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| EU relationship with USA |
Until last summer, the refugee crisis in Europe was quietly and
intentionally hidden from most Americans' view.
It took 3,771 deaths in
the Mediterranean last year - and a photograph of a lifeless, drowned
Kurdish child named Aylan Kurdi - for coverage to hit the American
press.
By that time, 3,000 people were arriving every day to Lesbos, and
many thousands more to the other Greek islands.
The
irony of this ignorance should be obvious: the United States
stands at the center of this disastrous situations given their military
involvement in the Middle East and around the world, which has resulted
in refugees being out of
their homes, over mountains, around border crossings, through Turkish
prison cells and onto crowded, dangerous boats.
From Libya to southern
Afghanistan, US interventions and occupations have led to further
destabilization, violence and, in almost all cases, civil wars.
A longer trail of complicity that stretches back to the four decades of
economic and military support that the United States has given to the
Arab dictatorships challenged in the 2011 Arab Spring, and to similar
support given in that same time period to a number of insurgencies that
dovetailed with US foreign policy objectives.
One such group, the
insurgency of the Afghan Mujahideen, fought a decade-long guerrilla war
against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
Those who came
to fight in Afghanistan from abroad, many of whom received US military
and economic support either from Congress or the CIA, hatched a postwar
strategy of insurgency across the Arab and Muslim world, which resulted
in a civil war in Algeria that took 120,000 lives. Meanwhile, other
smaller rebellions caused significant fighting across the Maghreb, in
northern Pakistan, Yemen, Chechnya, Albania and beyond.
The
group now known to the world as ISIS was created in this period by a
Jordanian Mujahideen veteran named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Originally
launched in Jordan, the all-but-failed organization was given a second
lease on life in post-invasion Iraq, where a destabilized and fractured
society made fertile soil for the hyper-sectarian ideology of Zarqawi,
who helped turn anger at the US occupation into a civil war against
Shiites.
The sectarian state originally put in
power in Iraq by the United States escalated divisions in the country,
helping fuel the other side of the 2005-2006 civil war while pushing a
large, disenfranchised Sunni population further toward the open arms of
groups like ISIS.
A focus of the US "surge" in 2007 was
working with Sunni militias to turn against this tide, but that
strategy only lasted until the Iraqi state took control of the Sahwa
program (Awakening Councils, or Sons of Iraq) as US troops withdrew and
quickly dismantled them.
Against a backdrop of
electricity shortages, water contamination and continued political
destabilization, ISIS, which had by then entered into the north of Syria
to take advantage of the civil war there, re-entered the picture with
its dramatic capturing of Fallujah, Ramadi and other key points in
Iraq's Anbar Province.
ISIS may be the most menacing
face of Syria's civil war, but the multifaceted war includes a range of
other groups, most notable the Assad regime itself, but also groups like
the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army, a
"moderate" group originally formed by deserters from the regime's
military. And while a civil society-based revolutionary movement
continues to defend the small spaces it has been able to hold, a
pipeline of US, Gulf and European money providing various factions with
weapons that have helped prolong the bloodshed has helped shatter the
hopes and dreams of those who first took to the streets in 2011. Though
the US Congress recently canceled the public program backing such
rebels, the much larger CIA program remains in operation.
Alongside
the US funding, US allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates have pumped weapons, logistical equipment and soldiers into
Syria to support various factions fighting in the civil war, mainly
those linked with the Supreme Military Council of Syria, which includes
the Free Syrian Army and other anti-ISIS, anti-Assad groups. These
groups, as well as the Kurdish peshmerga (from Iraq but often fighting
in Syrian Kurdistan) and the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG),
are often supported by bombings of the US, EU (NATO) countries, Saudi Arabia,
the Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Canada and Turkey.
On
the other side of that war, Russia and Iran have sustained financial
and political support to the four-decade-old Assad regime, helping
defend its authoritarian police state from an array of forces fighting
against it. In October 2015, Russian air support joined in the fight to
secure Russia a seat at the negotiation table and to bolster Assad's
position in power. Though Russia announced in mid-March that it would
begin withdrawing forces as a long-needed cease-fire takes effect,
fighting targeting Islamist groups unaffected by the cease-fire
continues in Aleppo, Syria's largest city and its financial center.
Popular
protests have exploded in almost every corner of the world, drawing
comparisons to the revolutionary period of 1968. It's hard to analyze
this wave of uprisings and protest without crediting the revolutions in
the Arab world as the first spark that caught.
Those
who inspired the world now face a severe wave of repression, with Syria
as one of the most shocking examples. Over 11 percent of the population
has been killed or injured since the start of the revolt, and over 20
percent have fled the country. Syria has become the single largest
source of refugees in the world. The second largest? Afghanistan.
The
Arab allies of the United States, fully involved in the war, have taken
in an astoundingly small number of refugees from Syria, with Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia in last place, with zero.
The United States, with its
massive economy and "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" rhetoric,
pledged last year to take in a mere 10,000 refugees for fiscal year 2016
- that's .015 percent. So far, that number has only reached a little
over 1000.
Considering the extent to which US money
has been spent killing people and destroying infrastructure in these
countries -- for each of the 1,700 Syrian refugees accepted into the
country last year, the United States spent an estimated $375,000
financing and arming various factions in the civil war -- it's far
beyond an oversight that the United States' borders are almost
impossible for refugees from the region to enter. Even those who worked
as interpreters for US soldiers in Iraq regularly make the dangerous
crossing to Greece, unsupported by the governments they risked their
lives to assist.
The reality is that the United
States is politically unwilling to help. Its wars of political and
economic self-interest have always centered on a US perception of
success and have always utilized a rhetoric of liberation to achieve
long-sought foreign policy objectives. It has left those whose lives
have been turned upside down across the Middle East -- the people it
claimed to be liberating when it invaded their homes -- to fend for
themselves in Europe or drown in the picturesque waters of the
Mediterranean Sea.
The message of the US is now crystal clear: "Your liberation only matters when we need to justify our wars."
Unfortunately
the EU will pay, as it already is experiencing, a heavy price for
blindly following, agreeing and participating in these disastrous US
adventures in the Middle East and other places around the world.
This
is not anti-Americanism, it is a statement of fact, ehich most cowardly
corrupt politicians and the corporate controlled press don't dare to
mention.
Where are the European politicians who
dare to speak out? It is high time for a EUXIT out of this destructive
US embrace, before this fragile European Union completely falls apart.
EU-Digest
