It’s bad enough that the House of Commons resumed its sittings this week without a clue about how Canada’s new government intends to participate in the global struggle against Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant (ISIL). Worse, Parliament began its proceedings against the backdrop of a recent meeting, in which our NATO allies had apparently sidelined us, or “snubbed” us, because of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s embarrassing incoherence on the subject.

It can be taken as a given that Trudeau and his ministers have utterly failed in their attempts to explain their rationale behind withdrawing the half-dozen Royal Canadian Air Force fighter jets from the U.S.-led coalition against ISIL. As for having been rudely cold-shouldered last week when the United States convened coalition defence ministers from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and the Netherlands in Paris, it is just as plausible that that the White House simply wanted to avoid embarrassing us any further.

In any case, knowing what everybody knows now about U.S. President Barack Obama’s abysmal failures throughout the Middle East, and particularly his catastrophic response to the Syrian debacle, what shame is there in Canada being slightly less implicated in the wreckage?

Being “snubbed” by Obama in these matters could just as easily be taken as a badge of honour. It would at least place Canada in the company of the only good guys involved in the Syrian mayhem. When the Islamic State’s campaign of genocide against the Yazidis finally shamed the Obama administration into authorizing airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in September 2014, it was the U.S.-based Coalition for a Democratic Syria and the Istanbul-based National Coalition for Syrian and Revolutionary Forces that got snubbed.

Obama’s air campaign began with “absolutely no coordination with moderate Opposition forces on the ground,” thecoalition protested. Since then, Syria’s pro-democracy revolutionaries have been sidelined ever further. The Syrian corpse heaps have grown only higher. Half the Syrian population — 12-million people — have been rendered homeless, due almost entirely to the war that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Iranian proxy Hezbollah and lately Russia have been waging upon the Syrian people, mostly by means of barrel bombs and cluster munitions.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been reduced to working as an errand boy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, instructing Syria’s rebel forces on what they may and may not put on the table in the latest United Nations’ “peace talks” charade, and making plain to everyone that Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani are on the same page: forget about sending Assad to the International Criminal Court. The point of the talks is to secure Assad a place in some sort of gerrymandered, power-sharing transitional government arrangement. To be absent from the invitation list to “world stage” proceedings this disgraceful is not something that should hurt Canada’s feelings.

The Opposition Conservatives are not helping to clarify matters by aping the New Democratic Party’s habit of construing Canada’s foreign-policy usefulness by what they imagine Canadians would want to see in a vanity mirror. “The Liberals’ incoherent and indecisive messaging has diminished Canada’s reputation on the world stage,” Conservative MP James Bezan told the House on Monday. Good grief.

When they were in power, we could at least count on the Conservatives to not particularly give a damn about what “the international community” thought. But now that the Liberals are calling the shots, or leaving everybody waiting to learn what shots they’re going to call, it suddenly matters? It doesn’t — certainly not to the people of Syria, whose agonies should be foremost in these considerations.

The apocalyptic sundering of Syria has quite properly remained front-and-centre in the rumpus-making about the role Canada’s military might play in the paltry U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State. This makes it particularly weird that Canada’s Operation Impact contribution has had practically nothing to do with Syria from the outset.

In the full year that Harper’s Conservative government was running Canada’s contribution to Obama’s air campaign, Operation Impact conducted more than 1,600 sorties: about 1,000 undertaken by CF-18 Hornet fighters, nearly 300 Polaris aerial refuelling missions and roughly an equal number of CP-140 Aurora reconnaissance flights. Total Canadian airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria: four.

As of Monday, Canada’s Air Task Force had conducted a further 300 sorties with an unchanged ratio of CF-18 Hornet flights, Polaris aerial refuelling jobs and Aurora reconnaissance flights — all in Iraqi airspace. Our fighter jets have played a critical role in securing recent gains against the Islamic State, especially around Mount Sinjar, and we can all be proud of that. But Syria is quite literally not even on Canada’s radar.

When the subject first came up at NATO in September 2014, the Liberals’ opposition to the RCAF’s engagement against the Islamic State made absolutely no sense. A genocide of Biblical proportion was underway, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis and Christians were streaming out of the Shingal Mountains and all we got from Trudeau’s Liberals was point-missing, subject-changing gibberish. The Liberals made even less sense when the mission came up for renewal in March of last year, when the Harper government sought Parliament’s blessing for extending Operation Impact into Syria (which never happened anyway).

Last September, Trudeau told me that Obama’s coalition was too narrowly focused on the Islamic State, that the Syrian catastrophe would require more than just a military solution — that a multi-faceted international effort of some state-rebuilding nature would be required to put Syria back together again — and that Canada stood ready to play some part in that. All well and good.

Around the same time, the University of Ottawa’s Roland Paris, who has since signed on as a senior Trudeau adviser, was making the rounds, insisting that the Conservatives’ focus on the Islamic State and the ongoing air war in Iraq was merely a distraction because the Syrian refugee crisis had little to do with jihadist marauders: “The main cause of civilian deaths and dislocation in that country is the government of Bashar al-Assad.”

This doesn’t mean Canada should let up on the Islamic State, which has to be pulverized in all its incarnations by any and all means available, in Syria, Iraq, Libya and anywhere else its rot might spread. But if Canada is going to make any real use of itself in restoring some semblance of peace and security in the bleeding human landscapes where Syria and Iraq used to be, primping and whinging about Canada’s “international reputation” won’t do.

Neither will quibbling about how many Special Operations soldiers might be required to make up for the loss of our fighter jets in Obama’s coalition, or bickering about how close to the “front lines” they should be allowed to stray, or making petty speeches about the “non-combat” virtues of training Iraqi and Kurdish soldiers.

In the coming days, Prime Minister Trudeau, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion and International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau will be huddling with their advisers and senior staff to formulate something coherent out of the hash we’ve all made of this. We’re waiting and, whatever the result, it better be more than merely coherent.

It’s time to go big or go home — to hell with what the “international community” has to say about it.