The CBC and US President Trump Both Learn Hard Lessons Over the Holidays in Cause-and-Effect
Christmas holidays did not come and go without controversy, predictable of course, for these times we live in. Specifically, there was a notable online backlash against Canadian public broadcaster, Canadian Broadcast Corporation (“CBC”), after they aired a slightly edited version of the classic Christmas film “Home Alone 2,” starring Macaulay Culkin — it was missing the now infamous 8-second cameo by US President Donald Trump. In the film, Trump appears as himself in the lobby of the historic Plaza Hotel in midtown Manhattan (which he owned at the time) providing a short set of directions to the film’s lost young protagonist. Some say that Trump was given the cameo by the film’s producers in exchange for Trump allowing them use of the Plaza Hotel lobby for filming. Regardless, the scene never made it into CBC’s rebroadcast of the movie on its networks over the holiday season, and many noticed – including the US President himself. Shortly after the apparent missing scene had garnered viral traction on social media, the US President tweeted “I guess Justin T doesn’t much like my making him pay up on NATO or Trade!”
The tweet – a vague reference to other recent controversies involving the US President and Canadian Prime Minister at an early-December NATO conference in the United Kingdom – reverberated through the Canadian political and media class, and sparked rare comment from the CBC on its programming and editorial choices, at least in regards to the edits that had been made to the Christmas classic in question. CBC’s spokesperson Chuck Thompson, in comment provided by CBC, said “as is often the case with feature films adapted for television, Home Alone 2 was edited for time,” Thompson explained. “The scene with Donald Trump was one of several that were cut from the movie as none of them were integral to the plot. These edits were done in 2014, when we first acquired the film and before Mr. Trump was elected president.”
Mr. Thompson would go on to explain that a rough total of eight minutes had been removed from the film, as to have the film sufficiently trimmed for a two-hour broadcast slot with commercials. An understandable explanation for sure. Nonetheless, this episode can serve as a textbook example of unintended consequences – a simple timing edit of a 90’s Christmas film done by the CBC in 2014, over a year before Trump would announce his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States, would turn into an embarrassing international political snafu with Canada’s strongest and most powerful ally in late 2019.
And unintended consequences are certainly not exclusive to the CBC. President Trump himself is learning a hard-lesson in unintended consequences in the Middle East, in regards to US adventurism in Iraq, and US policy towards Iran. See, ethnic and sectarian strife in Iraq is both a terribly complicated, and surprisingly simple issue. Iraq is a majority Shi’ite nation, with an Arab-Sunni minority. During the rule of Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s Sunni minority was in control of the nation’s economy and politics, and had aligned the country with the rest of the Sunni Arab world. While this provided the United States consternation in regards to Iraq’s supposed support for radical Salafist terrorism (Salafism is an extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam, and is the same branch of Islam practiced by Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other extremist Sunni terrorist groups), it at the very least made Iraq natural enemies of the United States’ number one rival in the region – Iran (which is overwhelmingly Shi’ite, and serves as the de facto leader of the Shia world). The United States was largely comfortable with this alignment between Iraq and the rest of the Arab world – and against Iran – for most of the 80’s and early 90’s – even providing Hussein’s regime in Iraq substantial military support and assistance in the bloody Iraq-Iran war of 1980-88. However, Hussein’s Ba’athist government became increasingly belligerent towards the United States, and was an unpredictable and unreliable ally to the rest of the Arab world. Tensions came to a boil when Iraq invaded its Arab neighbour Kuwait in 1991 – sparking the First Gulf War, and the beginning of openly hostile relations between Iraq, the United States, and Iraq’s former Arab allies.
