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Well, aren’t we pleased with ourselves.

The thing to keep your eye on, though, is the way Dion takes Weber’s ethics of conviction and his ethics of responsibility, artfully slides them around the table, and then, as if by magic, gets the “ethics of responsible conviction.” There is no pea. Blink and you’ll miss it: “ethics” disappears into thin air. Weber himself noted the “abysmal contrast” between his two ethical categories, but observed that they could be combined in someone with sufficient cunning for a career in politics. Max Weber, meet Stéphane Dion.

“Responsible conviction” is not a foreign policy doctrine. It’s even stretching things to call it a brand. But it is not meaningless: it is a conflation of two ethical categories in a manner that will allow the Liberal government to have it either way on any question, to cast any policy decision in the mould of “responsible conviction,” no matter how unethical.

Dion retroactively applied his formulation to the Trudeau government’s contentious decision to proceed with the previous Conservative government’s procurement of a $15 billion contract for General Dynamics Land Systems of London, Ont., to supply Saudi Arabia with “light armoured vehicles,” which is the dainty term for mobile gun batteries.

The Saudis have lately been pulverizing Yemen with bombardments of various kinds that have killed and injured thousands of civilians. The Liberals’ variously avowed “convictions” would sensibly require that they abjure the whole business. But, as Dion explained, Canada would have to pay penalties, it would cost at least 2,000 jobs, some other arms supplier would step up anyway and so on. “Of course, I would like to live in a world without weapons,” Dion insisted. But, abracadabra, “responsible conviction.”