestige and power in the world.

Obama needs to be his own Ronald Reagan, and he needs to start now.

He needs to pick a fight with the tea party hostage-takers and win it. He needs to shelve his prime ministerial instincts — his preference to convene, oversee and ratify — and lay out a fourth-year political program that will reassert the authority of the American presidency and the vitality of the Democratic party. He needs to make the tea party anarchists wear their self-indulgent, traitorous willingness to jeopardize America’s future around their necks every single day until the ballots get counted.
The president needs to do nothing less than to make the sun rise, just as Reagan inaugurated a new morning in America not so long ago.

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Tory nationalism on the ascendence

July 21, 2011 by Matthew Bondy

July 21, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury
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For Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, it’s a gift like no other.

In the second year of their majority mandate, the Conservatives will guide, fund and shape Canada’s commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812.

Tales of Canadian determination, valour and loyalty to Crown and country will hallow the month of October, 2012, slated to be designated as a month of remembrance by the federal heritage ministry, and the Conservative government will frame the meaning, outcome and impact of Canada’s improbable victory for living generations of Canadians.

The 1812 bicentennial is a once-in-a-generation political opportunity to shape Canada’s self-understanding, and weave a nationalist narrative from the pre-Confederation era through to the present day.

Make no mistake, the Conservatives will seize this opportunity to shape Canadian identity with a keen sense of its political consequences, and in the spirit of a deep, core conservative conviction: that, as American statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, the central conservative truth is that culture, not politics, determines the success of a society.

To the Conservative party of Stephen Harper, the key to lasting political success — and the key to achieving their vision for Canada — is to shape and connect with Canadian cultural values; to become their steward, their cheerleader, and, finally, their long-term political vehicle and emblem.

This is the mission of the Harper Conservatives, and since coming to power in 2006, they have pursued it with remarkable diligence and focus.

There are three core features of traditional Canadian nationalism that the Conservatives have emphasized under Harper’s premiership, each of which reflects noble and lasting Tory values: military, monarchy, and — maybe counter-intuitively — French Canadian nationalism.

The resurgence of martial nationalism in Canada is undeniable. Canada has a prime minister and a cabinet unafraid to make controversial, hard-power foreign policy decisions and to call on Canada’s troops to defend them — in Afghanistan, in Libya and wherever else Canadian interests and values may be threatened.

Venerating the service and sacrifice and cultural significance of the military has dovetailed neatly with the strong surge of monarchist sentiment the Tories have ushered to the fore.

Royal visit after royal visit is making Canadians feel more connected to their Royal Family, and whenever the Royals come, the full colour, tradition and splendour of Canda’s military tradition is literally paraded about for all to see, and for all to honour.

And perhaps most impressively – in true fidelity to Canada’s unique conservative tradition – the Harper Conservatives have embraced French-Canadian nationalism, weaving that asymmetrical but indispensable thread through Canada’s cultural and constitutional fabric and endorsing French Canadians’ legitimate claim to nationhood under the crown.

This uniquely Canadian, conservative nationalism, embracing military, monarchy and French Canadian nationhood — not to mention the central importance of Canada’s First Nations, which the Harper Conservatives have done consistently and sensitively — is once again on the ascendency, following that Liberal interregnum often referred to as the 20th century.

If the Conservative party is successful, after the next four years these conservative cultural and political values will have so decisively marginalized the alternative, liberal nationalisms made available at election time that the Tories will be the so-called natural governing party.

But assuming that mantle for a generation will be tough work.

Celebrating the war of 1812 — in which First Nations, Canadian and Canadien troops defended His Majesty’s colony from American domination — seems like a good place to start.

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Obama sets gold standard for presidential leadership

July 12, 2011 by Matthew Bondy

July 7, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury
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It had to end sometime.

The Afghan mission, which started as an expeditionary military action against Afghan-based Islamic terror networks following 9/11 and grew into an open-ended nation-building experiment, is now headed toward a gradual and – one hopes – orderly conclusion.

