But instead Canadians reserve their rage and fury for Omar Khadr’s capture and detention by the Americans. In less enlightened times, he would have been regarded as a traitor. Today, he’s the Billy Bishop of the new war, a hero to all the usual campaigners for “justice,” the ones who managed to maintain a scrupulous indifference to the fates of Omar’s fellow Canadians Bill Sampson, tortured by the Saudis, and Zahra Kazemi, questioned to death by the Iranian authorities.
Likewise, the British obsession with whether the war in Iraq was legally permissible. At the time, the late Lord Williams, then leader of the House of Lords and formerly attorney general in Mr. Blair’s ministry, remarked to me that the prime minister had been advised by his lawyers that if he expressed support for regime change in public it would risk having the war ruled “illegal.” I scoffed that any civilized human being, never mind one as self-righteous as Mr. Blair, ought to favour regime change in Iraq. But, in an increasingly legalistic conflict environment, it was felt that the narrow rationale of WMD was all that was available for London to sign onto, so president Bush decided to go along with it, mainly for Tone’s sake. That brought the Bush administration a ton of domestic political trouble down the line, and became the easiest cudgel with which the Democrats relentlessly delegitimized the war.
But, again, the legalistic obsession with the casus belli in Iraq is in marked contrast to Warmonger Bliar’s previous war. By the standards applied to Iraq, the Kosovo campaign was not only illegal, it was so illegal Blair and Clinton didn’t even bother to try to make it look legal. No attempt at UN resolutions there. They just cried “Bombs away!” and got on with it. And nobody minds.
Why? Because, for an advanced Western nation in the 21st century, war is only legitimate if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever war you’re waging. Kosovo meets that definition: no one remembers why we went in, who were the good guys, or what the hell the point of it was. Which is the point: the principal rationale was that there was no rationale. The Clinton/Blair argument boiled down to: the fact that we have no reason to get into it justifies our getting into it. Whereas Afghanistan and Iraq are morally dubious if not outright illegal precisely because Britain and America behaved as nation states acting in their national interest. And we’re not meant to do that anymore.
The cultural relativism of the dopier university campuses is to be applied globally.
That suits the enemy just fine. When he was facing a military commission, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed decided to cut to the chase and plead guilty: get those virgins ready, I’m on my way! When Obama scrapped the commissions and loosed KSM on the civilian justice system, the previously guilty man revised his plea to not guilty. So he’ll get a billion-dollar trial. And Tony Blair will be investigated to the end of his days. And don’t rule out one of those Khadr boys making it, if not to 24 Sussex, at least to the House of Commons.
Remember what they used to say about Sept. 11? “The day that everything changed”? No. It should have taught us how much had already changed—and how unlikely we’ll ever change back.
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