Parliament extends Libya mission

by Allan Wood

The House of Commons on June 14 voted 294-1 to continue Canada’s involvement in Libya for three and-a-half months. Green Party leader Elizabeth May was the only Member of Parliament to vote against extending the latest Canadian war.

Opposition leader Jack Layton and the other 102 NDP members in the House voted in lockstep with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. Layton attempted to soften his concession by explaining that the NDP was supporting only this particular extension.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Forces continues to bomb the innocent citizens of Libya. On May 25, Brigadier General Richard Blanchette said that Canadian warplanes had flown 324 attack missions and dropped 240 laser-guided bombs. Each bomb weighs 500 pounds and costs $100,000. Blanchette stated that he has ordered an additional 1,300 bombs.

So at the same time the Conservatives are pitching a budget calling for working-class and poor Canadians to accept deep cuts in social services, they are happily willing to waste $154,000,000 of taxpayers’ money solely on bombs to kill people in Libya. And millions more taxpayer dollars are being deposited free of charge into the wallets of Harper’s corporate friends, in the form of extensive tax cuts.

The Libyan government claims that more than 800 civilians have been killed. On June 19, NATO acknowledged for the first time that it was responsible for several civilian deaths in Tripoli, including two toddlers.

There was also a report in March that more than 40 civilians in Tripoli had been killed. Tripoli is the largest city and capital of Libya, with a population of over one million people. While NATO has remained tight-lipped about civilian deaths, common sense dictates that dropping hundreds of half-ton bombs on a heavily populated city will inevitably lead to widespread death.

In the US, talk in Congress about the illegality of President Obama’s action in Libya and attempts to cease military operations there have produced no results. While Congress is the only US body that can declare war, that law has been widely ignored for many decades.

Congress has neither authorized nor forbid the Libya intervention and bombs continue to drop. Obama has claimed that the murderous assault on the Libyan people does not rise to the level of a war because it “do[es] not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces [or] ground troops.”