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Op IMPACT: CAF in the Iraq & Syria crisis

E.R. Campbell said:
The Arab/Israeli conflict and the plight of the Palestinian regugees is a classic example of that lack of will.

Probably the leading example, as you say. Palestinian refugee "camps" in Lebanon and (those not destroyed) in Syria are very permanent villages.

Other refugees that never returned include the Vietnamese Boat People though, which we welcomed, and integrated, knowing full well even if they could eventually go back it was going to be generations. One could argue there was a certain amount of Western responsibility to them, but large numbers were accepted into Britain and Canada, neither of which ranked among supporters of the US-led war.

Or the Lebanese, many of whom did go back after Taif, though they keep their Canadian passports (since we did offer them citizenship), knowing how volatile the region is. Of course we now just despise them as "Canadians of convenience."

All too often these days refugees become migrants.
 
Acorn said:
Probably the leading example, as you say. Palestinian refugee "camps" in Lebanon and (those not destroyed) in Syria are very permanent villages.

Other refugees that never returned include the Vietnamese Boat People though, which we welcomed, and integrated, knowing full well even if they could eventually go back it was going to be generations. One could argue there was a certain amount of Western responsibility to them, but large numbers were accepted into Britain and Canada, neither of which ranked among supporters of the US-led war.

Or the Lebanese, many of whom did go back after Taif, though they keep their Canadian passports (since we did offer them citizenship), knowing how volatile the region is. Of course we now just despise them as "Canadians of convenience."

All too often these days refugees become migrants.


A great example of doing the (mostly) right thing ~ accepting (mostly) sophisticated, hard working, adaptable people as immigrants ~ for the wrong reason: as refugees.

I agree they were refugees, many had been in Hong Kong camps, in poor conditions, but better than the Arabs and the UN provide for the Palestinians (yes, I've been in some of those camps), and others were, literally snatched from the ocean by ships. But we, and other Western nations, should have had (should have right now) well targeted immigration programmes that would have seen East Asians as "right," and many other socio-cultural (ethnic) groups as "wrong" for immigration. I could, even, make a weak argument that, given the geography (including the human geography) of East Asia, settling Vietnamese refugees in Australia and North America makes some sense.

But, essentially, we were lucky: the Vietnamese refugees were, concomitantly, excellent immigrants, too; ditto the South Asians from  Uganda in 1972 and the Czechs in 1968; we were not so lucky with other refugees. It's NOT the refugees' fault that they are unprepared to make their ways in Canada ... they're glad to be here, but (culturally) unprepared to prosper here.
 
I'm sure this article from MacLean's, shared with the usual disclaimers, will cause some political leaders to question our future there.
 
"In central Iraq, that targeting has been spotty: The only viable local forces are Shia militias aligned with Iran, and co-operating with them is a geopolitical minefield."

"As much as Canadians want to be part of the action against Islamic State, the reality is that Canada is wading into a complex, fractured and unpredictable landscape. There is no satisfying endgame in sight."

Great piece - unfortunately Harper et al prefer to paint the situation as pretty straightforward - I guess in an election year ya gotta do what ya gotta do right?
 
E.R. Campbell said:
Refugees are, by definition, people who are:

    1. Fleeing their home in fear of life or limb; and

    2. Want, and fully intend to return to their homes as soon as the danger is removed.

People who are fleeing their homes, for whatever reason, and who want to settle somewhere new are migrants, not refugees.

It is wrong to settle refugees in far off, foreign lands, where they have little ability or, often, inclination to adapt. Refugees should be:

    First: Made safe ~ provided with shelter, food, medical care, schools and security, as close to their homes as is practical. This will put a HUGE strain on a few countries which are unfortunate enough to border conflict zones.

    Second: Able to see the international community deal with the threats/dangers which have made them into refugees. This is the real nature of R2P: the civilized, able, mature countries must ACT to change governments which abuse their
    own people: invade; overthrow the cruel, repressive, unrepresentative government; hang the leaders and their henchmen (and women); and, briefly, support new, better leaders.

