There are countries that generate refugees through massive violence, like the United States, secondarily Britain and France. Then there are countries that admit huge numbers of refugees, including those fleeing from Western violence, like Lebanon (easily the champion, per capita), Jordan, and Syria before it imploded, among others in the region. And partially overlapping, there are countries that both generate refugees and refuse to take them in, not only from the Middle East but also from the U.S. “backyard” south of the border. A strange picture, painful to contemplate.
An honest picture would trace the generation of refugees much further back into history. Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reports that one of the first videos produced by ISIS “showed a bulldozer pushing down a rampart of sand that had marked the border between Iraq and Syria. As the machine destroyed the dirt revetment, the camera panned down to a handwritten poster lying in the sand. ‘End of Sykes-Picot,’ it said.”
For the people of the region, the Sykes-Picot agreement is the very symbol of the cynicism and brutality of Western imperialism. Conspiring in secret during World War I, Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot carved up the region into artificial states to satisfy their own imperial goals, with utter disdain for the interests of the people living there and in violation of the wartime promises issued to induce Arabs to join the Allied war effort. The agreement mirrored the practices of the European states that devastated Africa in a similar manner. It “transformed what had been relatively quiet provinces of the Ottoman Empire into some of the least stable and most internationally explosive states in the world.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/noam-chomsky-how-imperial-violence-backfires-lessons-from-the-middle-east.html
HOW THE WEST IS RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THE PROBLEMS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
This is part of the “blowback” that Stephen Kinzer sketched and predicted in a 2012 article in the Boston Globe. He noted that the West was responsible for spreading Jihadists throughout Mali and the rest of North Africa, through to Somalia. “It is the direct result of an episode that may at first seem unrelated: the US-led intervention in Libya last year. Rarely in recent times has there been a more vivid example of how such interventions can produce devastating unexpected results.” He sees it as part of the larger pattern; “building a jihadist army in Afghanistan, the United States helped create a transnational terrorist force that has plunged an entire region into war. The invasion and occupation of Iraq set off a shattering civil conflict. Now Mali can be added to the list of countries that have been pushed into instability by American-led military action.” As the Telegraph concludes about the recent havoc in Libya, it was “created by the West” because the West “abandoned” Libya. Ironically the same West that toppled Qadaffi also collaborated with him and caused the current mess.
https://sethfrantzman.com/2014/09/05/how-the-west-is-responsible-for-all-the-problems-in-the-middle-east/
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