Yacoub El Hillo, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator in Syria, says that a million people have already been displaced by the civil war in Syria and that a million more will be displaced by the end of the year if things don’t change on the ground there. Considering that the war has been going on for four and half years now, this seems to represent a serious uptick in the rate that people are fleeing the conflict, and perhaps this is why things are beginning to come to a head in Europe and the subject of housing refugees has become a hot issue on the campaign trail.
“Unless something big is done to resolve this conflict through political means, the human train that has started moving out of Syria and the neighborhood will continue to be running for many months to come,” El Hillo told Reuters.
“Europe will be faced with a refugee situation similar to the one that led to the creation of UNHCR in 1950,” he said, referring to the establishment of the U.N. refugee agency set up to help the displaced from the Second World War.
It’s easy to forget that in 2007, the UNHCR reported that more than 1.2 million Iraqis were living in Syria as refugees from the post-U.S. invasion civil war in their country. So, President Bush really unleashed a bad form of hell on the region and now it’s like a game of refugee musical chairs.
No doubt, our country must bear a lot of responsibility for the refugee crisis and that means that we can’t turn our backs to the problem, particularly while Europe, which nearly uniformly opposed our invasion of Iraq, suffers the brunt of the consequences of our decision to initiate this catastrophe.
Having said that, I think we need to be honest. Ohio Governor John Kasich says he supports the president’s decision to open up 10,000 slots for Syrian refugees but “It’s very important that we don’t let anybody infiltrate who’s part of a radical group.”
Here’s the problem with that.
The Syrian War has morphed from its beginnings as an anti-regime uprising into a full-on sectarian war in which the Sunni powers are funding proxy armies of, frankly, religions lunatics to fight Iran’s Shiite and pro-Assad regime fanatics. Whether you are fleeing the government’s Free Syria Army, the Shiite death squads, ISIS, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, the Islamic Front, Kurdish fighters, or some other armed faction, the problem is that everyone is at each other’s throats and few places are safe. Plus, there’s no way to make a living in anything approaching normal commerce.
With distrust and hatred so strong and refugees coming from all over, any population of refugees will reflect these tensions. Some will be bitterly opposed to the regime and Iran and others will be hostile to the religious intolerance of the Salafist forces armed and funded by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Still others will be angry at all sides. After all, Syria was a very ecumenical and tolerant place prior to the beginning of the uprising.
What I am saying is that you can let people resettle here out of humanitarian concern, but the civil war that they left will remain with them in their hearts and minds. You can expect them to fight each other even if they don’t fight anyone else. What Kasich is saying makes sense, but it’s the wrong way of looking at it. The war there has gone beyond “radicals” to become a generalized regional war to the death between religious nuts, with secularists and moderates completely left out of the picture. This has been the problem from the beginning and the reason that the president wisely opted not to follow Hillary Clinton’s advice to get us bogged down in supporting the Sunni side against the Shiite side.
Europe has a harder time assimilating Muslim immigrants than we do, so maybe these influxes of refugees won’t present us with as many problems, but we ought to recognize that there are risks to becoming the sanctuary for tens of thousands of people who are warring with each other over the religious and political future of their home region. Because we helped create this problem, we should accept those risks as part of the price for allowing Dick and George to start this excellent adventure, but we shouldn’t have our eyes closed about it.
Finally, it’s easy to say that the civil war in Syria and the broader sectarian conflict in the Middle East are not our problem, or are not Europe’s problem. But, when you start getting significant refugee flows that present real security risks, then the conflict is our problem and we need to intervene.
How we intervene is critically important, because our goal cannot be to assist one side in prevailing military, politically, and culturally over the other. Obama’s refusal to attempt this so far has angered the Sunni powers, Israel, and our foreign policy establishment, but our close ties to the Sunnis and bad relationship with the Shiites was always more an accident of history than a statement of preference or values. And, in any case, having overthrown the Sunnis in Iraq and handed control to the Shiites there, we now have important allies/proxies in both camps. This is why Obama saw the nuclear deal with Iran as being a stepping stone to regional peacemaking while so many others saw it as helping Iran in their efforts to win the sectarian conflict against the Sunnis.
