What was the motivation for Canada’s parliamentarians to vote to join the United States and allied forces in an unprovoked attack against Libya?

Not only unprovoked, the Libyan war was an illegal act under the United States Constitution. If the United States had no national justification for declaring war in Libya, what was Canada’s possible rationalization?

At least all members of Parliament were offered the opportunity to debate the matter in the House of Commons-which is more than can be said for the United States Congress.

However, the discussion emanating from the Canadian legislators was opaque, as though they did not have a clear grasp of the Libyan situation which was understandable.

Nobody anywhere was clear on the campaign’s purpose. U.S. President Barack Obama was vague and contradictory in his explanations.

Obama’s first noble goal was “not a war”, he said, but simply to wipe out Muammar Gaddafi for humanitarian purposes. Bombings were alleged to be an instrument to establish a no-fly zone.

Translated that essentially means protecting a force of Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored Libyan rebels composed of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama’s second righteous goal, the “real purpose”, he said, was to help the “rebels” by degrading the Libyan military. Nobody could discern the “good rebels” from the “bad rebels”.

At no time, Obama chimed, was the intent of his U.S. military operation to kill Libyan soldiers. Intentionally or unintentionally, Libyan soldiers were killed as soon as the U.S. military showed up on the scene.

When former U.S. President George W. Bush requested backup to attack Iraq in 2003, Canada declined to participate. It was a good decision. Canada had no direct grievance with Iraq.

Besides, the United States was warned that any country going to war against Iraq would be stuck there for at least the next 30 years. Eight years have passed since the United States planted an air base and troops on Holy Land that has the Muslims piqued. Iraq still lacks a democratic form of government and is unlikely to have one patterned after the United States.

Canada, a member of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), chose to send troops to Afghanistan. Canadians have witnessed repeated delays for a firm date when troops will be brought home. More likely, Canada will be mired for the long haul in AfCANistan, just as it will be if it continues this Libyan lunacy.

The United States was warned that going into Libya would result in another Vietnam. Canada was smart enough to stay out of Nam and should have stayed out of Libya.

Until the parliamentarians voted to join an international coalition to attack the North African country, Canada had no fresh quarrel with Libya.

Libya was not invading Canada or any other country. Libya’s civil war was none of Canada’s business. But it very well may become Canada’s business now because this whole misguided United Nations charade is bound to backfire.

At one point, Italy, which has evidently lived and traded in a tolerable existence with its next door neighbor for years, threatened to reassess the opening of its seven mainland and Sicily air bases as staging areas for the leaderless coalition’s jet fighters.

It was pure chaos.

Some allied countries had not fought a full-fledged war for a dozen years; military flyers were lacking in combat training; other countries were operating aircraft that had not been tested for warfare; Canada owned older-model jet fighters.

Canada waded blindly into a hornet’s nest that the United States stirred up over 30 years ago. Since the Reagan administration bombed Muammar Gaddafi’s backside in the 1980s and told the madman to shut up, he’s been fairly quiet, only occasionally unleashing his heavies to wander around America looking for a candidate to assassinate.

During those years Western countries prostituted themselves by paying regular “foreign aid”–one bribe remitted as late as February–to placate and enrich the personal coffers of the kleptocrat who needed money to pay Libyan soldiers and mercenaries.

Oil, per se, is not at stake in this armed madhouse, as the Marxist mainstream media like to espouse. The spike in the oil price has nothing to do with short supply but is caused by manipulators playing the futures game on the derivatives market.

Only ten percent of the United States’ oil requirements come from the Middle East. OPEC wants the money and the U.S. wants to buy the oil. Exchanging money for a product is called commerce. If the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries stops pumping or refuses to sell, the United States can top up in Canada.

The Libyan street riots were actually ignited over the high cost of food. The devalued American dollar, against which all world currencies are pegged, has created harsh inflation in some parts of the world. A large portion of the seven-million Libyan population exists on low income and can no longer afford to buy food.

U.S. President Obama’s solution to the perceived problem was to dictate that Gaddafi step down. He didn’t obey. Obama’s backup solution was to forceable remove the dictator through use of CIA rebels.

The CIA, endowed with a bottomless pit of greenbacks, supplies money, arms, artillery and other goodies to rebels and foments dissension. The secret agency has a deplorable record as an intelligence gatherer, a fact dating back to the Cold War when the paranoid United States was off on a crusade under the guise of slaying the communist dragon.

Politicians simply parrot the mantra about establishing democracies in these backwater countries. The Western “mob-rule” form of government is not embedded in either the Muslim or the Communist cultures and is not part of the equation.

The United States wants to control these tyrannical dictators for its own purposes. For 60 years, the CIA has traditionally installed worst dictators to replace the evil ones who were expelled or assassinated, as was the disastrous case in Iran and Iraq in 1979.

When action heated up in Libya in March, the United States and the United Nations engaged in a little tête-à-tête for a week.

Then talking heads met for another week at a glitzy Paris Summit where, on March 19, President Nicolas Sarkozy seemed eager for France to be a vanguard in “protecting the people of Libya”.

In reality, he was promoting the rebels’ salvation from the Libyan military.

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper should have stayed at home and left the decision-making muddle to the likes of David Cameron, Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State.

But, being loyal United Nations member states, the naive imperialists were eager to jump into this dragon-slaying crusade without regards for civilian deaths, known in military vernacular as “collateral damage”.

Due to rough criticism, the U.S. military guaranteed no “collateral damage” in Libya. This is “not a war”, remember? It is “kinetic” activity, the military spokesmen stated.

Translation: “kinetic” means the movement of the hardware whizzing through the night air before the missiles thud to earth, thus reducing buildings and infrastructure to rubble and blowing hundreds of innocent civilians into bloody particles.