    Third: Assisted in returning to their homes.

Bringing e.g. Syrian refugees to Canada or Denmark or Germany is unproductive, possibly even counter-productive. Some people in refugee camps will decide that home is no longer attractive; they will want to change their own status from refugee to migrant. Those who want to immigrate to Australia or Britain or Canada should fill out the forms just like all other potential immigrants and hope that they have the "points" they need, based on skill and knowledge and so on.


Here is the problem for Syrian refugees:

             
e4157636-ea4c-4641-abbd-e7344fdb9214-original.jpeg


This image is circulating on social media, now ...

             
cc8ce86d-ddc5-49fa-aac7-6682efed305d-original.jpeg


You know, I almost hope IS** does well ... well enough to invade Saudi Arabia and string up every f'ing member of the House of Saud and all their friends and relatives in the region from every f'ing lamp-post in the f'ing country.
 
E.R. Campbell said:
You know, I almost hope IS** does well ... well enough to invade Saudi Arabia and string up every f'ing member of the House of Saud and all their friends and relatives in the region from every f'ing lamp-post in the f'ing country.

LOL  :D
 
crowbag said:
Alright lads, good cam and concealment, but the ******* Brigadier is coming to visit so take the ganja off your helmets NOW!

:o
 
Haggis said:
I'm sure this article from MacLean's, shared with the usual disclaimers, will cause some political leaders to question our future there.

Here is a more accurate account of Canadian airstrikes since the op launched last fall.  Maybe that article author should spend some time reading.

http://www.forces.gc.ca/en/operations-abroad-current/op-impact-airstrikes.page
 
Thank you Rosemary Barton for keeping Chris Alexander in check....
http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Politics/ID/2674869415/
 
E.R. Campbell said:
You know, I almost hope IS** does well ... well enough to invade Saudi Arabia and string up every f'ing member of the House of Saud and all their friends and relatives in the region from every f'ing lamp-post in the f'ing country.

Frankly I'd rather see our own governments face down the house of Saud and tell them what they can do with their oil. I'd rather see IS as a red mist and the Saudis treated like South Africa was in the '80s (at least).

Even if the Saudis (and inclue the other Gulf States) were inclined to accept regional refugees for anything other than cheap labour it's not exactly a popular destination. Limited livable space, limited opportunities for work and a hostile population are one reason Iraqi and Syrian refugees are heading in other directions. Jordan doesn't have much capacity anymore, and Turkey already has over 2 million living in appalling conditions. Plus the dead boy was a Kurd - is it any wonder his family risked all to get elsewhere.

I think I see a subtext in your earlier post that the people of the Middle East are somehow less desirable as immigrants than the 250,000 Southeast Asians we took in in the '80s. I doubt we can count education as a problem area - Levantine Arabs number amongst the best educated. I suppose we could return to the Christians Only policy that saw our Lebanese community grow prior to WWII - that's what Hungary is demanding should the EU finally get their collective thumbs out and figure out how to deal with a very unbalanced influx.

Yes, maybe the Arabs of the region should pick up more of the load. But perhaps "humanity" has no place in decision making of this sort?

Or maybe I spent far too much time in the ME, and went native, so it's colouring my view of the situation?

 
Eye In The Sky said:
Here is a more accurate account of Canadian airstrikes since the op launched last fall.  Maybe that article author should spend some time reading.

http://www.forces.gc.ca/en/operations-abroad-current/op-impact-airstrikes.page

Fair enough - the main point still holds strong though:

"...the reality is that Canada is wading into a complex, fractured and unpredictable landscape. There is no satisfying endgame in sight."

 
Acorn said:
Frankly I'd rather see our own governments face down the house of Saud and tell them what they can do with their oil. I'd rather see IS as a red mist and the Saudis treated like South Africa was in the '80s (at least).

