Author:
Rt. Hon. Joe Clark per jfh
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Date Posted: 13:22:23 03/20/03 Thu
Author Host/IP: d150-99-156.home.cgocable.net/24.150.99.156
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JOE CLARK, P.C., C.C., M.P.
I believe the United Kingdom view is correct and that this intervention is justified under the combination of resolutions taken in 1990 and resolution 1441 which referred to it.
I think this is an important point to make: the Prime Minister of Canada has been claiming that Canada’s action, really Canada’s inaction, is in support of the United Nations. I believe that is not true. I think the United Nations resolutions do provide legitimacy for this action and what is interesting to me, is that the Prime Minister has never claimed that the intervention is illegitimate. He declines to give a view as to whether or not it is legitimate, under international law or under the resolutions of the United Nations.
There used to be a time, when Canada would base our positions on principle and not on polling or by popularity. In this case, the only reason Canada has taken the position it has, is because the Prime Minister believes it is the politically palatable position to take in Canada.
I very much regret that this war has proven necessary. I pray that it will be over as quickly as possible, with as little loss of life as possible on all sides. My own preference would have been that the United Nations take longer in inspections. I certainly would have preferred more active intervention by Canada and by others to try to seek agreement in the Security Council so that the United Nations would not have floundered on this question, but we are in a situation now where an intervention has begun.
As I say, I believe that the intervention can be defended as legitimate under United Nations resolutions. I wish it had not come to that but I believe it is legitimate.
The question now for Canada is, what role are we going to play in the future? We have dealt ourselves out of any influence in the war itself. There is an urgent need for countries to be dealing with the process of reconstruction.
When I put that question to the Prime Minister two days ago, he said let’s not plan, let’s wait til the bombs have started. Well the bombing has started. For all we know, lives have been lost; we have to assume they have been. Certainly refugees have begun their flow out of Iraq. And so the humanitarian problem is there. Unless the United Nations acts, unless a country like Canada provides a means for the United Nations to act, who will be in charge of the reconstruction? The only country that is organizing for that is the United States of America.
I believe that the United States, as a superpower, is not as well equipped as other countries to take responsibility for the conciliation, the mediation, the bringing together of people, that is going to be necessary in any kind of reconstruction.
There is a problem in that the UN as it stands now, is not authorized to do more than simply offer humanitarian assistance. It requires a Security Council resolution to put in place a reconstruction program. Countries like Canada should be very active in trying to bring consensus for that kind of resolution now. It is not simply a matter of drafting, although it starts there. What we should doing is going out and building as strong as possible, a public opinion in support of a positive vote on a resolution of that kind when it is introduced by a sitting member of the Security Council to the Security Council. And we should be acting informally now to identify the range of resources, whether those are from non-governmental organizations, or from governments, or from elsewhere that can be helpful in the reconstruction effort.
But Canada having waited and ducked through the preparation for war cannot wait and duck through the preparations of peace. We have a unique capacity to influence the peace and we should be exercising that.
Question - (almost unintelligible) - Reconstruction may not be restricted to just Iraq, may not just be humanitarian efforts, who does that? What about if it creates instability in the entire region and civil war breaks out? How do we deal with that?
I’m interpreting reconstruction in the broadest possible sense, and that precisely is why I think it has to be undertaken by something other than one country. It has to be undertaken by an agency with international reach, such as the United Nations. I don’t see reconstruction as necessarily being limited simply to Iraq. I think that the consequences of this conflict could well reach beyond Iraq, to its neighbours and perhaps elsewhere in the world. And there is going to be a need for a trusted, effective, instrument by which the world can respond to whatever problems war causes.
A process has begun that will tear things apart. A process must be begun to bring them back together. And it may be that a superpower is ideally placed to start the tearing apart but the United Nations is ideally placed to start the bringing together. That can’t happen without a country like Canada taking an initiative so that the United Nations has that kind of authority.
Question - Mr. Clark, all this comes at a price. So how much do you think the Canadian Government should give in terms of humanitarian aid, UN support, and that kind of thing?
There is no question about that (the cost of war). The Gulf War came at a very significant price and it may well be that since, it may well be that we have to look at what the equivalent contribution to settling this dispute would be in price-dollar terms, to what Canada paid and contributed in the Gulf War. But there is no question; we cannot make this kind of proposal to the world unless we are prepared also to put resources on the table.
But let me be stark about the alternative. If there is no action to create a United Nations capacity to deal with pulling things together after a war, whenever that comes, then that job will be left to the Pentagon. And that is not where that job can best be done.
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