Europe’s Refugee Crisis Was Made in America

[unhappycamper]

http://www.thenation.com/article/europes-refugee-crisis-was-made-in-america/



 Washington helped create the conditions with its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 Europe’s Refugee Crisis Was Made in America
 By the Editors
September 9, 2015

 All over Europe and the Mediterranean world, barriers are being breached: the natural and man-made barriers used by nation-states to shut out unwanted travelers; the barriers of fear and grief that keep people from fleeing war or poverty until they have no choice; the barriers of indifference that enable
 the rest of us to get on with our lives as if those men, women, and children were no concern of ours. More than 380,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean this year in search of safety, two-thirds of them landing in Greece; at least 2,850 have drowned or are missing at sea. Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, and others walk for days in the heat, sleep rough on docks or station platforms or by the side of the road, are tear-gassed and beaten at borders and crammed into trains like cattle as they try to make their way north.

The numbers keep on growing, but for those on the edge of Europe struggling with their own troubles, the story is not new. The authorities are overwhelmed, as are the solidarity networks that offer food and water, shelter and medical care. On a continent that seemed divided between north and south by the financial crisis, the refugee crisis has revealed a different rift: between thousands of ordinary citizens, from Greece to Germany to Britain, ready to share their bread and open up their homes, and governments determined to fortify their borders and protect their power, backed by both the anxious and the frankly xenophobic.

 It’s taken clashes in Greece and on the Macedonian border, the death of 71 people in a truck in Austria, and public horror at those photographs of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, small and limp as a rag doll in a Turkish officer’s hands, to prick the European Union into a belated and inadequate response. Germany has taken the lead, opening its borders to Syrians, suspending the iniquitous Dublin III regulation that requires refugees to apply for asylum in the first European Union country they enter, and supporting as a first step a plan to settle at least 160,000 Syrians in EU member states. Germany, said Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, could accept half a million refugees a year “for several years.” But Hungary, Poland, and Denmark will have none of it. Britain (which funds refugee camps in the Middle East) has offered to take a mere 20,000 people directly from the region in the next five years. The suffering and chaos that result from the failure to act nourish the far right—as well as homegrown jihadis—more effectively than a program of integration ever would.

 But this is not a problem for Europe to solve alone. The Syrian civil war has displaced more than 4 million people, most of them to other countries in the region—though conspicuously not to the Persian Gulf states or Saudi Arabia, friend to the West and armorer of Islamist fighters in Syria. The rise of the Islamic State, or ISIS—now terrorizing Syria and Iraq and threatening neighboring countries—was sparked by the aftermath of the Iraq invasion and further fueled by the misguided tactics of the United States and Britain in Syria. Yet the United States has accepted just 1,500 Syrian refugees since the civil war began. Of the 22 presidential candidates, only Martin O’Malley has called for an increase in numbers, up to 65,000. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders has responded to requests from the UK-based newspaper The Guardian to comment on the issue.

[enough]

1. Interestingly, there's an article in The American Conservative, of all places,

making a very similar point.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-refugee-crisis-made-in-america/

A Refugee Crisis Made in America
Will the U.S. accept responsibility for the humanitarian consequences of Washington-manufactured wars?
By PHILIP GIRALDI • September 9, 2015

snip from the article>

Indeed, I would assign to Washington most of the blame for what is happening right now. Since folks inside the beltway are particularly given to making judgements based on numerical data they might be interested in the toll exacted through America’s global war on terror. By one not unreasonable estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001.

There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia.

The number of internally displaced within each country is roughly double the number of those who have actually fled and are seeking to resettle outside their homelands. Many of the latter have wound up in temporary camps run by the United Nations while others are paying criminals to transport them into Europe.

Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war. The invasion of Iraq created a power vacuum that has empowered terrorism in the Arab heartland. Supporting rebels in Syria has piled Pelion on Ossa. Afghanistan continues to bleed 14 years after the United States arrived and decided to create a democracy. Libya, which was relatively stable when the U.S. and its allies intervened, is now in chaos, with its disorder spilling over into sub-Saharan Africa.

end snip>

[6chars]

2. I would also assign blame to the people doing the killing and bombing

and the people funding it. they are not passive agents, and it's actually patronizing to pretend that all they do is respond to us.
who is responsible when ISIS beheads 75 people? ISIS. Who is responsible when Assad barrel bombs a civilian center? Assad.

Flame away