Consider me a near-isolationist when it comes to Canada’s involvement in foreign wars.

Watching or reading about the atrocities committed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq in the name of Allah is enough to turn your stomach.

The foot soldiers of ISIS – many of whom are from Europe and North America – have been more than barbarous. In thousands of cases they have been downright sadistic.

Not content to slaughter Christians for their belief in Jesus, in some cases in northwestern Iraq they butchered Christians by hammering crosses through their throats.

On Thursday, even the United Nations’ human rights office felt the need to weigh in on ISIS’s massacres. According to the UN, ISIS’s attacks have included “directly targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, executions and other targeted killings of civilians, abductions, rape and other forms of sexual and physical violence perpetrated against women and children, forced recruitment of children, destruction or desecration of places of religious or cultural significance, wanton destruction and looting of property, and denial of fundamental freedoms.”

It gets worse. According to other multiple reports, ISIS has, more specifically, incarcerated hundreds of Christian, Shiite and Yazidi (an Iraqi minority) girls as young as 12 in what can only be described as rape camps. And it has sold hundreds or thousands more into slavery.

There can be no doubt ISIS is evil. Still, my question has to be: As god awful as ISIS has been to other residents of the Middle East, does that justify Canada sending CF-18s to the region to engage ISIS from the air?

I feel badly for ISIS’s victims. I am so grateful my family and yours are citizens of a safe country. But, as callous as it may seem, the abuse of people and people’s rights in far-off lands isn’t necessarily our business.

Canada has had military advisers in Iraq for nearly a month now providing “strategic and tactical advice to Iraqi forces before they commence tactical operations against (ISIS).”

By agreeing to send as many as six CF-18s to bomb ISIS from the air for up to six months, Prime Minister Harper said that being a “free rider” (a country that benefits from others fighting terrorists on its behalf) means “you are not taken seriously.”

He added that ISIS has “conducted a campaign of unspeakable atrocities against the most innocent of people. It has tortured and beheaded children. It has raped and sold women into slavery.”

All that’s awful, to be sure, but it’s still not enough to convince me.

I have never bought the “responsibility to protect” (or R2P) doctrine devised by Liberals such as Paul Martin and Lloyd Axworthy when they were in power. That doctrine holds that governments that do not protect their citizens’ basic human rights forfeit their right to sovereignty, at which point international coalitions are free to invade and impose peace, order and, I suppose, political correctness.

Finally, in the House of Commons on Friday, Harper got to the one and only reason Canada should send the CF-18s. ISIS now has control over a vast territory and its oil resources, from which “it intends to launch a terrorist jihad, not merely against the region, but on a global basis. Indeed, it has specifically targeted Canada and Canadians.”

Now we're talking a good reason for Canadian armed forces to join the attack on ISIS.

Our first duty is still to defend against attacks on Canadians and Canada – here. We need to take serious precautions to keep ISIS terrorists from committing attacks in our own country.

But now that ISIS fighters – some of whom are from Canada – have urged attacks on Canadian targets, pre-emptively bombing them in their home bases in Syria and Iraq is justified.

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