Two different responses to Harper's speech --
First from the chippy bastard:
Harper's speech shocks and awes
Alliance leader takes a forceful stance on Liberal war policy
Paul Wells
National Post
Friday, March 21, 2003
OTTAWA - The Pentagon's shock-and-awe policy has been delayed by circumstance. Jean Chrétien's aw-shucks policy continues unabated.
For months the Prime Minister refused to discuss the possibility of war in Iraq because it was hypothetical. Yesterday, he announced he must not discuss war because there is one underway. Once the shooting stops, expect Mr. Chrétien to brush off further questions by saying it is not worth rehashing the past. This is what it feels like to be given the runaround by an expert.
Mr. Chrétien is, at least, on the side of the Canadian majority. Stephen Harper is not, so some of my favourite columnists have suggested Iraq will be the Alliance leader's Waterloo. I am not so sure after yesterday.
Mr. Harper has been reluctant to put too much emphasis on his Iraq policy. Day after day has gone by, during the last few months, when the Alliance was the only opposition party to find other issues besides war to pester the Liberals about. He has seemed more keenly aware than anyone else that Iraq could cause him trouble.
But at some point you are stuck with your beliefs, if you have any. Yesterday, Mr. Harper decided to make the case for his Iraqi policy. He did it forcefully, coherently, emotionally. I am less inclined to believe his stance will doom him than to suspect the qualities he showed while defending it offer his only chance of success.
The Commons was debating a Bloc Québécois motion opposing war. The best that can be said of Mr. Harper's speech is that it steered well clear of an argument making the rounds: that Canada must support a war because the Americans will be angry with us if we don't. That is an appeal to cowardice and the pocketbook, a suggestion that George Bush's customs agents are more cause for worry than Saddam's artillery.
Mr. Harper hinted at that argument only when he said this is the first time Canada has refused to side with a military coalition of Brits and Americans, a statistical observation that should be of no interest if the Brits and Americans are doing the wrong thing. He set out to make the more difficult argument that war is the proper course on its own merits.
"It is inherently dangerous to allow a country such as Iraq to retain weapons of mass destruction," he said. "If the world community fails to disarm Iraq, we fear that other rogue states will be encouraged to believe that they too can have these most deadly of weapons."
So Iraq must be disarmed. "But it has now become apparent that that objective is inseparable from the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime."
From there he made points about legality and about the value -- cruelly limited, for him -- of United Nations support. All this was perfectly pedestrian until Mr. Harper made an uncharacteristic appeal to deeper values.
"This government, in taking the position it has taken ... has left us standing for nothing, no realistic alternative, no point of principle and no vision of the future. It has left us standing with no one."
His voice rose as he said this. The tired, distracted tone he so often affects left him. He spoke of his "great fear: A country that does not embrace its own friends and allies in a dangerous world but thinks it can use them and reject them at will. Such a country will, in time, endanger its own existence."
But again, it's not all about the Yankees: "In the great wars of the last century -- against authoritarianism, against fascism, against communism -- Canada did not merely stand with the Americans, we more often than not led the way."
I have learned, by criticizing him, that Mr. Harper has a substantial fan club composed, in the main, of people who liked his two predecessors just fine and who will not hear a cross word against anyone who wears Alberta's colours in Parliament. Fair enough. But the Stephen Harper on display yesterday was strikingly different from both of his predecessors.
Preston Manning was a committed populist. He would, I believe, have found some way to come out on the side of the majority on an issue as big as this. Stockwell Day, paradoxically, seemed unwilling to make a deliberate moral case on the very issues about which he had the strongest moral convictions.
Mr. Harper has hardly set this town on fire. But his newfound willingness to go down swinging may offer his best hope of making sure he doesn't go down.
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