Even if the Saudis (and inclue the other Gulf States) were inclined to accept regional refugees for anything other than cheap labour it's not exactly a popular destination. Limited livable space, limited opportunities for work and a hostile population are one reason Iraqi and Syrian refugees are heading in other directions. Jordan doesn't have much capacity anymore, and Turkey already has over 2 million living in appalling conditions. Plus the dead boy was a Kurd - is it any wonder his family risked all to get elsewhere.

I think I see a subtext in your earlier post that the people of the Middle East are somehow less desirable as immigrants than the 250,000 Southeast Asians we took in in the '80s. I doubt we can count education as a problem area - Levantine Arabs number amongst the best educated. I suppose we could return to the Christians Only policy that saw our Lebanese community grow prior to WWII - that's what Hungary is demanding should the EU finally get their collective thumbs out and figure out how to deal with a very unbalanced influx.

Yes, maybe the Arabs of the region should pick up more of the load. But perhaps "humanity" has no place in decision making of this sort?

Or maybe I spent far too much time in the ME, and went native, so it's colouring my view of the situation?


I suppose you do. My own, personal (and very limited) experience is that my (few) Arab (Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian and Lebanese (Christian and Muslim) colleagues (mostly in the radio/telecomm engineering world) were excellent people, great immigrants and a real asset to Canada ~ very well educated, in many cases, and (universally, I think) eager to leave the Middle East for socio-economic and political reasons. On a slightly lower scale, ditto for my neighbour the Arab convenience store owner who is doing a great job raising two sons to be good, hard working, well educated, productive (and, it appears to me, happy Canadians ~ happy to be Canadian). Not the same, evidently, for many Arabs (just a minority, I suppose) who have come to Canada and cannot manage to adapt to a modern, sophisticated, Western/multi-cultural lifestyle and have become drains on both our social welfare and criminal justice systems.

Are there no Chinese and Vietnamese criminals? You bet your life there are: and they're a cruel and vicious lot, too. :nod:

But, my personal experience is that my East and South Asian colleagues and friends seemed to have fewer community problems than my Arab/Middle Eastern colleagues; one of my Arab-Canadian friends told us that he had withdrawn almost completely from any Islamic community organizations, cutting himself off from some of his own famiuly: he has three daughters and he explained that they could not grow to their full human potential if they were exposed to the influences of mosques and community organizations. I don't recall any of our Chinese or Indian colleagues saying anything similar, ever, not even about Hindu-Sikh problems.
 
The Last Neocon

"Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been a hawk since the days of W. His looming defeat could finally mean an end to one of the most controversial foreign-policy eras in recent history."

Interesting take on PM Harper:

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/02/the-last-neocon-canadas-stephen-harper/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=%2AEditors%20Picks
 
E.R. Campbell said:
I suppose you do. My own, personal (and very limited) experience is that my (few) Arab (Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian and Lebanese (Christian and Muslim) colleagues (mostly in the radio/telecomm engineering world) were excellent people, great immigrants and a real asset to Canada ~ very well educated, in many cases, and (universally, I think) eager to leave the Middle East for socio-economic and political reasons. On a slightly lower scale, ditto for my neighbour the Arab convenience store owner who is doing a great job raising two sons to be good, hard working, well educated, productive (and, it appears to me, happy Canadians ~ happy to be Canadian). Not the same, evidently, for many Arabs (just a minority, I suppose) who have come to Canada and cannot manage to adapt to a modern, sophisticated, Western/multi-cultural lifestyle and have become drains on both our social welfare and criminal justice systems.

Are there no Chinese and Vietnamese criminals? You bet your life there are: and they're a cruel and vicious lot, too. :nod:

But, my personal experience is that my East and South Asian colleagues and friends seemed to have fewer community problems than my Arab/Middle Eastern colleagues; one of my Arab-Canadian friends told us that he had withdrawn almost completely from any Islamic community organizations, cutting himself off from some of his own famiuly: he has three daughters and he explained that they could not grow to their full human potential if they were exposed to the influences of mosques and community organizations. I don't recall any of our Chinese or Indian colleagues saying anything similar, ever, not even about Hindu-Sikh problems.

