Free pass for Syria killer

Free pass for Syria killer

Boy, we're getting tough on Syria.

John Baird, Canada's foreign affairs minister, met with Hillary Clinton, his U.S. counterpart, and they held a very stern press conference in which they denounced Syria's tyrant, Bashar al-Assad.

He's the one mowing down his own citizens by the thousand. You know, tanks shooting at civilians kind of thing.

But do not worry, Canada and the United States have denounced him.

Which is an improvement over U.S. President Barack Obama's first approach to the Arab dictators, back in 2009, sending them a sternly worded apology.

Assad is slaughtering his own people, especially in the town of Hama. Which is fitting. Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, who was Syria's dictator before him, killed more than 20,000 people in that same city in 1982. The world didn't stop him then, and they're not stopping his son now.

The United States and Canada can't even bring themselves to call for Assad to leave.

The official U.S. line is they continue to seek ways to "isolate" Assad, and are glad "international opinion" is shifting against him and are "committed to seeing violence end."

But it's not the role of the United States or Canada to be the world's policemen. There are plenty of tyrannies in this world and it's simply impossible for America, even with NATO's help, to take the role of globo-cop.

Take the NATO-led mini-war in Libya. That air war was purportedly started to fix the exact same problems we see in Syria, a brutal dictator killing protesters. At first, the air strikes were supposed to just stop Moammar Gadhafi from killing civilians. But then NATO decided they wanted a regime change and began to target Gadhafi himself.

After months of bombings, hundreds of Libyans are dead — including dozens of civilians. Several of Gadhafi's children are dead, too. But the old Colonel remains unscathed. Last week, the French government announced it was withdrawing its aircraft carrier for a break.

Mission accomplished, I guess — France had shown how morally pure it was, had spent some money blowing things up, and thought it was time to go home.

The only thing worse would have been if they had actually killed Gadhafi. What would France (and the U.S. and Canada) do then? Would we put soldiers on the ground to actually police the country through its revolution to a democratic transition? Would we be a physical buffer between rival clans and gangs? Would we stick around for eight years, as the U.S. has done in Iraq? Or 70, as the U.S. has done in Germany and Japan?

Leftist, one-world-government types have concocted a fuzzy theory called the "responsibility to protect," requiring western nations to do just that — to make other countries' business our own business, even if (especially if) we have no real national interests at stake. The idea is so fashionable it even has its own nickname, R2P.

R2P would have western soldiers everywhere in the world from Rwanda to Darfur to Syria to Libya to Zimbabwe. It's social workers with rifles — which is not what the Canadian Forces were trained to do, nor is it what Canada's military was created to do.

We have a military to defend our borders, and to project our might around the world judiciously to defend our national interests. Like the Second World War.

The slaughter in Syria is a shame and a scandal. But it is not in our national interests to attack Assad. Just as it is not in our national interests to spill a single drop of Canadian blood in Libya, either.

We should do what the French have done — declare victory and head home.

Let the Europeans keep fighting in Libya. Unlike us, they're actually there for a national interest.

They buy a million barrels of conflict oil a day from Libya. It makes sense for them to fight in Libya.

Not for us.

EZRA LEVANT - QMI AGENCY