this is mostly nonsense. it made sense ten years ago, when the topic was bombing iraq for no discernible reason. but, bombing isis is not the same thing as bombing saddam hussein. that's the error this article is making, and perhaps the error that a small number of canadians continue to make.

what you see when you look at polls on this is not a stark ideological division, but a difficulty choosing between two aspects of our cultural heritage. we are both the country that avoided pointless fights in vietnam and iraq and the country that fought the hardest (western) battles in world war two, when the war was worth fighting. this isn't a wedge issue. it's two sides of the same coin: we don't like to fight, but we will when we feel we must. the hard part is in trying to understand what it is that is before us: is this a pointless fight for geostrategic positioning, or is there a really nasty enemy here that needs to be thoroughly annihilated? is it even somewhere in between? canadians will react relative to how they perceive this question.

the reality is that this was not at the top of any voters issue lists. the issues at the top of the list were health care and jobs. the liberals won the election on a rejection of conservative economic austerity, whether that austerity was real or perceived.

and, the reality is that the decision is neither political nor cultural but simply strategic.

you want obama comparisons? you can make a good one, here. it was well publicized that obama opposed the invasion of iraq. but, this was widely misunderstood by the media as a pacifist position. obama's position was actually very clear, to those that took the time to learn it: he did not oppose the invasion of iraq because he was a pacifist, or even because it was illegal, but simply because he thought it was strategically foolish. he thought it was going to bog his forces down in a pointless and unwinnable conflict, and he would have preferred to invade pakistan, instead, where the roots of the problem could be more effectively rooted out. you can look this up, it's absolutely accurate. now, he may not have been fully briefed. but, over a decade later, it is clear that he was right - if you accept the narrative we're presented with. iraq was a mistake because it prevented the americans from containing the bad guys in central asia.

ten years from now, it will probably be equally clear that the right choice is to train local forces to create stable, local governments, and not to rain down fire from the sky. but, it's less clear that our allies have the foresight to realize this and less clear that he's going to be able to stop them from making that error.

the irony here is that the mere idea of the wedge issue is a consequence of the previous government.

liberals have historically defined themselves via subtle thinking, not picking one side of a fight.

"involvement if necessary, but not necessarily involvement".

it's easy to call this "weak". but, this is our actual identity.

if it gets really bad, we'll send troops under a un or nato mandate.

and, virtually everybody will support that.

www.huffingtonpost.ca/alan-ramon-ward/isis-bombing-campaign_b_8700124.html