The Boy King plays semantics:
The militant group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has claimed responsibility for both incidents.
Trudeau, who made his comments during a CBC Radio interview, and Dion — speaking Wednesday in the House of Commons foyer — both said the conflict with ISIL does not fit the true definition of war.
"A war is something that can be won by one side or the other and there is no path for ISIL to actually win against the West," Trudeau said.
"They want to destabilize, they want to strike fear. They need to be stamped out."
Since 1945 political leaders across the world and the ideological spectrum have been hesitant about using the the W-word. Harry Truman famous called the three blood-letting in the Korean peninsula a "police action" rather than an actual war. Strangely this did little to dissuade either the Red Chinese or the North Koreans from killing millions of allied soldiers and Korean civilians. The comparatively recent hesitancy to use the term "war" to describe the organized killing of human beings is partly politics and partly legalese.
An official declaration of war typically requires the full machinery of the state to be engaged. The national legislature must pass some type of enabling statute. The Geneva convention starts to kick in. It's a big thing that limits the flexibility of the executive in prosecuting their military and political objectives. By pretending that a word doesn't mean what it actually means the world quickly becomes your oyster. The United States Supreme Court has been doing it for nearly 80 years. If anything the politicians were slow on the uptake when compared to their black robed brethren in government.
Knowing the Boy King and his minions it's unlikely the legality was very high on his mind when he avoided calling the war against ISIS a war. Papa Trudeau was the constitutional scholar, junior is a snowboard instructor and amateur thespian. While he understand very little he feels quite well. He has what the psychologists call "emotional intelligence." The regular old fashioned intelligence is good at spotting patterns in nature. The new fangled intelligence is about "reading" people's emotions. Call a war a war might hurt Canadians feelings. It conflicts sharply with the Trudeaupian self-image of Canada as a nation of peacekeepers and Dudley Do Rights. Americans do war. We do peace.
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