This is one of the toughest foreign policy problems we have ever faced as a country and the president has understood it in the proper context. His probable successor does not see it in the proper context, but neither do any of her competitors on the Democratic or Republicans sides. In fact, only Biden knows and agrees with the president’s thinking and is likely to continue the policy of neutrality in the conflict.
You can talk about the bankruptcy bill or the crime bill or Anita Hill until the cows come home, but when it comes to Biden vs. the rest of the Democratic field, this is the main argument in his favor.
[Cross-posted at Progress Pond]
This is literally the first time I’ve seen somebody present a sensible rationale for a Biden candidacy.
We’ll see how Sanders, Biden, Clinton, and to a much lesser extent Webb and O’Malley respond to this. It’s time for our candidates to really show what they’re made of.
Bush said the invasion of Iraq was to establish democracy. This was a lie, the initial plan was to install a man with no popular backing. But they got outmaneuvered and had to have elections.
Many supported the Arab Spring out of a sincere desire for democracy, but it has not turned out well.
Ousting Ghadafi had a similar claimed rationale, and has also turned out badly.
Supporting the overthrow of Assad was justifiable in the abstract in terms of democracy, but has been a disaster. It’s time to admit that calling for democracy in that situation was a mistake. The people of Syria and the world were much better off with the brutal dictatorship.
It’s time to admit that the region needs stability, even if that means supporting brutal dictators against uprisings. Yes, this is something the right-wing generally claims (though this time, they claimed support for democracy against dictatorship). That doesn’t mean it is never true. We are seeing the truth before our eyes.
I never thought I would miss the realists. Our foreign policy is just as aggressive and brutal, but has lost all touch with reality. At a minimum, we should have left Ghaddafi alone and not even rhetorically have egged on rebellion against Assad. Invading Iraq was a mistake, but it was not the only mistake.
I think we can let the people in the region figure out what is best for them and not try to impose either outcome on them. We just need to butt out
Finally, it’s easy to say that the civil war in Syria and the broader sectarian conflict in the Middle East are not our problem, or are not Europe’s problem.
Pottery Barn. We broke it, we own it. What is happening now right across the Middle East is in large part a direct result of our actions in the region in general and in Iraq in particular. Say what you want about Saddam or Assad, they were maintaining a semblance of order, even if it was as brutal as it was fragile.
When we invaded Iraq and took down Saddam, we broke that. The flood of refugees that unleashed destabilized Syria and other regimes in the region. Now the dominoes are starting to tumble into Europe. I don’t think anyone knows where all the pieces are ultimately going to land. It won’t be over soon and it ain’t gonna be pretty.
And yes, we bear a heavy responsibility for what’s happening now, whether we want to admit it or not. And we will continue to pay a heavy price for our part in it, whether we want to or not.
Democrats will naturally want to put all the blame on Bush, but if we hadn’t made Mubarek step down over some protests, if we hadn’t taken out Ghaddafi, and if we hadn’t egged on and armed the rebellion against Assad, it’s very unlikely Syria would be where it is now. After all,there was very little indication it was going that way until the Arab Spring. These dictatorships were not particularly fragile – they had lasted decades, probably because many of the people understood that the alternative was chaos, even if we did not.
Disagree that “we” made Mubarek step down (Clinton claimed that “the Mubarek regime is strong” during the Arab Spring); otherwise agree.
I blame Cheney more than Bush. I don’t think Dubya had the faintest clue what was really going on. They let him think he was in charge, and he got to go in front of the cameras and play the tough cowboy. That was probably enough to keep him happy while Cheney pulled all the strings.
These dictatorships were not particularly fragile – they had lasted decades, probably because many of the people understood that the alternative was chaos, even if we did not.
This. Something too many Americans probably still don’t understand.
It will be interesting in the least to find out in Obama’s memoirs what the thinking was behind the Arab Spring. I can understand not backing Mubarak, though. He was 82 years old and claimed to be dying, and he had made the obviously unpopular decision to transition power to his son. The US did not make him old. Wasting time with Morsi I think was a mistake, but if the thieving elite of Egypt would tone down the thieving, perhaps they would win elections.
