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| George W.Bush "the mission is over" - who was he kidding? |
On September 18, 2015 Andrew Bacevich wrote in Politico something which
not only the US Government, but also its European NATO partners have
never openly admitted.
"As migrants have poured into Europe, Americans must bear the blame".
"if you break it you own it.” Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn Rule, warning George W. Bush of the consequences of invading Iraq.
Bush broke it — “it” being a swath of the greater Middle East. But the
U.S. and their European NATO partners, the so-called "coalition of the
willing" adamantly refused to accept anything like ownership of the
consequences stemming from Bush’s recklessly misguided act.
Not least among those consequences is the crisis that finds refugees
fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the Islamic world in
search of asylum in the West. The European nations most directly
affected have greeted this wave with more hostility than hospitality —
Germany, for a time, at least offering a notable exception.
For its part, the U.S. has responded with pronounced indifference and
silence. In a gesture of undisguised tokenism, the Obama administration
announced it would admit a grand total of 10,000 Syrians —
one-eightieth the number that Germany has agreed to accept in one year
alone. Obviously the situation is now even more grim for refugees
wanting to come to America, with Trump's "Make America Great Again"
anti-immigration policies.
No doubt proximity plays a part in explaining the contrast between
German and U.S. attitudes. Viewed from Wichita or Walla Walla, the
plight of those who hand themselves over to human traffickers in hopes
of crossing the Mediterranean plays out at a great distance.
Syria is what Neville Chamberlain would have described as a faraway
country of which Americans know nothing (and care less). And Iraq and
Afghanistan are faraway countries that most Americans have come to
regret knowing.
However, To attribute the European refugee crisis to any single cause
would also be misleading. A laundry list has contributed: historical
and sectarian divisions within the region; the legacy of European
colonialism; the absence of anything even approximating enlightened
local leadership able to satisfy the aspirations of people tired of
corruption, economic stagnation, and authoritarian rule; the appeal —
inexplicable to Westerners — of violent Islamic radicalism. All play a
role.
Such attitudes may be understandable. They are also unconscionable.
Yet when it comes to why this fragile structure collapsed just now we
can point to a single explanation — the cascading after-effects of a
decision made by Bush during the spring of 2002 to embrace a doctrine of
preventative war.
The previous autumn, U.S. forces toppled the government of Afghanistan,
punishing the Taliban for giving sanctuary to those who plotted the
9/11 attacks. Bush effectively abandoned Afghanistan to its fate and
set out to topple another regime, one that had no involvement
whatsoever in 9/11.
For Bush, going after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq formed part of a larger
strategy. He and his lieutenants fancied that destroying the old order
in the greater Middle East would position the U.S. to create a more
amenable new order. Back in 1991, after a previous Iraq encounter,
Bush’s father had glimpsed a “new world order.” Now a decade later, the
son set out to transform the father’s vision into reality.
The administration called this its Freedom Agenda, which would begin in
Iraq but find further application throughout the greater Middle East.
Coercion rather than persuasion held the key to its implementation, its
plausibility resting on unstoppable military power. For Bush’s inner
circle, including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and
Paul Wolfowitz (but not Powell), victory was foreordained.
They miscalculated. The unsettled (but largely ignored) condition of
Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban already hinted at the extent
of that miscalculation. The chaos that descended upon Iraq as a direct
result of the U.S. invasion affirmed it. The Freedom Agenda made it as
far as Baghdad and there it died.
That Saddam was a brutal tyrant is a given. We need not mourn his
departure. Yet while he ruled he at least kept a lid on things. Bush
blew off that lid, naively expecting liberal democracy or at least
deference to American authority to emerge. Instead, “liberating” Iraq
produced conditions conducive to the violent radicalism today
threatening to envelop the region.
So rather than cluck over the reluctance of Greeks, Serbs, Hungarians
and others to open their borders to those fleeing from the mess the
U.S. played such a large part in creating, Americans would do better to
engage in acts of contrition.
The US, even under the leadership of Donald Trump, should at least
understand that it is never too late to say they are sorry for creating
this total mess in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which saddled the EU
and Turkey up with millions of refugees, and indirectly, as a result,
also created ISIS.
As to the EU, it is never too late to recognize, they finally must
get off the lap of Uncle Sam, develop their own independent foreign
policy, and stop being part of disastrous US military adventures.
EU-Digest
