A large crowd gathers in southern Iran’s Minab for funerals of students killed at a girls’ elementary school. Photo by Morteza Akhondi/Tasnim News Agency.

On February 28, Mark Carney issued a statement on what he delicately termed the “Iran-related hostilities throughout the Middle East.” He did not call them the “Israel-initiated hostilities” or the “US-initiated hostilities,” despite the fact that the hostilities originated in a so-called “preemptive strike” on Iran by Israel and the US earlier that day.

“Canada,” the PM’s statement proclaimed, “supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security” (my emphasis). This was a clear endorsement not only of the (purported) political objectives of the US military action, but of the action itself.

So what, exactly, is Canada supporting? Equally to the point, what is it opposing?

During the first round of strikes, Israeli and US missiles assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with his daughter, son-in-law, grandchild, and daughter-in-law. Khamenei’s wife died from her injuries on March 2. The IDF boasted of taking out 40 top Iranian commanders “in the first minute” of the attack, including Armed Forces Chief of Staff Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi.

So successful were these targeted assassinations that on March 3 Donald Trump told reporters that “Most of the people we had in mind [to succeed Khameini] are dead… And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So, I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

Military and political leaders were not the only casualties. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, the first day of the war left 555 dead across Iran. Bombings have continued every day since, with the capital Tehran being especially hard hit. By March 5 the death toll had reached 1,230—more than the number of people killed in the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, which appalled the world and precipitated Israel’s Gaza “war.”

Thousands of kilometres away off the coast of Sri Lanka “an American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.” I quote US secretary of war—he’s no longer called secretary of defense—Pete Hegseth. Eighty-seven bodies were recovered.

The war has meantime spread to Lebanon, where Israel is carpet-bombing and has ordered more than half-a-million people to evacuate Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Most horrifically, a missile attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab in southern Iran killed at least 165 people, most of them schoolgirls aged seven to 12.

Israel disowns the Minab massacre, stating that it has not “found any connection to our operations.” The Pentagon is “investigating,” but Pete Hegseth has assured the world that “we of course never target civilian targets” and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio protests “The United States would not deliberately target a school.”

Neither Carney nor Foreign Minister Anita Anand have yet uttered a word of regret about the Minab slaughter. In fact, they haven’t mentioned it at all. But while remaining silent on what—at the least—is a tragic instance of collateral damage, they rushed to condemn the “strikes carried out by Iran on civilian infrastructure across the Middle East.”

According to Anand, it is Iran’s retaliatory strikes, not the the Israeli-US aggression that Canada supports, that “represent an unacceptable escalation and a blatant attempt to further destabilize the region.” The first European leader to publicly react to the war, EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, also denounced Iran’s “reckless and indiscriminate strikes” as “a blatant violation of… sovereignty and a clear breach of international law,” without mentioning, still less condemning, the Israeli-US actions that provoked them.

This is self-evidently absurd. Asked by NBC News why Iran was attacking US bases in neighbouring Gulf states, the Iranian foreign minister gave the only appropriate response: “Um, because you’re bombing us from those bases? What do you want me to say?”

Francesca Albanese, post on X, March 1, 2026.

Carney’s backing for the Israeli-US strikes on Iran came as a nasty shock to many in Canada and abroad in light of his widely-acclaimed address at the World Economic Forum in Davos little more than a month earlier.

Carney began his Davos speech by acknowledging “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality where geopolitics—where the large, main power—is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” But, he argued,

the other countries, particularly intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the various states.

The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.

Invoking former Czech President Václav Havel’s parable of the Prague greengrocer who places a sign in his window every morning reading “Workers of the World Unite” not because he believes it but “to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along,” Carney urged: “Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”

Middle powers like Canada should adopt “value-based realism” in foreign policy. He presented this approach as

both principled and pragmatic—principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.

Carney’s value-based realism seems to have crumbled in the face of its first test.

Odious as the ayatollahs’ regime may be when judged from the standpoint of human rights as proclaimed—though not always honored—by the West, the Israeli-US attack has unquestionably violated Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and is manifestly not consistent with the UN Charter or international law.

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states categorically that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” However evil a regime may be, force may only be used in pursuit of regime change........

© Canadian Dimension