isis are some pretty bad bad guys. about the worst bad kind of bad guy that you could get. a little of it might be propaganda, but the crux of it seems pretty bad, regardless. they seem to be a front for saudi interests, and that gets to the heart of some nasty problems with american foreign policy. my analysis of this is that they're trying to stop a proxy war between saudi arabia and turkey, out of a political vacuum that's arisen in the region. essentially, the saudis and turks are fighting over control of the area in what is being (perhaps falsely) assumed as a post-russian sphere. that converts it into some kind of war against the saudis, on behalf of the turks. the saudis are trying to maintain a plausible deniability level of distance, but the americans don't really believe it.
but, i'm stealing your video to make a different point.
whatever you think about this, it places the canadian left in an ideological and policy position that needs clarification and rethinking. and, i think this is something that should be a part of the upcoming election cycle.
the ndp have held to principled foreign policy issues out of their role as a perennial protest party. now that they're looking at power, you can expect them to sound a little more like liberals. not a total abandonment of principle (the liberals were always relatively principled on foreign policy to begin with), but maybe a bit of a shot of reality into the principled perspective. the problem with this is that the liberal position has become untenable in the period of time that's elapsed since they last formed a government.
the liberal party position on intervention has been pretty consistent since the establishment of the united nations, and it's to uphold the security council, the various conventions (including the geneva convention) and the rule of international law. their decision to go into afghanistan and serbia and stay out of iraq wasn't intuitive kneejerking, or even based on domestic politics. it was out of a very long standing tradition of moving with the un, rather than with nato. harper has realigned this position to one where canada just sticks to whatever nato (or increasingly just america) does. one would expect that an incoming liberal (or ndp) government would be likely to retreat back to the internationalist, united nations position.
...except that the iraq war has rendered the united nations useless. the russians have pointed very heavily towards the resolution on libya as the point where the un became toothless. whatever you point to as the breaking point, there has been a breaking point. this idea of the united nations as an arbiter is really out the window.
today, the united states does whatever it wants. in fact, the united states executive branch does whatever it wants. it doesn't seek approval from the united nations, and it ignores it when it votes against it. it doesn't seek approval from congress. it doesn't seek approval from nato. it follows no concept of international law, and doesn't care if it breaks it. as this has been developing, canada has had a government that has embraced their contempt.
so, where does that leave the canadian left in reformulating it's policy on intervention?
i happen to think that isis deserved a good bombing. these are really, really bad guys and if you leave them in place they'll do really, really bad things.
but, i think that there needs to be a post-un legal framework in place that allows us to come to that conclusion via more than gut instinct.