When declaring this war, the monarchal U.S. president not only abdicated his executive responsibility to request Congressional approval, as is outlined in the Constitution, Obama did not even notify the elected members, except to send a letter to a couple of key people, before jetting off on holidays.

The only time the U.S. president can declare war without Congressional approval is when America is under enemy siege on its own soil. This indiscretion is grounds for impeachment. Luscious thought!

After exercising unmitigated gall, the president disappeared to Brazil, allowing uninformed Congressmen to go away on spring recess none the wiser.

It was learned that the president had bypassed Congress in favour of a week of secret meetings with that bumptious bunch at the United Nations. This international organization, which was overanxious to go into Libya, is the same outfit that turned its back to the pleas from Rwanda where nearly a million people were slaughtered in an internal war in 1994.

Obama, the Commander-in-Chief facing war, was conspicuous in his absence from the Paris Summit. This is the same man who boasted during his presidential campaign that as soon as he was sent to the White House he would bring the U.S troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq. All he has done is enter the United States into a third war with a Muslim nation; four, really, if you count Pakistan.

It became abundantly clear very soon that Obama was in over his head and could have used new advisors and strategists. He didn’t know what he was doing or why he was doing it.

His remarks to the American people were incoherent. If the American people were in the dark as to why the United States is in Libya, then how could Canadians possibly condone their own government blindly following the United States into a war?

Some news commentators on both sides of the border, who never took Political History 101, stupidly compared the Libyan situation to Nazi Germany. They aren’t even remotely close in similarity.

Germany, a European country, was not embroiled in a civil war. The Nazis had a lust for land and was aggressively annexing Austria, then Czechoslovakia’s Sudentenland region, before invading Poland.

Britain, not wanting to become a German-speaking country, was forced to declare war against Germany on September 3, 1939. In allegiance to the motherland, the Dominion of Canada swiftly came onside a week later.

The United States was nowhere to be seen in the outbreak of the European Theatre, except for industrialists supplying Germany with parts, tanks and heavy artillery.

It was over two years before the United States suffered an attitude adjustment about joining World War II when the Japanese kamikazed U.S. battleships and aircraft at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.

The idea of democracy, the rule of parliament and individual freedoms, which made rapid headway in early England, France and later in Canada and America, had no roots in the German psyche, just as democracy and the rule of parliament are foreign concepts that are not going to take hold immediately in countries with a long history of brutal totalitarianism.

The gruesome WWII ended in 1945 on the note “Never again!” It was the last time Canada declared war…until Libya!

When the Libyan no-fly zone business came about, the United States had no intentions of leading the pack, as every country involved had assumed. Neither did the United Nations want the job. They expected the position to go to NATO, who didn’t want the job either.

During the first six days required to convince NATO to take on the lead role, bombs rained down on Libyan cities without anybody seemingly in command.

The sum total of what the heads of the coalition countries knew from the outset was that the United Nations Security Council had voted “go”.

Another ironical wrinkle is that last year, 2010, Canada, for whatever reason, wanted a seat on the UN Security Council. The bid was lost to Portugal, mainly because of opposition expressed from the Arabian countries that had made unfounded accusations about Canada’s human-rights abuses.

That would have been an ideal occasion for Canada to withdraw membership from the United Nations and reallocate the hefty annual dues, peacekeeping funds and miscellaneous fees to better use at home.

Canada should definitely distance itself from this war. If Gaddafi had attacked another country, that would have been a different issue. But this is a civil war contained within Libyan borders.

Yes, Gaddafi is notorious as a cruel and bloodthirsty tyrant who hires mercenaries with foreign aid money to kill his own people and executes dissidents in the public square. He dispatches terrorist thugs to blow up passenger jets and to stalk high-profile Americans tagged for assassination.

These dealings may sound despicable and heartless to weak-livered Westerners. But this is the harsh reality of how autocratic rulers in Muslim and Communist countries do business.

Even if Gaddafi is deposed, democracy can’t sprout up overnight to replace an absolute dictatorship. And who is the United States or the United Nations going to chose to sit in the driver’s seat?

Canada and the United States are hypocrites in their attempts to change another country’s system of government to reflect Western standards. In both countries, the democratic process, Constitutional rights and inalienable personal rights and freedoms have been infiltrated and watered down with Marxism.

Yet Canadians were appalled over the hypocrisy of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights setting Gaddafi up to wear a UN crown as a global judge of human rights. Hey, rules and morals be damned in this unethical circus.

The West’s payments have enabled Gaddafi and his supporters to stay in power for 42 years. Why this sudden overnight thrust to depose him?

If these moral uplifters surveyed the corrupt United Nations they would probably find another 50 of these goofballs. Is the United States going to slate them for a wipe out, starting with North Korea and Zimbabwe? Of course not; the UN would never sanction it.

It is, however, unconscionable for the so-called political masters in high places to talk of taking discarded dictators for trial before the UN International Criminal Court in La Hague, Netherlands.

Justice can only be served if the toppled dictators are tried under their own legal systems and in front of the citizens who were oppressed by the regime. Not only must justice be done, justice also must be seen to be done.

Canada should not be setting itself up as a perfect example of a free and democratic nation to which other countries are forced to submit. Neither should Canada be reduced to indiscriminately declaring wars against other nations.

It would be prudent for Prime Minister Harper to heed the words of Prime Minister of Russia, one of several countries abstaining from a UN Security Council vote on Libya.

Vladimir Putin impatiently condemned the fools rushing in on the Libyan mission as nothing more than “medieval crusaders”.

Jane Gaffin, March 30, 2011