When Barack Obama assumed office, the United States had been in Afghanistan for seven years – already longer than America’s service in the two world wars combined. The U.S. military had painfully regained the initiative in Iraq and then-president George W. Bush was starting to reprioritize the original mission in the war on terror.

Obama accelerated that shift in focus, and led the development of a new American policy on Afghanistan to save the mission from strategic stalemate. The key turning point of that policy came last week.

“We set clear objectives: to refocus on al-Qaida; reverse the Taliban’s momentum; and train Afghan security forces to defend their own country,” the president said on prime time television June 23.

And thanks to the skill, service and sacrifice of American – not to mention Canadian – servicemen, the U.S. has been “meeting its goals” and a U.S. troop withdrawal is now underway.

Predictably, there’s been no shortage of criticism to go around. Obama’s fellow Democrats are dissatisfied at the gradual pace of withdrawal set by the president – some 30,000 by next summer, which only returns the U.S. troop presence to where it was before Obama became president.

Republican lawmakers are nervous about jeopardizing the fragile, hard-fought strategic gains American troops have secured for the allied mission over the last few years.

And commentators, for their part – venerable trade though they serve – are predictably claiming that the politically centrist president is just splitting the policy difference between left-wing doves and right-wing hawks in an attempt to be all things to all people.

Each faction misses the point. Partisanship aside, Obama is exercising true executive leadership on Afghanistan, and this policy announcement has been in the hopper for about a year and a half.

Obama led a comprehensive policy review process, chairing a broad policy team spanning the joint chiefs of the defence staff, combatant commanders, high level advisers, leading scholars, seasoned bureaucrats and accomplished diplomats.

As detailed in veteran American journalist Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, the president refused to be snowed by the military brass, tossed conventional wisdom out the door, demanded that clear, measurable, achievable goals be set for the mission and insisted that America would start “thinning out” its military presence on a reasonable timetable.

At the end of the review process, what did he have to show for his efforts? A 33,000-man troop surge, a clear “disrupt, dismantle and degrade” policy to fighting in-theatre terror networks, and a target date of July 2011 to start drawing down American soldiers from the country.

He delivered. Outgoing CIA chief Leon Panetta told congress in recent weeks that there are fewer than 100 al Qaeda fighters left in Afghanistan. The Taliban insurgency is on its heels and many population centres have started enjoying the fruits of security and stability, and even expanded economic opportunity.

It’s fair to say that Obama’s Afghanistan policy – like virtually any military policy – is imperfect. It saps the mission of urgency and momentum, assumes Afghan forces are ready to lead the fight, and by making an orderly withdrawal the key strategic priority of the mission, Obama will make America’s bargaining position with local and regional belligerents weaker than its continued presence merits.

But being a president means making hard choices, managing national resources, and owning the big decisions.

Obama’s done that, and in so doing, he’s set a new gold standard for thoughtful, engaged and decisive presidential leadership.

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Chretien misled the Canadian people on Iraq

May 25, 2011 by Matthew Bondy

May 19, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury
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It was supposed to be as Canadian as maple syrup and good manners. “Canada will not participate,” in the liberation of Iraq, then Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien told Canadians the day before Operation Iraqi Freedom went live in March 2003.

It was a statement of sovereignty, proof positive of Canada’s independence from America.

Proud of their patriotic selves, Chretien and his cabinet heavyweights then sang that purposefully indecipherable Liberal song. “We support the UN and our multilateral decisions,” said then defence minister John McCallum. “And secondly we support our allies in the fight against terrorism.”

Ok, you might say. They weren’t on board with the Iraq war.

Except, they kinda were.

