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The United States has led five major wars in the Muslim world in the last 25 years, including the recent attack on the self-declared Islamic State. Remarkably, Canada has participated in all but one of them.

Few Canadians now have any regrets about the Chrétien government’s decision to sit out the Iraq war. But I’d like to focus on another one of those many American wars that was exceptional: the Gulf War of 1990-91.

It was exceptional in a different way. It was the only one that succeeded.

Right now, Canada is like the needy schoolboy, insistently raising his hand, bouncing in his seat, trying to catch the teacher’s eye so he can say: “Pick me!” But we should be doing more than validating our self-worth by being allowed to come along. We should be trying to figure out whether this is worth doing.

The reason the Gulf War succeeded while the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — and now, likely, this new war against Islamic State — were doomed to failure (or at best to a messy, unsatisfactory result) had to do with strategy.

The Gulf War, remember, was triggered by Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked invasion of Kuwait. This was an obvious threat to world order, for which the sanctity of borders is an important principle. And it was a dagger aimed at American and Western oil interests in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

But many bad things happen in the world, and while the United States is prone to getting involved in a lot of them — too many, some of us might think — it can’t jump in everywhere. And back in 1991, the United States had not fought a major war since Vietnam, an event which traumatized a generation.

In fact, the memory of Vietnam fundamentally affected the U.S. approach to the Gulf War and shaped the strategy that resulted in its success. That approach became known as the Powell Doctrine, named after Colin Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time — effectively the head of the American military.

The Powell Doctrine can be summarized in various ways, but its essence could be boiled down to a series of political and military questions that must be answered before embarking on war:

Is the goal clear and important?

Is it a last resort after non-military efforts have failed?

Does the mission command the support of the American people and the international community?

Have the costs and expected gains been clearly analyzed?

Can the planned military mission achieve the intended political objectives?

Are the goals clearly circumscribed and is there a plausible exit strategy?

It was this doctrine that shaped the policy that led the then-president, George Bush Sr., to rally a broad international coalition. The force was overwhelming: nearly a million troops — many of them, yes, ‘boots on the ground’. The goal was limited — to evict Saddam’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

I’m talking about blowback from the Muslim world — which includes the implications of allying ourselves with the loathsome, head-chopping Saudis and, if we are honest, Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian dictatorship. Not to mention the motley crew of Iraqi fighters who are now our military avatars.

Over-awed by American power, Saddam vamoosed, Kuwait was freed from his grip and the war was over in a matter of months.

Each of the American wars since then has been critically undermined by a failure to answer some of the Powell Doctrine’s questions.

In Afghanistan and later in Iraq, the U.S. was hobbled by the misguided ideas of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which held that a combination of high-tech military hardware, air power and small units of “special forces” could replace all those pricey boots. Not so, it turned out — tragically.

In Libya, the Americans led a air mission, the original aim of which was not to oust the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, but to stop its attacks on civilians. Then the mission changed. And today, Libya is free of Gadhafi. It is also a violent, chaotic mess.

So how does the new Barack Obama-led mission against Islamic State fare when tested against the Powell Doctrine?

It easily answers the first two questions. Getting rid of Islamic State is important to the people in the region and to the international community. Islamic State is a bloody scourge on those who fall under its power. It threatens to become an enclave for the training and cultivation of extremists who will attack us in the West. And given its ideology, it seems unlikely to respond to any pressure short of armed force.

The answer to the third question, about political support, is less certain. At the moment, there is widespread — if hardly universal — support domestically and internationally for an attack on Islamic State. We really have no idea how long that support can be sustained with a mission which has no plausible end-date in, say, the next year or two.

But the answers to the last three questions — about whether there has been a clear calculation of costs and benefits, whether the planned military mission can achieve its political objectives, and whether there is a defined exit strategy — are plainly ‘no’.

Neither the Obama administration nor, for its small part, the Harper government has been frank about the potential costs of the mission. I am thinking now not just of the financial expense of an open-ended mission. I’m also talking about blowback from the Muslim world — which includes the implications of allying ourselves with the loathsome, head-chopping Saudis and, if we are honest, Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian dictatorship. Not to mention the motley crew of Iraqi fighters who are now our military avatars.

Nor do many people who know about these things think that the military mission as it is now conceived — that is, bombing Islamic State and supplying the ragtag forces of our new best friends on the ground — can achieve its supposed aims. Stephen Harper, who seems so pleased just to be on the team, may say the mission is to “contain” Islamic State. But Obama, whose team it is, says the goal is to “eliminate” it.

At the moment, airstrikes do not seem enough even to repel Islamic State from the siege of Kobane, a Syrian border town so close to NATO’s Turkish border that journalists can watch the battle with binoculars as massed Turkish tanks sit tensed but idle nearby.

And oh, an exit strategy? This mission, like the fabled “War on Terror” — and unlike Powell’s Gulf War — has no end in sight. Obama says the goal is to eliminate Islamic State “eventually”.

There is a principle in moral philosophy, attributed to Immanuel Kant, which is that “ought implies can”. That is to say, you are morally obligated to do something only if it is within your powers.

There has been a lot of high-blown rhetoric from the Harper government about good and evil. This loud-mouthed moralism in international affairs has become one of this government’s trademarks.

But we should not be bullied into war without a plausible plan.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is associate professor of journalism at Carleton and has taught political science at the University of Manitoba. He is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.