Justin Trudeau’s empty rhetoric won’t save Ukraine

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This article was published 24/02/2022 (1037 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Vladimir Putin has committed several heinous crimes in invading Ukraine. What we are not hearing is that all the posturing by Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and other Western leaders won’t change, indeed, is not designed to change, the reality of Russian occupation of a sovereign nation and its 43 million citizens.

Sanctions could possibly have been effective had they been imposed months earlier — along with the uprooting of dirty Russian money invested in real estate in London, New York and possibly Toronto. Or, better, by letting Ukraine join NATO when Putin was still weak.

Now the sanctions will be pinpricks for the Kremlin. And perhaps prove as ineffective as the American sanctions on Cuba for the last 60 years, on Iran for 41 years, on Saddam Hussein through the 1990s, and on the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s and again since last August when they reconquered Kabul. The ever-escalating penalties made little difference to the rulers — they helped entrench them — but squeezed and starved and displaced millions of ordinary Cubans, Iranians, Iraqis and Afghans.

The sanctions were ineffective, partly because they were routinely padded to win brownie points at home with the Cuban exile community and other rabid anti-Communists; with those who never could get over the American loss of Iran to, of all people, “mad mullahs;” with those who wanted “regime change” in Iraq; with those who can’t quite swallow the loss of Afghanistan to the ragtag Taliban after two decades and $2 trillion of American investment.

The sanctions on Putin are also a placebo for Western domestic audiences who might ask why the Ukrainians were led down the garden path for the last 30 years if we were not going to save them from a calamity that was clearly coming.

In recent years, not only has the U.S. lost its moral radar, but also the appetite for another war. Worse, it has lost the capacity to carry out a sustainable political and military strategy abroad, principally because it no longer has the internal democratic coherence to create a national consensus for any. Ukraine is only its latest victim.

Putin is doing what the U.S. and its allies have been doing with greater impunity and less justification; the U.S. invaded Iraq and presided over the killing of between 186,000 and 209,000 civilians (according to the Iraq Body Count database); it stayed on 20 years too long in Afghanistan after toppling the Taliban in 2001 for hosting Osama bin Laden, and it presided over the killing of 240,000 people there and in neighbouring Pakistan (Brown University), peoples who had nothing to do with 9/11; it intervened in Libya, ostensibly for humanitarian reasons only to break up the country and cause chaos that continues there and in neighbouring nations now awash with Libyan weapons; it displaced at least 37 million people in the nations where the overt and covert war on terror has been waged (Brown University); and it has assassinated enemies, while promising democratic law and order.

Ukrainians can take little comfort from the fact that the U.S. cannot even be relied upon to stand by and with its “friends.”

In 1991, George H.W. Bush urged Iraqi Shiites to rebel against Saddam Hussein and when they did, abandoned them. His predecessor, Ronald Reagan, hailed the anti-Soviet Mujahideen in Afghanistan as the modern equivalent of America’s founding fathers, but turned his back once they overturned the Soviet occupation. The vacuum was filled, eventually, by the Taliban.

When the U.S. and its allies did little following Putin’s 2014 takeover of Crimea or his war in 1999 on Chechnya that killed more than 100,000 people, it was said that neither place affected American interests.

Nor, apparently, does Ukraine, despite all the rhetoric.

A conquered people revolt. The Ukrainians will as well. But it’s hard to see them waging a long guerrilla warfare like the Afghans or the Viet Cong.

Which means that the West has abandoned them to the Russians.

Justin Trudeau’s tough words to Putin and Chrystia Freedland’s heartfelt message of solidarity with her Ukrainian community, conveyed in the Ukrainian language, would carry more weight if Ottawa were to say how many Ukrainians we are willing to settle in Canada.

A million?

Half a million?

Haroon Siddiqui, former columnist and editorial page editor emeritus of The Star, is senior fellow at Massey College. Siddiqui.canada@gmail, com