.
"The refugee problem can’t be solved at Europe’s borders; it only can
be solved before it happens, by stabilizing the situation on the ground.
But that would mean containing Iran’s ambitions and crushing the Sunni
jihadists at the same time."
9/7/15, "The price of Europe’s fecklessness," David P. Goldman, Asia Times
"In Luis Bunuel’s eponymous 1961 film, the young postulant Viridiana
leaves her convent to claim her uncle’s rural estate, and creates a
refuge for local beggars. They ransack her house in a bachannalia staged
to lampoon the Last Supper, and a couple of them rape her. The classic
film should be mandatory viewing for European officials caught up in
refugee euphoria. This is going to end very, very badly.
The Europeans, to be sure, are a pack of cynical hypocrites. If they
had cared about Syrians, they might have sent a couple of brigades of
soldiers to fight ISIS. But not a single European will risk his neck to
prevent humanitarian catastrophe. The last time European soldiers got
close to real trouble, in Srebrenica in 1995, Dutch peacekeepers stood
aside while Bosnian Serbs massacred 8,000 Muslims.
The horror has now piled up on Europe’s doorstep, thanks evidently to
the skill of Turkish gangs who have turned the Turkey-to-Balkans
smuggling route into a superhighway. Europe said and did nothing while
the global refugee count exploded from 40 million in 2010 to 60 million
in 2014, according to the UN High Commission on Refugees, but was
shocked, shocked to find such people on its doorstep.
At this point the floodgates of European sympathy opened, and Germany
declared that it would accept 800,000 fugitives, including many from
the world’s most brutal war zones. From a security standpoint it is
foolhardy in the extreme: 250,000 people have died in Syria’s civil war
since 2011 because other people killed them, mostly with small arms or
improvised explosives (such as the government’s notorious “barrel
bombs”). Such killing is a labor-intensive affair, and requires the
participation of many thousands of killers. It isn’t only that ISIS
(and other jihadists) are able to smuggle to Europe as many of their
operatives as they care to, as ISIS itself
purportedly boasts. The refugee population itself is flush with killers
from both sides fleeing the war. The presence of small children does
not obviate this; killers have families, too.
The Arab Gulf States accept very few Syrian refugees out of security
concerns which are entirely legitimate. Thousands of Syrian migrants
fought either with the Assad regime (allied to Iran, the nemesis of the
Sunni Gulf States) or ISIS and al-Qaeda (which want to overthrow the
Saudi monarchy).
The social pathologies that this brutal and brutalized population
bring Europe will change Germany in a predictably nasty way. Even worse,
the open door policy will attract an order of magnitude more such
refugees, as the Interior Minister of the State of Bavaria, Joachim Herrmann,
warned yesterday. To no avail: Germans have spent the past seventy
years feeling badly about themselves and are determined to take this
opportunity to feel good about themselves.
The refugees have given the Germans the sort of frisson of good
feeling that one gets from adopting a stray puppy. This one redemptive
act, they seem to believe, compensates for the country’s criminal
behavior during the middle of the past century. It is one thing to take
in one stray, however, and quite another to find a pack of hungry dogs
baying at one’s door. At that point one calls the dog-catcher.
Syria’s civil war was not an isolated occurrence: it was one of many
fissures in an Islamic civilization which has ceased to function from
the Indus River to the Meditarranean. There are 60 million refugees in
the world, almost all of them within reach of Europe. Almost as many Afghan refugees have turned up on Europe’s borders as Syrians, and an increasing number of Iraqis have
joined the horde. At some point the Pakistanis and Bengladeshis will
hear about the bounty of the Europeans and join in as well.
The prospective size of the migrant stream to Europe, including
economic migrants as well as war refugees from Africa, probably exceeds
100 million, or two orders of magnitude larger than the already very
large number that Europe has agreed to accept.
Europe will have scenes of horror on its border: barbed wire, tear
gas, rubber bullets, malnutrition and epidemic disease in tent camps
swollen by millions of desperate people. It will also have acts of
terrorism by refugees already inside its borders protesting Europe’s
future refusal to accept more.
The immediate future in the Middle East does not point towards
stability. The international recognition of Iran as a major regional
power in the P5+1 nuclear deal will persuade the Sunni states to use
whatever instruments are handy to contain Iranian power, including ISIS
and assorted al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Iran’s $150
billion windfall under the nuclear deal will allow Tehran to increase
its support for the Assad regime in Syria, for Hezbollah in Lebanon, for
the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and other Shi’ite elements that it has
cultivated as cat’s paws. The Sunnis will respond in kind. Turkey,
meanwhile, will redouble its efforts to crush the nascent Kurdish state
emerging on its border in Iraq and Syria. Europe supported the P5+1 deal
in part because it was the path of least resistance, and in part
because it hoped to make money once the Iran sanctions were lifted. It
will pay a big price for its sloth and cynicism.
The combination of sectarian and ethnic violence in a multi-player
civil war will push even more desperate people towards Europe. And that
does not taken into account the potential for instability among the 330
million people of Pakistan and Bengladesh, many of whom live under
desperate circumstances already.
The refugee problem can’t be solved at Europe’s borders; it only can
be solved before it happens, by stabilizing the situation on the ground.
But that would mean containing Iran’s ambitions and crushing the Sunni
jihadists at the same time. Blood would spill, and not all of it local.
The Europeans don’t think the Middle East is “worth the bones of a
single Pomeranian grenadier,” as Bismarck said of the Balkans. They will
pay for their fecklessness many times over." via Lucianne
Image caption: "Luis Bunuel’s lampoon of da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in “Viridiana” (1961)"
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