In light of the recent, and ever-present, refugee debate in Canada, I would like Campbell's take on the Sri Lankan Tamil boat people:

Has Canada seen the last of the boat people?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/has-canada-seen-the-last-of-the-boat-people/article21153005/
 
crowbag said:
Fair enough - the main point still holds strong though:

"...the reality is that Canada is wading into a complex, fractured and unpredictable landscape. There is no satisfying endgame in sight."

AFAIC, Canada's end game in Op IMPACT would be rethinking strategy once the Liberals win the election on Oct19.
 
Re: Refugees and Immigrants.

As an immigrant myself I do not want people coming here out of fear and desperation.  I want willing volunteers to help this country grow and sustain the lifestyle we enjoy.  Fear and despair breed resentment.

Immigrants should be welcomed. 

Refugees are a necessary evil. 

The suitable response when someone is driven out of their home is to get them back into their home as quickly as possible. 
 
From Thursday copy of the National Post. Re-printed under the usual provisions of the Copyright Act:

Canada is watching Syria die

Terry Glavin | September 2, 2015 | Last Updated: Sep 3 8:36 AM ET

“The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,” Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in the Syrian community are feeling.”

There are feelings of deep gratitude for having been welcomed into Canada, Alazem said. But with their homeland being reduced to an apocalyptic nightmare — the barrel-bombing of Aleppo and Homs, the beheadings of university professors, the demolition of Palmyra’s ancient temples — among Syrian-Canadians, there is also an unquenchable sorrow.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s genocidal regime clings to power in Damascus and the jihadist psychopaths of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are ascendant almost everywhere else. The one thing the democratic opposition wanted from the world was a no-fly zone and air-patrolled humanitarian corridors. Even that was too much to ask. There is no going home now.

But among Syrian-Canadians, the worst thing of all, Alazem said, is a suffocating feeling of solitude and betrayal. “In the Western countries, the civil society groups — it’s not just their inaction, they fight you as well,” he said. “They are crying crocodile tears about refugees now, but they have played the biggest role in throwing lifelines to the regime. And so I have to say to them, this is the reality, this is the result of all your anti-war activism, and now the people are drowning in the sea.”

Drowning in the sea: a little boy, no more than five-years-old, in a red T-shirt and shorts, found face-down in the surf. The toddler was among 11 corpses that washed up on a Turkish beach Tuesday. Last Friday, as many as 200 refugees drowned when the fishing boat they were being smuggled in capsized off the Libyan coast. At least 2,500 people, most of them Syrians, have drowned in this way in the Mediterranean already this year.

A year ago this week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry emerged from a gathering on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Wales with commitments from nine NATO countries, including Canada, to join in a military effort to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIL. A few days after that Sept. 4, 2014, huddle, a half-dozen Arab states signed up. At least a dozen other countries are now also contributing in one way or another.

To say the American-led coalition effort has failed to stop the war in Syria would be true enough. It would also be disingenuous, for two reasons. The first is that to have allowed ISIL to expand the scope of its rampages would have meant war without precedent in 1,000 years of the Middle East’s bloody history. The second and most important is that the Obama administration never had any intention of stopping the war in the first place.

Assad, the Iranian ayatollahs’ Syrian proxy, has been allowed to persist in his relentless bombing of Syria’s cities and his dispatching of Shabiha and Hezbollah death squads. Assad has been allowed to violate Obama’s allegedly genius chemical-weapons pact as well, dozens of times. It is the toll from Assad’s war, not ISIL’s atrocities, that is the thing to notice: perhaps seven of every eight Syrian deaths (at least a quarter of a million people so far), almost all of Syria’s seven million “internally displaced” innocents and the overwhelming majority of the four million Syrian refugees who have fled the country.