Diplomatic cables recently released by Wikileaks, a group that collects and releases sensitive organizational information from around the world, including secret diplomatic cables, shows that the Liberal government of the day was going out of its way to accommodate the U.S. and British-led action to disarm and replace the genocidal regime of long-time Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

According to news services, Canadian diplomats made it clear to their American and British colleagues that the Royal Canadian Navy’s assets in the all-important Middle Eastern oil artery of the Strait of Hormuz could be “useful” to then president George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing,” and that Canadian Forces deployments in Afghanistan would be bolstered to free up more Yanks and Brits for the fight in Iraq.

Far from a principled assertion of national sovereignty, the Liberals’ downright dishonest approach to the intervention in Iraq was not only a counterproductive slight to Canada’s core allies, but was also fundamentally offensive to the people of Canada, whom they played for fools, and disrespectful of the Parliament of Canada, which they seem to have deliberately misled.

The Liberals were faced with a difficult situation, to be sure. That party’s modern identity is founded upon the legacy of Grit prime pinister Lester Pearson’s philosophy of peacekeeping and fidelity to the UN system.

Distressing for the centre-left Liberals, the action to liberate Iraq — which a credible cross-section of scholars and commentators, including this one, view as having been compatible with UN Security Council resolutions — was launched from within that shadowy limbo of UN diplomacy, where the letter of the law can be cast into doubt by the political posturing of member states.

But their concern was not one for law nor security, it seems, but one of public popularity, political expediency and classic, Liberal, brokerage politics, where the name of the game is pacifying stakeholders.

To their discredit, they even got that part wrong. What our historic U.S. and British and Australian and Dutch — one could go on — allies wanted was Canada’s political and moral support. Our military contribution would be negligible, with our Forces being maxed out by the mission in Afghanistan.

Regardless, the central point is this. On the defining international security issue of our time — one with unprecedented legal, diplomatic, cultural, and military consequences — the Liberal party dithered, delayed and distracted.

And then, on the day before our closest allies went to war, they blew their nationalist trumpet with one hand and crossed their fingers with the other.

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Our responsibility to protect Libyan civilians

May 25, 2011 by Matthew Bondy

March 18, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury
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It’s a fight til death in what’s left of Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.

The authoritarian petro-state, a former Italian colony and one of North Africa’s stronger economies, has collapsed beyond repair. The ongoing violence between Gadhafi’s butchers and the free Libyans bravely resisting them will yield a one-sided triumph; reconciliation is now inconceivable, by the rebels’ own admission.

Libya’s is a struggle without a clear strategic interest at stake for major western powers. The root of the struggle is not terrorism in the contemporary sense, nor Libya’s invasion by another state. The source of the fight is internal; the great risk and reward belongs to Libyans.

So what is the role of the international community?

The nations of the world determined, during the 2005 World Summit and in subsequent endorsements by the United Nations, to protect innocent populations from crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

The framework for delivering this protection was engineered in large measure by Canadians, and is known as the Responsibility to Protect.

R2P, the doctrine’s common moniker, calls for decisive intervention in states whose national governments perpetrate — or fail to prevent — any of the four specified mass-atrocity crimes against their citizens.

In the case of Libya, Gadhafi’s actions plainly constitute crimes against humanity. Ordering military jets to destroy citizens whose only end is liberty clears that legal threshold with room to spare.

Some states, particularly the United Kingdom and France, have called for robust action, including military involvement if necessary. Implementing a “no-fly zone” banning all but allied aircraft from utilizing Libyan airspace is the most popular proposal, but even that fairly non-invasive scheme is slow to gain traction, most notably from Washington.

President Barack Obama, who won the oval office partly due to his strong opposition to his predecessor’s global military expeditions, approaches global conflict with caution and a commitment to the rules-based system of international law. Having robust legal justification prior to taking action is a primary consideration for the Obama foreign policy team.

It would follow that the Obama administration would engage the globally recognized and UN-blessed Responsibility to Protect doctrine to convene a coalition of the willing, ideally under United Nations’ auspices, to put an end to the crimes against humanity Moammar Gadhafi is daily perpetrating against Libyan civilians.

