Martin plan full of holes

Editorial

There may be more than meets the eye to Prime Minister Paul Martin's new scheme to create a group he dubs "L-20." The prime minister raised the idea with President George W. Bush this week in meetings in Chile. Martin's idea is to create an independent body like the invitation-only economic clubs the G-8 or the G-20, but which would take upon itself to intervene in places where sovereign states fail to protect civilians. The obvious immediate case is the Darfur region of Sudan, but another precedent that springs to mind is Rwanda.

According to reports, Bush wasn't immediately impressed with Martin's idea, reportedly expressing the fear that such a group wouldn't have enough to do and so would meet just for the sake of meeting. Of all the viable reasons to oppose such a proposal, Bush's has to be among the least convincing. A lack of conflict zones in the world is hardly the main problem facing Martin's pet group.

There are, however, legitimate problems with Martin's idea, American reticence notwithstanding. Firstly and most glaringly, intervening in crisis scenarios is what the United Nations was formed to do. The idea for a new club to take over this responsibility is being proposed as a new form of multilateralism. But usurping the role of the UN hardly seems to be a proposal that improves multilateralism. It almost sounds like Martin is just asking that he and a few friends be invited into the decision-making process of American-led unilateralism. At its root, Martin's proposal has to be considered a slap in the face for the UN. Of course, we've argued in this space before that the UN could use a slap in the face, so this critique doesn't bother us. But repairing the deeply flawed UN system is not the same as supplanting it with a self-appointed group of global police.

Second, while Martin's proposal remains fairly theoretical, its practical challenges are obvious. For example, few would argue that such a force would have been almost universally welcomed when the Third Reich's genocidal policies were being enacted, but European powers were still appeasing Hitler.

Third, even if Bush and whoever else Martin thinks should be included in the club accede to his idea, what makes Martin think Canada would be invited to join? There's nothing worse than being excluded from your own party – as Woodrow Wilson could tell Martin, if he and his League of Nations were not both long dead.

It might be ideal for the world to respond more quickly and less bureaucratically when threats to massive numbers of civilians emerge, but what about the other side, where intervention is not so clearly a matter of universal resolve? What would Martin's L-20 have done, say, during the lead-up to the Iraq War?

And what would such an organization do in the case of the Israeli-Arab conflict? The United Nations has repeatedly expressed its position that Israel deserves full responsibility for every failure in the region since 1947, that Israel alone is the cause of the conflict and that complete unilateral Israeli concessions to Arab demands are the minimum requirements for peace. Would the L-20 have a different take? If so, would it intervene militarily? If yes, who is to be the arbiter of competing claims? Multilateralism may be a fine idea, but intervention requires some agreed-upon framework for resolution. Who is to say that the L-20's ideas of what constitutes judicious resolution would be anything more than a lop-sided imposition of a conclusion that satisfies only one party – or neither?

The United Nations is a deeply flawed organization, as its institutionalized anti-Zionism and a raft of other failures clearly indicate. But it remains preferable to a new form of invitation-only unilateralism in multilateral disguise.

A no-win situation

Meanwhile, under the "can't win" category, file the latest development in Canadian foreign policy. For years, Canadian Zionists have tried to sway this country's diplomatic mission at the United Nations away from Canada's ongoing support for wildly anti-Israel (and arguably anti-Semitic) resolutions at the world body. When the office of Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew suggested this month that such concerns might finally be taken seriously, critics pounced on the comments as a sign of Canadian capitulation to American foreign policy. In the aftermath of Bush's re-election, which polls and anecdotal evidence suggest was a disappointment to a vast majority of Canadians, any coincidental parallels between Canadian and American foreign policy will hereafter be considered capitulation with the Bush Doctrine. The implications for Canadian Zionists are massive in ways we cannot yet fathom.

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