The enormity of the Syrian catastrophe is at least partly what makes the tragedy so difficult to comprehend, but in Canada there is an added encumbrance. It is the delicate sensibilities of established opinion that require diplomacy to be privileged as an unimpeachable virtue and further require the United Nations to be understood as the sole means by which disasters of the Syrian kind are prevented, or at least resolved.

It makes no difference that no less an authority than António Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, attributes Syria’s agonies primarily to a failure of diplomacy, or that the UN’s governing Security Council is a hostage of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, or that the UN’s refugee budget is running well below the half-way mark — $5.6 billion — for Syrian refugees. Funding is already two-thirds shy of anticipated refugee costs for 2015. The World Food Program has been rolling back its refugee food allowances year after year and in the coming weeks, more than 200,000 of the most desperate Syrian refugees are having their aid cut off entirely.

With their homeland being reduced to an apocalyptic nightmare, among Syrian-Canadians, there is also an unquenchable sorrow
In Geneva, the International Organization for Migration reckons that about 237,000 people have set out across the Mediterranean in rickety ships headed for Europe this year, a number already exceeding last year’s total figure of 219,000. The main cohort consists of Syrian refugees, the largest refugee population on Earth. Europe is now facing a refugee crisis unlike anything since the Second World War.

In the Canadian context, the only comparable event is Black September, 1847, the darkest hour of the Irish famine, when roughly 100,000 mostly Irish refugees arrived in the Saint Lawrence River in dozens of coffin ships. Roughly 17,500 Irish drowned that year, or died on board ship, or in the fever sheds on the quarantine island of Gross Isle. The Syrians are the famine Irish of 21st century.

There’s another illustrative comparison worth making. Canada has settled roughly 20,000 Iraqi refugees since 2009 and last January, the Conservative government committed to taking in 10,000 Syrian refugees, on top of 1,300 welcomed in 2014. Last month, Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised that another 10,000 Syrians and Iraqis would be added to the mix. Here’s the contrast: the kinder, gentler Obama administration has allowed only about 1,500 Syrian refugees to settle in the United States over the past four years.

Harper is right when he says the New Democratic Party’s approach to the Syrian catastrophe amounts to little more than “dropping aid on dead people.” The NDP is right when it points out the inordinately obtuse and incoherent accounting of just how many Syrian refugees have actually arrived in Canada. The Liberals are right, too, in their call to expedite family reunification visas, show more generosity and cooperation in private-sponsorship efforts, reduce processing times and allow Syrians on temporary visas to extend their stays in Canada and acquire citizenship.

But what we are all doing — Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, Americans, Canadians, and all the dominant elites of the United Nations and the NATO countries that cleave to that sophisticated indifference known in polite company as anti-interventionism — is a very straightforward thing. We are watching Syria die. We are allowing it to happen. And if you can comprehend that, you will know something of the sorrow that afflicts Faisal Alazem and all those other Syrian-Canadians these days.

National Post

Article Link
 
crowbag said:
Fair enough - the main point still holds strong though:

"...the reality is that Canada is wading into a complex, fractured and unpredictable landscape. There is no satisfying endgame in sight."

So, if it's hard or difficult, leave it for someone else?  Imagine if the world continued to do that in say, 1939ish...would have been a great ending no?

If we pull out of the MESF now, how long will it be before the Liberals and NDP are yacking that the Conservatives are 'doing nothing and letting innocent people die"? 

Point - no matter what the PM and government do, the Liberals and NDP will say it is wrong and not enough.
 
Tuan said:
AFAIC, Canada's end game in Op IMPACT would be rethinking strategy once the Liberals win the election on Oct19.

You aren't seeming to get it.  Canada can have all the 'strategy' revamped by the Liberals IF they win an election.  It will only (maybe) change a few things, Canada is NOT...NOT driving the big happy MESF bus.  We have a seat on the bus, if we don't like the way they bus is going we have the choice to get off, or stay.  The Coach Master is the GOI.

PS - this is an OP Impact thread, not a Sri Lanka thread.  :2c:
 
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