Although, as I write, Canadians are going to the polls in only 8 weeks and Americans are not going to the polls for 11 weeks plus an entire year, the speculative excitement in the media about who will be the next national leader seems to be about equal in both countries. And there are other similarities.
Both countries are presently headed up by unusually confident, strong-willed and controlling men. Both Harper and Obama have problems “playing nicely with others” and exhibit impatience when their political agenda is resisted.
But in essence they are very different individuals. Harper projects a public aloofness, even frostiness, while hiding a private inner warmth. Obama projects public warmth and caring, while hiding an inner coldness. As former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, relates in Ally, his political memoir, “’Obama’s problem is not a tin ear,’ one of my European colleagues lamented, ‘it’s a tin heart.’”
And on no issue is Obama’s heart flintier than the Middle East. As many political historians have noted, Obama came to the presidency with the fixed idea of extrapolating the U.S. from the area’s political and ethnic Gordian knot, leaving Iran as the regional strong man to impose stability. And, as we can see from the porous and even ominous deal he has unilaterally struck with Iran, he is prepared to see such putative stability imposed at any cost to the region, including the sacrifice of Israel’s security and, possibly, even existence.
Nobody ever said Obama loved Israel, either for itself or for what it represents as a bastion of democracy in the midst of chaos and barbarism, to most Americans. Today it seems clear he feels little sense of obligation to Israel even as a political ally that has in the past and doubtless will in the future serve as the thin blue line standing up to proxies for expansionist tyrannies that loathe the U.S. and everything it stands for.
Obama quite often speaks about the “arc of history” bending a certain way. But he himself knows very little actual history, at least of the Middle East, because he grew up and was educated under the rubric of historical revisionism, according to which America is not exceptional, no culture is better than any other and narratives are as real and compelling as facts.
(Here, to illustrate the school of progressive thought in which Obama was raised, I must interject this extraordinary telephone conversation recorded in Michael Oren’s Ally, between Oren and Andrew Rosenthal, editorial-page editor of the New York Times, after the NYT published an op ed by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud, who suggested the Arabs had accepted the 1947 UN Partition Plan:
[Oren]: “When I write for the Times, fact checkers examine every word I write,” I began. “Did anybody check that Abbas has his facts exactly backward?”
“That’s your opinion,” Rosenthal replied.
“I’m an historian, Andy, and there are opinions and there are facts. That the Arabs rejected partition and the Jews accepted it is an irrefutable fact.”
“In your view.”
“Tell me, on June 6, 1944, did Allied forces land or did they not land on Normandy Beach?”
Rosenthal…replied, “Some might say so.”)
Obama’s policy is based not on evidence or patterns of aggressor behaviour, but on personal certitudes based in personal feelings, in selective experiences like “the call of the muezzin” in his childhood. Obama’s is a political dreamer’s rainbow’s end of hands across the oceans, exactly the kind of thinking that generally leads to disaster on a grand scale.
So far his many other “certitudes” – “Al Qaeda is “on a path to defeat” (2012), Bashar Assad’s “days are numbered” (2011), “Russia and the U.S. “are not simply resetting our relationship, but also broadening it” (2010) and others enumerated here – have given us no reason to believe that the Iran deal will alter the pattern.
Stephen Harper, on the other hand, is a historical realist. What is, is. He does not think in utopian terms. He is not hamstrung by political correctness regarding Islamism. History is not about him, it is about facts, cultural patterns of behaviour, belief systems that cannot co-exist in harmony, however nice a thought that is. He is impervious to “narratives” and does not, even though he has personally loved hockey all his life, see global politics as the NHL writ large.
Which is why I will be voting for yet another mandate for the Harper government in October.
You would not know it from this election campaign so far, which is fixated on domestic issues, but a great swath of the globe is aflame with bloodthirsty hysteria: that beheadings, drownings, burnings, crucifixions, mass rapes of children, chemical weapons and religious genocide have become so routine they don’t always make the headlines. Refugees are flooding Europe in crisis-inducing waves (those that aren’t drowned trying to escape the chaos around them). Yet most Canadians do not seem eager to know what their next national leader thinks about or will do about all this.
I care very much, far more than I care what a political candidate’s views on abortion are, or what magic number of referendum votes will give Quebec the right to secede, important as that is. And I do not believe that either Thomas Mulcair or Justin Trudeau give a great deal of thought to Islamism or its present and future impact on western democracies. I do not believe that either of them “get it” about Israel’s security – Mulcair because although his personal views on Israel pass muster, his party’s traditional position of hostility at worst and neutrality at best would hamper any full-throated support, and Trudeau, who will not call barbarism by its name, because he is Obamaesque in his ignorance and worldview.
It is possible that a change of political leadership in Canada would be better for our country in all manner of ways. If we were living in an era of relative global stability, I too would be voting on domestic issues. But we are living in parlous times, and the times call for a leader who understands the stakes. There may not be much that Canada under anyone’s leadership can do to prevent the cataclysm that Obama is helping to foment, but it is no small comfort and no small matter of national pride to have a leader who speaks the truth about Iran and Israel in world forums.
Given our changing demographics, it is my belief that Stephen Harper will be the last overtly pro-Israel prime minister we will have for the foreseeable future. Which is why I will do my small part – voting for his re-election – to promote his continuing principled presence on the world stage for as long as possible.