Such an initiative already enjoys broad international and regional support. Most member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have endorsed international action in principle, and regional bodies — including the Gulf Co-operation Council and the Arab League — are on board with a no-fly zone at the least.

So what of Obama’s reluctance to intervene? Is his administration just simply pacifist by instinct? Is it part of a political campaign to rebrand America as the reluctant good Samaritan rather than the baton-wielding policeman? Or maybe his administration just has a healthy appreciation for the massive logistical, political and legal challenges that would really only begin after the Gadhafi regime has been euthanized.

Whatever the reason, America’s reluctance to lead is troubling — especially when the need, the justification and the means for action are so clear.

If the U.S. won’t convene a coalition to protect Libyans from their despot — by diplomacy if at all possible — Canada should work with other partners like Britain and France to build a broad, representative and regionally supported coalition, and give it a mandate to intervene on behalf of the Libyan people and their universal human rights.

As a principal engineer of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and a consistent steward of liberal values around the world, Canada should bring her voice, influence and, if need be, might, to the defence of free Libyans.

R2P is our doctrine. Let’s use it.

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Stability now or later for the middle east?

May 25, 2011 by Matthew Bondy

February 17, 2011

My latest from the Guelph Mercury
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On the revolution then unfolding in France, Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke observed, “When I see liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it.

“I must be tolerably sure,” he continued, “before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one.”

This sentiment, so wise and prudent, is nowhere more applicable than in the case of Egypt, whose 30-year dictator, former air force general Hosni Mubarak, was last week forced from office by popular uprising.

The latest in a series of political convulsions in post-war Egyptian politics, the Twitter revolution as some are calling it sprung from a thousand grievances. High unemployment, particularly among youth, an authoritarian political system, lack of opportunity — fuses, all, dry and exposed to the revolutionary spark.

To consolidate gains and keep the dream alive, opposition groups met Monday to discuss next steps and continue the process of transforming the existing constellation of anti-authoritarian activist groups into competitive, democratic parties. Promisingly, the supreme military council now serving as a custodian government has made the facilitation of orderly, democratic elections the core of its mandate.

“We’ll see,” Burke might say.

Egypt’s international partners, the United States chief among them, are now rightly focused and concerned with Egyptian and regional stability — economic, social and geopolitical. After all, Egypt is the Middle East and North Africa’s second largest economy; its peace treaty with Israel is a cornerstone of the regional balance of power; its co-operation in the war on terror has been valuable; and Egypt’s secular political tradition is seen as a relatively palatable alternative to the neighbourhood’s broad offering of fanatical Islamist regimes.

These are not small advantages from a western perspective. So it is understandable that western decision makers, especially those serving in the cautious and restrained Barack Obama administration, are concerned with preserving these plusses amid a fluid and volatile political environment.

But U.S. and allied policymakers need to keep their eyes on the prize. They need to recognize that the fundamental policy choice isn’t between stability with the status quo and instability with change. The true choice is between short-term stability based on repression and long-term stability based on liberty.

If there is a gradual slowdown to the revolution in Egypt, and the international community accepts it – stalled revolutions sometimes happen, and would perhaps tempting if there are some small enhancements to the rule of law and a modest expansion of economic opportunity – the West could have a shot at locking in the strategic advantages it currently enjoys and putting further change on hold.

Or, by pressing for continual progress toward real democratization in Egypt and across the region, the U.S.-led west could help the most politically repressed civilization in the world chart a new course toward freedom, with all the moderating, wealth-creating and peace-producing benefits that democracy yields.

The latter is the just course because only liberty can sustain great civilizations; and only liberty can and does facilitate long-term peace and co-operation between nations.

Of course, there can be no doubt the journey toward sustainable, democratic stability in the Middle East will be steep, perilous, long and hard.

But free men are amassing in Cairo, Tehran, Tunis and Algiers, and they’re ready to make the trek.

And if they reach their goal, a true Burkean blessing it will be.

Posted in Columns, International Affairs, Liberalism, Security & Defence | Leave a Comment »

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