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For the Conservatives now have the ultimate differentiator between themselves and their opponents; an open-ended, aspirational foreign war in which they stand alone, guardians of all that is good and true, while the “wets” of the New Democratic and Liberal parties natter from the sidelines. Next year’s Tory election ads will surely offer clips of the speeches to occur Monday as the House of Commons debates the six-month deployment, which is to include up to 600 support personnel, up to six CF-18 fighters, two Aurora surveillance planes and a refuelling plane. The PM’s speech will be charged with the gravitas he reserves uniquely for such occasions.

The wrinkle – the wild card that makes this a Hail Mary pass, in political terms – is that it all may go so very badly wrong.

Read more from Michael Den Tandt …

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The genocidal jihadists, including Canadians and other Westerners, who fight under the banner of ISIS “have to be whacked, and whacked good,” Lloyd Axworthy, a former Liberal foreign affairs minister who aimed to put “human security” at the heart of foreign affairs, said on CTV last week.

“If you really want to stop them, you’re going to have to give a full-court press.”

He was not alone in supporting the action Mr. Trudeau has vowed to reject, or in undermining the leader’s rhetoric before he used it. Former interim Liberal leader Bob Rae, for example, rejected the comparison, later made by Mr. Trudeau, to the “fiasco” of the 2003 Iraq War. Former Liberal Senator Roméo Dallaire dismissed a campaign of air strikes without ground troops as pointless, and former Liberal cabinet minister Ujjal Dosanjh calling for “robust” Canadian military action.