I can understand the impulse there. For Ben Ali in Tunsia as well. These were old men who claimed to be ailing, who became extremely wealthy as “public servants.” It would be unusual for a US administration to unequivocally back their sons as natural successors since these aren’t nominal monarchies.
For Libya, I don’t think we’ll ever get to the bottom of why Sarkozy and Cameron, two men not exactly known for their humanitarian concerns, were so hell bent in ousting Qaddafi. By the time that “crisis” rolled around. I know we should look at Hillary and Suzanne Power for that, but honestly, I still think of Libya as the French/British freak-out. I can blame Obama for not saying No, but I think our allies still come off worse.
Sarkozy was in the run-up to an election and Libyan refugees were flooding into Italy, which would not take them, and then crossing into France. Sarkozy’s leading opponent was Marine Le Pen. It it pretty straightforward what Sarkozy’s urgency was. And then he lost by being an Islamaphobe at the last minute.
Cameron wanted his foreign policy Churchill badge.
The difference with Mubarak was that he was our son of a bitch, which was never true of Assad, Saddam or Moammar.
Lol we did a lot to keep Mubarak in power. Not everything in our power, mind you, and compared to previous US governments we largely got out of the way (though I’d say Obama still preferred him to stay). Anyway, the government of Egypt since at least Sadat has been militarily controlled. Right now, the government of Egypt is largely unchanged under Sisi when compared to Mubarak, except more dissidents are disappearing. What we shouldn’t have done was support the subsequent military coup (which we haven’t even acknowledged publicly). Now the lessons are clear, just as they were when Hamas won their elections: kill any dissenters rather than allow them to stay within positions of power. And so now rather than, say, the Muslim Brotherhood, we will see more radicalized elements the next time anything like this happens.
It was within Mubarek’s power to crush the protests. Fire into the square till all were fled or dead. We vocally discouraged that, and, since we were ultimately paying the bills, it did not happen. We then officially said he had to go (it was “inevitable”, which it only was if we were prepared to let it happen), well before he actually went.
Yes, he was our sonvabitch but we didn’t stand by him. We might’ve preferred he stayed in, though the signals we sent were mixed and against him at the end. The only thing that made his overthrow inevitable was a hesitation to use violence to the full extent possible. And those were largely our scruples, not his, probably based on a desire to win back mideast hearts and minds that were lost by Iraq and by unqualified support for Israel. Or, it’s possible that Obama has genuine scruples about unrestrained violence against a non-violent democracy movement. But Mubarek certainly did not. We were tying his hands.
The point is he wasn’t calling the shots, the military was. And there was violence, many people died (almost 1,000 I believe). The military allowed “democracy” to play out, MB gets elected and writes a constitution, the people protest again…and the military decides it’s had enough and quashes it and now Sisi is in power. Oh, and they sentenced the democratically elected leader to death.
How is Egypt any different under Sisi than under Mubarak? All I see that’s different is that more dissidents are “mysteriously” disappearing, and the people of Egypt now know that democracy won’t be tolerated by the PtB. The leaders of the military will need to be ordered dead “next time”.
I don’t think it is much different at all, and to the extent it is different it is worse. I don’t know what we should have done instead. Because Mubarek was our boy, we couldn’t really stay completely out of it. But I felt forebodings about the whole thing when everyone I knew was cheering on the democracy protesters, to the extent that I began to feel like an old grump and supported them too, though I could not see it leading anywhere but to an MB takeover, and saw no outcome after that that was not worse than the status quo. The one we have is the best we could realistically hope for, I think.
My broader point is that Muslim fanaticism and sectarianism had been held in check largely by 4 brutal dictators – Hussein, Ghadafi, Mubarek, and Assad. Only one of those was one of our bastards, though Ghadafi came round at the end and even abandoned and came clean on his nuclear program. And we responded by taking him out. This shows the world how much profit there is in making peace with America, even when you make significant sacrifices to do so. Hussein was morally far the worst of the lot. If you’re going to argue we have the moral obligation to depose people because they are brutal dictators, Bush’s target was more deserving than either of Obama’s (Ghadafi or Assad).
