Harper knows the game has changed

Israeli warplanes are pounding Hezbollah installations in southern Lebanon, Iran and Syria are threatening all-out war on Israel, the bodies are piling up, refugees are in flight, and naturally the question on everyone’s lips is: What does it mean to Canada? Specifically, has Stephen Harper shown the requisite “nuance” in his appreciation of the “ambiguities” of the Middle East, or has he abandoned “Canada’s traditional honest broker role” in the region?

“Nuance” was much on the minds of the travelling press accompanying Mr. Harper to the G8 summit in Russia, apparently in the belief that their own appalling mistreatment might be taken as a metaphor for his dealings with the whole world. “Harper's seeming lack of nuance, empathy and people skills are making his week-long diplomatic foray … an excruciating exercise,” Canadian Press reporter Bruce Cheadle filed from the summit. “Throughout the trip, Harper has distanced himself from reporters. Since leaving Ottawa last Wednesday, he has spoken to media travelling with him only three times, including a brief encounter on the plane.”

But back to the thousands of dead. Well, it’s 251 at last count, including 219 Lebanese, 25 Israelis, and 7 Canadians, but after Mr. Harper defended Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on its cities as “measured” you could almost hear the snickering from St. Petersburg. Didn’t he get the memo? Hadn’t he understood the script?

Scene one: Israel withdraws from territory it had taken in previous conflicts, in a grand exchange of “land for peace.” Scene two: Hezbollah or Hamas or some such Syrian-Iranian proxy sets up shop in the same territory, putting its newfound proximity to Israeli population bases to deadly good use. Scene three: Israel eventually gets tired of this, and counterattacks.

Now comes scene four, and the chance for Canadian prime ministers to get a little screen time: Political leaders in the rest of the world, impervious to the deaths of Israeli civilians in the months and years previous, suddenly grow aroused and demand that all sides, meaning Israel, show “restraint.”

At length someone comes up with the novel idea of sending an international force into the region, which succeeds mostly in ensuring Hamas/Hezbollah/Hoozit lives to fight another day, before itself coming under attack from the same groups and withdrawing. But by then everyone has lost interest, and we are ready to start again with scene one.

So when Mr. Harper departed from the script, dispatched with the usual pieties, and defended Israel’s response as no more than any other country in the world would have done -- in fact, rather less than most, including those apostles of “restraint,” the highly nuanced Russians and the ever ambiguous French -- the press was on high alert. Was it -- dare we even hope? -- a gaffe?

Alas for those trapped in the bubble that surrounds a travelling prime minister, events were moving fast. Perhaps unbeknownst to them, several Arab countries, fed up with Hezbollah’s adventurism and wary of Iran’s ambitions, had also publicly sided with the Israelis, denouncing Hezbollah for its attacks in astonishingly unnuanced terms.

Not long after, the G8 followed. The final communique, though it included a perfunctory call for “restraint,” hewed notably closer to the US/British/Canadian line than to the Franco-Russian, placing the blame squarely on Hezbollah for the conflict and demanding that it stop shelling Israel and return the Israeli soldiers it had kidnapped. Only then was Israel enjoined to withdraw.

Alas for Hezbollah, Israel shows no intention of doing so. Whatever the reasons for Hamas and Hezbollah’s apparently coordinated decision this month to dare Israel to a war -- divert attention from the manifest failures of the Hamas government in Palestine, reassert Syrian influence in Lebanon, stake Iran’s claims in its contest with the US over the future of the Middle East, take your pick -- it appears to have backfired. Has Israel used the attacks, as some have suggested, as a “pretext” to go in and root Hezbollah out of its southern Lebanese stronghold, once and for all? Gosh, I hope so.

At any rate, much of the world seems to have understood the game has changed in the Middle East, or perhaps it is just their perception of it that has. Israel is not surrounded by fellow democracies, with which it has occasional misunderstandings, nor is the Middle East a cauldron of mutually hostile tribes, requiring the intercession of outside mediators. Rather, the Jewish state is a lonely outpost of law and civility beset on all sides by murderous terrorist groups, vanguards of the same Islamic extremist movement with which we are now at war across the world, and if it goes down, with it goes any hope the Middle East might one day be transformed into a prosperous and peaceful region, from the breeding ground of fanatical ideologies it has been until now.

I realize Mr. Harper’s public embrace of this good sense places us firmly on the side of the western democracies, and thus risks our hard-won reputation as interminable equivocators, impartial, as Churchill said, “between the fireman and the fire.” Perhaps that also means we will not be invited to serve as “honest brokers” in any future conflicts in the region. But as we haven’t been one since that one time in 1956, it seems a price worth paying.