Fast forward to 2003 and we have the invasion of Iraq by the United States under President George W. Bush. One of the primary stated goals of the invasion (now largely accomplished) was to bring Western-style democracy to Iraq, a nation formerly ruled by the iron fist of the totalitarian Hussein. The unintended consequence here (although far more predictable than the conundrum the CBC found itself in) is that it always remained likely that giving a Shi’ite majority population the democratic vote would result in Iraq electing a largely pro-Shi’ite parliament, thus leading to a potential re-alignment of Iraq away from its Arab-Sunni neighbours (although this had already begun to happen under Hussein following his invasion of Kuwait) and toward the Shi’ite-world, and primarily Iran. As of January 2020, this is exactly what has happened.
While the world focuses on the tit-for-tat military exchanges between the United States, and Iran and its many proxies in the region, the real story in Iraq today is the gradual re-alignment of the democratically elected Iraqi government toward Iran, and away from the West and the Arab world. Frankly, regardless of whether President Trump had Iranian General Qasem Soleimani killed or not, the re-alignment of Iraq was already long underway – the attack on Soleimani only worked to highlight existing and growing divisions between the Iraqi government, and that of the United States.
Critics of President Trump’s strike against Soleimani are indeed correct that forces under Soleimani’s command largely helped in the effort to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria from 2015-2019. However, the war fought by Soleimani influenced Iranian proxy groups against ISIS, and was a far different war with far different objectives than that of the Western coalition against ISIS. Soleimani’s goals – and by extension Iran’s – were to consolidate Shi’ite control over the formerly hostile (to Iran) Iraq. Iran had few qualms with using extremist terrorism for political purposes – they just wanted to make sure that the extremist groups in control of Iraq were Iranian influenced Shi’ite groups, such as Hezbollah, rather than Arab/Salafist influenced groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The Western coalition’s objectives in contrast, at least stated, are to “stabilize” Iraq, prevent a safe-haven for terrorism from forming – whether Shia or Sunni inspired – and to ensure the integrity of a democratic government. As such, the United States now finds itself at loggerheads with the majority of the Iraqi people. It is those very people who democratically elected an overwhelmingly pro-Shi’ite, pro-Iran parliament, and it is those very people who provide the popular support and approval needed by many Iraqi Shi’ite militant groups opposed to a continuing US presence in Iraq. The West is now opposed by the population it was attempting to help.
As such, the unintended consequence of an otherwise well-intentioned policy of bringing liberty and democracy to a once oppressed people is likely to ultimately result in an Iraq-Iran Middle East alliance, probably with the backing of both Russia and China, creating a far greater threat to the United States and the West than Hussein’s regime, or an isolated Iran, ever did. This policy pre-dated President Trump by more than a decade, and was carried out by two previous Presidents, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Yet, it is President Trump who is left to deal with the fallout, much the same as the poor CBC public-relations team of Christmas season 2019 left to deal with the fallout of an otherwise uncontroversial timing edit made in 2014 to an early 90’s Christmas film.
Yet, as the old saying goes, it is never too late to stop digging. Although President Trump is not the cause of the situation in the Middle East that he inherited, he can make things much, much, worse, if he does not heed the lessons learned in unintended consequences in US foreign policy over the last two decades. Attacking and invading Iran does absolutely nothing to further security in the West, or security in the Middle East for that matter. It is without question that the United States’ military could make short-work of Iranian armed forces, but at what cost? An invasion of Iran would likely dramatically weaken Iranian-backed proxies throughout Iraq and Syria, but does this really stop terrorism in the region? It is easy to predict that the moment Shi’ite forces lose grip on the territory they now control in Iraq, extremist Sunni groups will look to take advantage (and revenge), and we could see the return of groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Then what? We will be entangled in a military conflict in yet another country in West Asia (and the most powerful of any nation we’ve intervened in yet), while Al Qaeda and ISIS regain lost ground in Syria and Iraq.
Unintended consequences can be both foreseeable (Iraq) and unpredictable (CBC editing President Trump out of Home Alone 2 in 2014), but they are ever present, and the implications can be massive. It is high time that our political leaders started acknowledging this basic fact.
My name is Corey LeBlanc, and that’s just my opinion.