I give Obama credit for not sending our troops into Syria when under tremendous pressure to do so. He dodged that bullet (barely and perhaps accidentally). But he was supporting the protesters early on and arming them as soon as it became violent. This was a serious mistake. We should have stayed out of it, which would have meant ignoring the “Arab Spring” idealism and letting Assad crush them. We’re trying to play puppetmaster without a clue what we are doing, and acting with a mixture of cynicism and idealism that ends in incoherence.
It isn’t that we disagree, especially wrt Libya and Syria (although I think Syrian protestors were violent almost from the very beginning without much prodding from Assad). It’s just that there were quibbles with the argument that we didn’t back Mubarak when we clearly did, until it was no longer sustainable. Also, I’m pretty sure Mubarak ordered the military to shoot protestors many times, but they defied his orders. Again, just had to protest that point: we did back Mubarak until as long as was possible in the digital age; had this been the 90’s we would have probably backed him even more strongly.
I think we largely controlled the military because they wanted to keep the money flowing. So saying it was the Egyptian military, not us, who kept Mubarek from going all-out is not to me a crucial difference. Absent our influence, I’m not sure I buy such restraint from the army. But I suppose there’s no easy way to prove such a thing, so pointless to debate it further.
10,000 is like 0.5% of the current estimated numbers of Syrian refugees. Is the USG only responsible for 0.5% of all the factors that contributed to the disaster in Syria? Has the weapons, fuel, equipment, etc that’s been funneled to the various insurgent groups only been of 0.5% US origin?
At a minimum, and ignoring US claims to be humanitarian, we should be willing to accept 25% of the refugees, assuming that number would want to resettle here. Any less than that and a majority of Americans will continue to fail to accept the full cost of and responsibility for their mad military adventures around the world.
It’s fine that Obama/Biden are making some effort to try to fix a mess that they assisted in creating in Syria, but absent a policy change from regime change in Syria, it’s not robust enough to do more than slow down the destruction. And we seem to have washed our hands of our participation in the destruction of Libya and Yemen.
Well it’s much more difficult for the refugees to get here compared to Europe but yes, with our larger population we should be accepting more.
25%? There are 23 million Syrians, and possibly 100% will claim to be refugees, although a huge percent are perfectly safe in Turkey at this time.
So, you are willing to accept 6 million refugees? I sure as hell am not.
What a surprise.
I get your point regarding dataguy’s tolerance for immigration, but I’m not prepared to accept that number of refugees either.
So what happens when we have hundreds of millions of climate refugees? Shoot their boats?
we’ll be living on boats.
Seriously, six million refugees? Why don’t we invite them to move the war to Massachusetts and Connecticut and they can finish it there.
I actually didn’t mean to say we should take 6 million refugees myself. Just that “No! Go away!” is not the right response to this situation. This isn’t a bump in the road, this is just the beginning of what is going to be a sustained and agonizing refugee crisis all over the world. We’d better figure out how to deal with it.
So what number will you accept? I will go as high as 5000. All the “refugees” so far, including the parents of the child in the surf, were in a Turkish refugee camp. Almost all of the Syrian “refugees” in Europe left camps in Turkey. In other words, they are not refugees. They are economic migrants. And the two are not treated at all the same.
Germany has royally fucked the economic migrants over as has Sweden by offering false hopes. In addition, traffickers gin up false refugee hopes. All of those boats in Libya? Here’s the algorithm:
How do they fill the boats? By making false claims, by making all kinds of false statements. For the parents of that unfortunate child, they were in a camp, the father had a work permit. The mother could not swim, and did not want to take the boat. So, why did they take the boat? I have no idea, but I imagine some trafficker made a lot of false promises.
There are 23,000,000 Syrians. There 20,000,000 Iraqis. There are 90,000,000 Nigerians.
While I know that compassion, bleating heart statements about “poooor refugees” and so forth is very popular, there is no way that 150,000,000 third world folks are going to Europe or to the US. And if we end up with a bunch (more than 5000), you can all practice saying “President Trump”.
