As with just about everything else, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said one thing about the war on the Islamic State but is doing another. The non-combat mission featured combat. The short-term commitment has become long. No involvement in Syria has evolved into a war in Syria.

His reasons for extending and expanding the mission are patently false. The Islamic State didn’t move into Syria yesterday — it was there last year as well. It does not pose a direct threat to Canada the way the prime minister frames it in order to scare us, just as George W. Bush whipped up fear about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism to justify his wars and get re-elected.

If the Islamic State poses as big a threat to Canada as the prime minister says it does, why has he committed only six planes and 69 Special Forces soldiers?

The Islamic State thugs are brutal all right, but less so than Bashar Assad. They behead, he gases people on an industrial scale. They’ve killed a few thousand, he 210,000. Yet Harper sheds strategic tears for their victims — “minorities,” “Christians,” “Yezidis” — while staying mum about the bones scattered across Assad’s killing fields.

Harper is only taking the war into Syria but not on Syria. Assad remains safe from Canadian and American bombs. So long as he does not attack Israel or Turkey or other allies of ours, he may continue slaughtering his people.

Harper makes the mission against the Islamic State sound like holy war against evil. The absurdity of that becomes clear when you see that he has committed Canada to fight on the same side as Iran, which he considers evil. Iran props up Assad, alongside Russia, which Harper also considers evil. Iran also backs the murderous Iraqi Shiite militias that prompted the rise of the murderous Sunni Islamic State.

Harper is peddling us a war in which he is on the same side as one of three members of Bush’s Axis of Evil (Iran, Iraq and North Korea) that was invoked to launch the 2003 war on Iraq, which Harper ardently backed and Jean Chrétien resisted.

The war on the Islamic State is neither a United Nations nor a NATO mission. It’s led by the United States, whose invasion and botched occupation of Iraq, plus inaction against Assad’s mass murders, birthed the Islamic State. U.S. President Barack Obama may feel some obligation to clear up the mess of America’s making but “Canada has no place in this war,” as NDP leader Thomas Mulcair says.

Our presence there motivates the angry lone wolfs here to attack Canadian targets. It also prompts some young Canadians to go join the Islamic State in an ill-conceived solidarity with Muslims.

Whereas all this is presented as “jihad” and “jihadism” — a product of “violent Islam,” no less — reality is more prosaic. In just about every case of “jihadist” attack, either carried out or foiled, the stated reason is the same: retaliation for the endless wars on Muslim nations. But Harper won’t hear of it.

Canadians do seem to see the connection, shows an Angus Reid poll. Even as they support the war by a wide margin, more than a third, 38 per cent, see the war as making Canada more dangerous and only 19 per cent as making us safer, as Harper claims.

Reasonable people can agree to disagree about the military mission. Of greater import is the larger picture — how the endless U.S.-led war on terror is playing into the hands of extremists in both the Muslim world and in the West clamouring for a clash of civilizations.

Their cultural warfare ripples out in Europe and North America in one hissy-fit after another over hijab, niqab, sharia, mosques, minarets, cartoons, etc. — issues that are not all that different than the kippa or the turban or the Lord’s Prayer or other cultural friction points that eventually get worked out in civilized Canadian ways.

By not challenging the xenophobic, Islamophobic bigots and racists, we have allowed them and opportunistic politicians to divide and weaken us; erode our self-confidence; and distract us from the debilitating challenges of an anemic economy, amid relentless mechanization and globalization.

It is in this context that Harper’s jihad against the niqab is so reprehensible, as is his Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, outlawing what’s already outlawed — polygamy, family violence, “honour-killing” and forcing children under 16 to leave Canada for marriages abroad. While different cultures and faiths are guilty of such practices, these are assumed to be Muslim. “The legislation is about foreigners or — more to the point — Muslims,” writes Robert Fisk, columnist for the Independent, excoriating Harper for playing the crassest of politics.

Instead of the diversionary tactics of exaggerating real and imagined threats, fanning fear about foreign and domestic enemies and dividing Canadians against one another, the prime minister needs to present the budget that he has long delayed, so that we may begin an election year debate on his economic mismanagement, how instead of protecting the surplus that he inherited, he squandered it through tax giveaways and war expenditures, thereby weakening Ottawa’s ability to weather the current storm caused by sinking oil prices. That’s what really matters, especially to the unemployed and under-employed — Canadians of all ethnicities, colours and faiths.

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hsiddiqui@thestar.ca

Correction - March 26, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that

misnamed the countries cited by George W. Bush as Axis of Evil

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