Jean Chretien wrote an editorial for The Globe and Mail on Friday backing Justin Trudeau’s decision to oppose Canadian airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq.

An honorable defense of pacifist principle? Or just a cynical attempt at partisan damage-control? Assuming you know anything about the author I doubt it’ll be difficult to guess.

Trudeau’s unanticipated hostility to the Conservative government’s October 7 resolution endorsing Canada’s offer of limited air support to the coalition of nations battling the Islamic State has garnered a decidedly chilly reception. Irwin Colter, a former attorney general and one of the Liberals’ most respected foreign policy thinkers, abstained from the vote rather than back his boss, while former leader Stephane Dion — now a backbench MP — was conspicuously absent as well. Fellow ex-leader Bob Rae has professed support for airstrikes, as has Michael Ignatieff, the leader before him. Ordinary Liberal-friendly pundits and editorial pages across the country have broken character, describing Trudeau’s ISIS stance as inarticulate, “callow” and proof “the young leader is not ready for the big stage.” Most damning of all, Justin’s anti-airstrike position is said to be opposed by 64% of the Canadian public — including 54% of the famously isolationist Quebeckers (whose Liberal premier also supports airstrikes, incidentally).

It’s into this context that the 80-year-old Chretien has been wheeled, the nation’s sole surviving three-term Liberal PM evidently hoping his unique standing will be enough to counter the near-unanimous dissent of other grande dames within his party.

Chretien’s rhetorical case against airstrikes features the standard themes of populist chauvinism, armchair intellectualism, and tenuous grasp of causal relationships that defined his premiership. ISIS “must be stopped,” he writes, but only Arabs should bomb them, lest we sass up the locals with our insensitivity to the Middle East’s “legacy of colonialism.”

“If the region sees military intervention as just another knee-jerk Western show of force, we all know what the long-term consequences will be,” he warns darkly.

Um, do we? This is the man, after all, who sent the Canadian army to Afghanistan three weeks after 9/11 and happily kept them there for the remainder of his tenure. But of course our Afghanistan adventure doesn’t count as insensitive western imperialism since it happened “under the umbrella of the United Nations” — and what uppity Islamist could find fault with that?

Such hand-waving is necessary for Chretien to reach his politically expedient conclusion: that there exists a shared strain of folly connecting limited airstrikes against ISIS with the 2003 invasion of Iraq , thereby making J-Tru’s opposition to the former as virtuous as Chretien’s opposition to the later — an opposition so heroic he’s praised by strangers to this day for it, “on street corners, in restaurants, in airports…”— at least in his retelling.

That Chretien gleefully accepts such accolades is an act of astonishing political chutzpah. Regardless of what you think of the decision to depose Saddam Hussein a decade ago, Ottawa’s opposition to it can hardly be heralded as a great exertion of Canadian principle or foreign policy wisdom.

It’s now been widely reported that the Chretien government was fully prepared to commit 800 troops to America’s 2003 invasion before waffling at the very last minute. And even after this formal opposition was noted, Canada still provided so much logistical support to the war effort — refueling US warplanes in Newfoundland, offering naval escorts for US carriers in the Persian Gulf, committing over 100 on-the-ground Canadian exchange officers — the US Ambassador of the day was forced to incredulously remark that “anti-war” Canada had actually offered a lot more practical assistance than many nominally pro-war European states.

But most Canadians aren’t aware of such nuance, and indeed, much of Prime Minister Chretien’s talents as an unapologetically cynical partisan can be credited to his skill at weaving simplistic, patriotic storylines to mask the difficult nuances of realities he doesn’t trust the public to handle. The Chretien Liberals postured against the 2003 Iraq war not because they opposed its goals or feared its consequences, but simply because polls suggested there were votes to be gained — particularly in beloved Quebec — for any party perceived able to “stand up” to America and its unpopular president.

Yet Obama is no Bush, ISIS is not Saddam, and 2014 is far from 2003. In evoking yet more shallow nostalgia to prop up a stumbling Liberal leader whose political appeal is based on little else, Chretien is gambling that Canadians can still be reliably mobilized behind sloppy evocations of anti-American contrarianism and flag-wrapped appeals to some hazily-defined “Canadian way.”

In other words, precisely the sort of dated lefty assumptions that caused Trudeau to require rescuing in the first place.