Canada's Liberal Party Infighting
What is one to make of deposed Canadian Liberal party leader Stephane Dion’s wife sniping at Michael Ignatieff and declaring the party is headed for “the ashcan of history”?
A year after Dion’s ouster as leader, the scoldings of Janine Krieber are more than an impetuous, impulsive reaction of a wife defending her hubby.
As a “lecturer on terrorism” at Royal Military College (RMC), Dr. Krieber has obviously given considerable thought to her observations. But she may still be wrong.
Dion was not “ousted via a whispering campaign,” as described in the National Post. He was bounced because he was clearly a failure in the eyes of Canadian voters; the Liberal party was going nowhere under his leadership, which was widely seen as wimpy, well-meaning and ineffective.
That his replacement isn’t creating a tsunami of enthusiasm is hardly indication that the party erred in replacing him. Nor that “Toronto elites” turned on him without giving him a chance to “absorb all the hits needed to rebuild the party” (as she puts it).
Dr. Krieber has studied terrorism for some 30 years and qualifies as an expert – which raises questions why she chose this moment to malign federal Liberals.
She has called “terrorism” a hit and run strategy that uses propaganda, subversion and destabilization against institutions of the state to create alarm, insecurity, uncertainty.
In lectures she has said anti-terrorists must fight back with intelligence, infrastructure protection, preparedness, and have the material and psychological resources for reconstruction.
It could be argued that her outburst was aimed more at Ignatieff than the Canadian Liberal party. An interesting person.
When Dion was chosen to lead the party, Krieber told Maclean’s magazine that her husband was useless around the house: “He can’t be trusted to change a light bulb, especially halogen.” Hmm.
If so, he seems a curious choice to run a political party, much less a country.
As an “expert” on terrorism, possibly Dr. Krieber is unforgiving of Ignatieff’s pragmatic assessment of torture. In past writings, Ignatieff clearly finds torture offensive, but acknowledges that it’s possible hitherto guarded secrets can be elicited through torture – something Dr. Krieber suggests is “insanity” and wrong.
In her academic (rather than practical) exposure to torture, maybe Dr. Krieber is wrong. Perhaps torture can work, as human rights activist Dr. Alan Dershowitz acknowledged after 9/11, when he supported “non-life threatening torture” (like extracting fingernails) as legitimate to acquire life-saving information from terrorists.
Ignatieff has written:
The argument that torture and coercion do not work is contradicted by the frequency with which both practices occur. I submit that we would not be “waterboarding” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed … if our intelligence operatives did not believe it was necessary to crack open the al Qaeda network that he commanded. Indeed . . . [after] a Time (magazine) report in March 2003 that Sheikh Mohammed has ‘given U.S. interrogators the names and descriptions of about a dozen al Qaeda operatives believed to be plotting terrorist attacks’ . . . we must at least entertain the possibility that the operatives working on Sheikh Mohammed in our name are engaging not in gratuitous sadism but in genuine belief that this form of torture . . . makes all the difference.
Maybe this view is what turned Dr. Krieber against Ignatieff – not the replacing of her husband as leader?