Today's tonic from Lloyd Axworthy: "Canada once rejected America’s aggressive, unlawful foreign policy. Today Mark Carney embraced it"

If you are one of those Canadians who supported former Prime Minister Jean Chretien's rejection of America's illegal and immoral military aggression based on lies of WMD in Iraq in 2003, but today support Mark Carney's kowtowing to Joker Maniac President Donald Trump's latest attempt to distract from the Epstein files with his illegal and hypocritical military attack on Iran (dubbed Operation Epic Fury, which sounds like a teenager's video game fantasy), then you are a hypocrite, plain and simple.  

There was no imminent threat of Iran completing nuclear weapons (that threat may now be strengthened by these attacks which will fortify extremist power in Iran under new leadership and hand that horrible regime much moral authority).  In fact, it was Trump who tore up the anti-nuclear agreement that his predecessor had signed with Iran, refused to negotiate seriously to replace it, and chose once again the option of might over right.  Even if this regime is toppled after months or years of war, does anyone who’s not a crazy conservative actually believe this will lead to something stable and peaceful in the region?  How can we forget so easily the extremist Islamic State that eventually replaced Saddam Hussein leading to years of more conflict paid for by U.S. tax dollars?

Today, I'm happy to share some brutal honesty from former Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy with this column published in the Toronto Star this weekend:   

"Canada’s response to the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran exposes a fault line at the heart of our foreign policy.

"We invoke international law and the “rules based international order” when adversaries engage in unlawful actions, but abandon those same rules entirely when it’s the Americans — whose current government 60 per cent of Canadians now see as a threat — doing the bombing. For a country that depends on law more than force for its own security, that is not realism; it is recklessness...

"We have been here before, and once knew better. In 2003, Canada refused to join the American invasion of Iraq because there was no Security Council resolution, and the case for war rested on preventing a hypothetical future WMD threat. Today, by endorsing preventive strikes on Iran during ongoing diplomacy and after Washington itself shredded the previous agreement, we are embracing the very doctrine we used to reject...

"The contrast with our language on Ukraine is stark. For four years, Canadian officials have rightly called Russia’s invasion an “unprovoked,” “unjustifiable,” “illegal” violation of the UN Charter and of Ukrainian sovereignty. Yet when the United States and Israel launch large scale strikes without UN authorization, Ottawa drops the legal vocabulary entirely. No talk of aggression, no warning about Charter erosion, no insistence on emergency debate in New York. The double standard is obvious: when Russia uses force without lawful grounds, it is condemned as an outlaw; when the U.S. does something legally analogous, we kowtow in an effort to curry favour."