Wrongly interpreted events

Canada's Harper government has seized on the horrible events in Iraq and Syria, exhorting all Canadians to close ranks against a perceived threat from a barbarous band of unprincipled evil-doers, with the Harper government of course, leading the nation bravely into war against these evil-doers. Meantime a few thousand Km south-east in Kenya, a handful of Al Shabaab fighters (4 or 5 altogether) from Somalia descended on a small undefended private university just across the border in Kenya, separated the Christian and Moslem students as they slept in their dormitories, and slaughtered 147 of the Christians. The Harper government hasn't proposed military action against Al Shabaab. However, its statements imply that a holy war is in progress between genocidal Islamists and the defenders of righteousness (of Judeo-Christian persuasion). A few troubling facts suggest this is at best only partly correct. It may be utterly wrong.  Some of it is based on the same fantasy that asserted the Iraqis would welcome as liberators the American forces who invaded their country in 2003. One fact is that aerial bombardment, even with terrible weapons like napalm and cluster bombs, can't defeat a grass roots movement. Another fact is that populations who have been targets for napalm or cluster bombs (or any other form of aerial attack) do not perceive those who bombed them as friends. The bombing campaign the Harper government has so eagerly embraced, which will cost over half a billion dollars in the next year, will not win friends for Canada in Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State - an aspiration, a grass roots movement, not a real state - has committed some appalling atrocities. We have TV evidence from their own skilled propagandists as proof of this. But truth is the first casualty in all wars and I doubt if this is an exception. What reliable evidence is there of genocide? Another fact is that IS, or ISIS, or ISIL, is a Sunni Islamic movement; Shia Islam is its mortal enemy. That's the reason Iran, and the Assad regime in Syria, are aligned against IS - with Canada and USA. This is a Sunni-Shia war. On the basis of the old saying that 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' we have (the Harper government has) become an ally of Iran - where we recently closed our embassy - and of the reviled Assad regime. In the meantime, some 25,000 well educated youngsters from many western nations have made their way to the ruins of Syria and Iraq, eager to join IS. Why? What do they know that the rest of us don't know?  It's all very bewildering.

These events suggest to me that getting involved in a war against IS may be the most stupid mistake yet made by the Harper government - a government not noted for evidence-based decisions, noted by some of us at least for some spectacularly stupid policy decisions.

There is another interpretation of the dreadful wars and unconventional forms of conflict in progress in the Middle East and Africa. Rather than being based in disputes about faith and belief, the real underlying cause is a quest for what Hitler and the Nazis called lebensraum - living space and resoures. The most important fact of all may be that the world is overpopulated by at least an order of magnitude. The world would be a better place for all humans if instead of more than 7 billion of us, there were 700 million.