By Jack Cunningham

While we all work and live in Canada, we have different political histories and party affiliations, although most of us fall on the left side of the ideological spectrum. We all welcome the Euston Manifesto as a statement of fundamental small-l liberal values,  and agree with its call for a new alignment of progressive forces, an alignment that is as desirable in Canada as in Britain.

Intelligent and liberal-minded people can disagree in good faith on questions such as the wisdom of the American-led removal of Saddam Hussein from power, the prudence of recent Israeli actions in Lebanon, or the Harper government's handling of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. We hold varied opinions on them ourselves. Yet we lament the present tendency in some Canadian political, academic, and journalistic circles to view those who defend the principles of liberal democracy, however imperfectly, and those who reject them root and branch as morally equivalent. We emphatically disagree with those who refuse to distinguish between acts of terrorism and the projection of power on behalf of democracy and liberty. And we believe that attachment to and pride in Canadian achievements are perfectly compatible with diplomatic and military cooperation with the United States and its other allies.

Canada may never have been more than a "middle power", but some of the noblest chapters in its history saw Canadians fight to liberate Europe from Nazism, play an important role in the formation of NATO in order to defend it from Communism, and take up arms again in Korea on behalf of the cause of collective security. Canadian progressives, like their comrades elsewhere, draw upon a worthy tradition of internationalism in defence of those democratic values and human rights which totalitarian movements of any stripe would crush. Some of us see Islamist extremism and terrorism as linear descendants of the totalitarian creeds of the past century. Others see their origins elsewhere and dispute some features of the analogy. Yet we agree in seeing those factions in the Islamic world that mobilize terror and hatred against Israel or the West more broadly as equally inimical to democratic values.

In Canada today, dislike of the Bush administration and of the Harper government's seeming closeness to it have encouraged the spread in sections of the Canadian left of arguments that: the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were in some sense a defensible reaction to American foreign policy; the invasion of Iraq was an act of unprovoked aggression; Canada has no stake in the fight against global terrorism; the prospect of an Iranian nuclear arsenal poses no particular threat to regional peace and security; and that Israel is uniquely at fault for all the suffering in the Middle East.

All of us would condemn at least some of the Bush administration's domestic policies, and the litany of its military and diplomatic errors is now familiar, ranging from faulty intelligence, invading Iraq with too few troops for the subsequent occupation and reconstruction, and alienating allies with high-handed unilateralism to open disdain for the principles and provisions of the Geneva Convention. Most of us also dislike important aspects of the Harper government's domestic policies, and some regret that it did not make the case for the Afghan mission in a more extended debate in the House of Commons. No government of any state is above criticism, and legitimate objections can be raised to some recent Israeli actions. Yet the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are not mirror images of the atrocities of Saddam Hussein, Canadian troops in Afghanistan do not occupy the same moral plane as the Taliban, the prospect of rogue states acquiring nuclear weapons is a genuine threat,  and if acknowledgment of Israel's right to exist is to mean anything, it must encompass recognition of the legitimacy of military action in self-defense.