Good read from Michael Harris - again

What Trudeau will — and won’t — do to reverse Harper’s legacy

No matter what the pundits, pols or PR types tell you, de-Harperizing Canada will be the biggest political story of 2016.

The writing, or rather the graffiti, is already on the wall; it’s all about Liberal credibility now. The Conservative Opposition has made it crystal clear — if the Trudeau government doesn’t change Harper’s decisions, it’s endorsing them. As an argument it’s morally craven, but effective in its own way.

While people voted for Justin Trudeau in large numbers because of the ‘positive’ things he promised to do, they also have a long list of things they expect him toundo. In the Westerns, it’s called ‘cleaning up Tombstone’. Trudeau is Wyatt Earp.

One of the true measures of success or failure for the new prime minister in his first year (not his first two months) will be how faithful he remains to the commitment to systematically reverse the worst of the Harper legacy. Steve was a bird who soiled the nest knee-deep. Justin must put on his rubber gloves and get scrubbing.

It will not be pleasant or easy work. Thanks to Harper’s schoolyard foreign policy, the Trudeau government is not in a good position to make the return to “constructive multilateralism” as promised during the campaign. The fact is, Harper left our international knickers in a knot.

His bomb-and-bombast policy in the Middle East has been an unmitigated disaster. It did nothing to bring peace to that part of the world, or to make this country safer. In fact, it put Canada on the map as a terror target.

http://ipolitics.ca/2016/01/07/what-trudeau-will-and-wont-do-to-reverse-harpers-legacy/

Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of Great Britain’s MI5 domestic security service, just delivered that very message in the U.K. to the Chilcot Inquiry. Chilcot is examining why Britain really went to war in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It wasn’t to unearth weapons of mass destruction (the U.S.-led coalition supplied those). The reason was regime change — an illegal proposition under international law. In other words, the whole thing was a dark deception … which explains the chorus of lies sung on both sides of the Atlantic by the former political leaders who directed the invasion.

Lady Eliza’s testimony is turning the former British PM from Tony the Tiger into Tony Baloney. Not only did Hussein pose a “very limited” threat to Britain, she said, but invading Iraq under false pretenses “substantially” increased the risk of terror attacks.

According to the former counter-intelligence chief, the invasion was also a “significant” factor in the radicalization of Muslims living in the U.K. We see here the law of unintended consequences writ large: Tony Blair’s misbegotten war created “domestic” terror.

It’s worth remembering that Harper thought opting out of the 2003 Iraq war was a grave mistake. In fact, he and Stockwell Day apologized for their country’s policy in a letter to Americans printed in the Wall Street Journal. Once in power, there wasn’t a war Harper missed from Afghanistan to Libya. Then came Iraq and Syria.

Harper’s mess now rests uneasily in Trudeau’s hands. During the campaign, Trudeau promised to reverse the Harper policy and stop the bombing — a message that apparently resonated with a huge number of Canadians, given the results of the election.