As far as “dealing with it”, here is a very important point:
The refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon are running out of food. In other words, we are going to see a huge wave of hungry refugees if they cannot eat.
So, from a hugely practical standpoint, we need to put time, effort, and resources QUICKLY into the camps in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.
That’s actually the kind of thing I had in mind. Resources are exactly what I’m talking about. We obviously can’t take in the whole world, but that isn’t going to stop people from coming. So we can fortify our borders and coastlines, or we can help to provide for refugees elsewhere, or maybe some combination of the two. The one option we don’t have is to stay out of the whole mess.
Good. We can agree that these unfortunate people need help. I am much more interested in helping them in the camps, where we can consider long-term solutions. I do not pretend that the camps are great. They are horrible, that is for certain. However, there are hundreds of thousands of Syrians.
Now, we need to convince the Republican House and Republican Senate to actually commit actual real money to this cause. Any idea how to do that? And if we say “bring refugees here”, again money is needed. I think that if Obama said “We can help them there or bring 100,000 here”, he would quickly get a $20mil fund together. Why not take that approach?
Let’s help folks, I agree. I do not see a large number coming to the US.
Wish there was an editor…
I meant to say “he would quickly get $20mil to help the refugees in the camps in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.”
What about your basement? What about your garage?
Your compassion is duly noted. Actions?
I get what your point it but 25% is a very large number, especially since we can’t get the GOP Congress to pay for regular stuff in the budget as it is.
Some of them are criminals and rapists, as Trump might say, but I’ve gotta believe that the vast majorities aren’t. The vast majority, I presume, are people who’d be thrilled and grateful to live here … and who’d probably scream at their children for becoming too ‘Americanized,’ and barely recognize their grandchildren, just like my grandparents barely recognized me.
Unless we want to adopt the Cheney doctrine, there are always dangers. There are always violent elements among humans.
And this is a genuine question: when this problem comes to a boil after 7 years of Obama administration, is it fair to say that the president is handling it all that well? I mean, maybe so; maybe this is about as good as it gets, given where we started.
That’s a good question. And an important question, because we’re all going to have to get ready for a whole lot more of this kind of thing. What’s going to happen when Bangladesh is underwater?
Bangladesh is an important test case, as is India. Many people complain about China, but China is no longer growing at double-digit rates. What have India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other countries with Indian roots done about population growth?
Nothing. At. All.
And what has Pakistan done about rampant, pervasive tax evasion? Every couple years, Pakistan has a huge flood, and they whine, but the millionaires in Pakistan pay little or nothing in taxes.
One of the most persuasive reasons I’ve ever heard for why we do better with Muslims than Europe is that unlike Europe where most of the Muslims in a given country come from one region (Britain-Pakistan, France-Algeria, Germany-Turkey) our Muslims come from all over. They are exposed not only to different faiths but different varieties of their own faith. And because the Muslim population is comparatively small it forces an acceptance of differences in practice of Islam and thus kind of primes people for more tolerance and flexibility overall.
Anyhow, while I would clearly accept any refugees I’d probably try to keep a diversity in who I accepted. Lots of Alawites, Christians and Druze along with secular and orthodox Sunnis despite sectarian issues. I’d also try to spreat them out to reduce chances of ‘little Syria’ enclaves forming.
Fine, let him be Sec of Defense. But his previous positions were pretty hawkish.
when does seven years as veep begin to trump his record in the Senate?
And, if you’ll recall, while he didn’t oppose invading Iraq that was because he felt responsible for trying to mitigate the damage from a decision he knew had already been made to invade. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, he tried and failed to keep it to inspections and then to make it so it at least was legal under international law.
He should have opposed it outright, but I understand why he focused on mitigation. He wasn’t a hawk in the context of the times.
If you say that you have to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton’s vote on the AUMF wasn’t that bad either (I’m willing, after her statement in the memoir, as I was for Kerry).
Domestic politics here (and increasingly in Europe) prevents some obvious political solutions that are now probably too late given the condition of the Assad regime.
The current analysis is that King Saltan now realizes the Bandar bin Sultan screwed up in his nod-nod-wink-wink policy of arming jihadis allied with al Quaeda just because they advanced Salafist objectives. It is not clear that the Gulf States have had that realization with respect to the Moslem Brotherhood forces.
It seems that the US intelligence community has been either clueless or delusional about what is going on in Syria, sufficiently so that commentary outside the US wonders whether the US intelligence community was a some point in alliance with ISIS to topple Assad. The fog is thick there.
Given the parties in conflict include not just state-sponsored fronts but what appears to be non-state actors seeking the power of a state from which to base its operations in search of the caliphate. It is now the idea of the caliphate that is the political elephant in the room that has to be dealt with and cannot be finessed. You can oppress the current organizations promoting it, but the idea and its adherents will be out there awaiting the next opportunity. T. E. Lawrence and Zbigniew Brezinszki have created a monster. Not to mention whoever it was who framed the Iraq war as sectarian.
There are Syrian, Iraqi, and more generally Muslim communities in the US who are opposing immigration because of the concerns about sectarian disruption that you describe. Sufficient enough to be reported in the news.
These situations are definitely our problems. We caused or manipulated them into this chaos. The situation that we have not understood is that the US, especially the US military, does not have the solution and cannot provide the solution to the problem we created acting as the dominant agent. President Obama has the pieces in place so far (I think). He is in good relationships with Erdogan, Salman, Rouhani, Sisi, the heads of state of the Gulf States, Abadi (and Kurdish Talabani). Odd men out are Netanyahu and Assad, but rapprochement with Putin could bring Assad into political discussions. Netanyahu is hopelessly tied to the GOP plan to bring down Obama.
Because the political solution need not be negotiated publicly in a “conference”, I hope that the routine diplomacy of Obama and Kerry are working toward that agreement on approach.
Creating refugees seems to be a new wrinkle in the non-state actors strategy to destabilize the West. Once again, they have read our hot buttons in a way that causes us to hurt ourselves.
Of course, Erdogan’s betrayal of the Kurds created the environment in which this could happen. That piece of the political puzzle has to be solved as part of the overall political solution. His action disrupted the Kurdish offensive on Raqqah.
One wonders whether there could be a religious-political reconciliation that dampens the sectarianism. Khamanei and Sistani having a common understanding would be a beginning. The Sunni side seems more fragmented and complicated even confining to the Salafists, which reportedly are less deferential to notions of religious authority.
Boo, that’s one million becoming refugees this year alone, on top of what’s already happened: 7.6 million displaced persons inside Syria, and 3.9 million in Turkey/Lebanon/Jordan/Iraq (yes, poor broken Iraq has taken in 234,000), and perhaps as much as a million in the rest of the world put together, or probably more than 12 million refugees all told, more than half of the country’s prewar population. It’s really one of the worst things that’s ever happened in human history.
You’re right about Biden understanding this better than Clinton or Sanders, to say nothing of all the jerkoffs in the other party, and it’s clear that there’s no military action that can really solve anything. But massive, massive, bigger-than-Germany actions to share the care of these human beings can not only alleviate suffering but do something to end the crisis (Assad and Isis and al-Nusra are fighting over population control, not the useless land), peacefully, now.
Not sure what this sentence in the original post is referring to with the term ‘neutrality’.
“In fact, only Biden knows and agrees with the president’s thinking and is likely to continue the policy of neutrality in the conflict.
re: sectarian divisions
Is a Biden candidacy still on the table?
Was it ever on the table?
In clearing the 2016 presidential election chessboard, would team Clinton not have removed of all the pieces except for the queen and a pawn (to leave the appearance that it would be an election and not a selection)?
Having appropriated a significant portion of Obama’s big money donors and top campaign operatives plus the carry forward of her own from 2008, there’s not a whole lot left that Biden could tap. Then again not many are needed to quickly stuff the coffers of a Super PAC, and if the FEC doesn’t shut down the use of Super PAC funds for regular campaigning the way Fiorina is doing, this is likely to quickly catch on and give Joe a chance to jump in with a huge splash.