Lux Lucet

Syrian refugees

The uproar surrounding how to deal with the waves of Syrian refugees surging through Europe and the US reached a new high this past week, with several governors and Republican presidential candidates pushing back on President Obama’s refugee resettlement plan. While opinions on how to handle this situation run hot, what generally is not well understood is what caused the crisis in the first place. It is well worth asking, why is it that so many people just now have decided to flee an ancient nation dating back to the time of the Old Testament?

Regime Change Blowback

Since the end of WWII, the US federal government has engaged in what amounts to a high-stakes, global game of thrones, overthrowing regimes its views as hostile to perceived US interests and installing compliant puppet rulers who will go along with the State Department/CIA program. In short, the US has acted less like a republic and more like a global empire, which indeed it has become. And, as was the case with its imperial predecessors, imperial Washington sees nothing wrong with this high-handed policy. It’s just business as usual.

Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria

The situation in Syria is just one of the more recent examples of this long-standing policy. Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, the US has supported the Free Syrian Army, a rebel group attempting to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. According to an article the New York Times, “Under the administration’s division of labor, the State Department is in charge of supplying nonlethal aid, while the C.I.A. runs a covert program to arm and train the Syrian rebels.”

Why, you may ask, are the State Department and CIA working to oust Assad? That’s a good question. But it’s one that US officials are either unable or, what is more likely, unwilling to clearly articulate. Apart from making vague accusations that the Syrian government has engaged in human rights abuses, there has been little attempt on the part of Obama or other supports of regime change in Syria to explain to the American people just why it is that US blood and treasure should be spent overthrowing Assad. One suspects they have their reasons but apparently don’t think issues of such importance should be discussed with, and reviewed by, the American people. We can’t handle the truth. Their attitude towards the voters, it would seem, is just as imperious as it is toward foreign rulers that refuse to do their bidding.

ISIS fighters with captured Humvee.

One result of the Syrian civil war is a flood of refugees fleeing the country. This is an example of what the CIA calls blowback, the unintended negative consequences that come as a result of foreign policy interventions. One might think that politicians would wise up and see this, but that rarely seems to happen. For example, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, “We need to bring our allies together and revise rules of engagement to make sure that what we’re doing is taking on ISIS in a significant, direct way that will be effective.” In other words, we need to double down on the intervention, the very thing that caused the problem in the first place. In truth, were it not for constant US meddling in the Middle East, it is entirely possible that the Islamic State (ISIS) would not exist. ISIS, you see, is a breakaway group from the Free Syrian Army, the same people the US has backed against Assad. What is more, according to one analyst ISIS is the beneficiary of, “approximately three divisions of worth of [US military] equipment,” left behind when the US equipped Iraqi army turned tail and ran at the sight of ISIS fighters.

An additional irony of US involvement in the Syrian civil war is that, even while American officials condemn the group’s terrorism, the US and ISIS both have the same goal in Syria, the ouster of Assad. Although the motives of the US remain shrouded in mystery, ISIS’ motivation is simple, they want to replace the secular Assad with an Islamist government. How ironic it is that after fourteen years of spouting global war on terror rhetoric, the strategy put forth by the State Department and CIA finds the US working to accomplish the same goal as the medieval terrorist thugs of ISIS.

US policy in the Middle East has brought about a disaster. Over the past several decades, America has spent probably multiple trillions of dollars on war and foreign aid in the region, and what do we have to show for our efforts? Nations left in smoldering ruins, hundreds of thousands dead, many of them civilian victims of drone strikes or other forms of “collateral damage,” millions displaced from homes and livelihoods resulting in the current refugee crisis, ongoing wars in Syria and Yeman, a tottering government in Saudi Arabia, the threat a further US involvement in Libya, and the beginnings of a new intifada in Israel. Oh, and lest I forget, since Russia now is actively involved in backing Assad in Syria, the civil war there has morphed into a proxy war between Washington and Moscow and has the distinct possibility of becoming much more serious. Just think, we could end up in WWIII over a conflict about who should be president of Syria.

A New Approach to Foreign Policy Needed

Rather than calling for more military intervention in the Middle East, American officials would do well to ask themselves why they so often find themselves calling for new interventions to fix problems created by prior ones.

John Quincy Adams, 6th president of the United States, 1825-1829.

The historic foreign policy of the United States is one of strategic independence. In the opinion of the founding fathers of America, it was the job of federal government to ensure the freedom of the American people, not that of the world. Incidentally, non-intervention is the foreign policy approved by the Bible. The God-given Law of Moses served as Israel’s constitution. And that constitution called the nation to worship God as instructed and to mind their own business, not pursue empire.

In foreign policy, the role of government in ancient Israel was not to make the world, or even the Middle East, safe for theocracy. The nation was simply to occupy the land that God had given them (John W. Robbins, The Sine Qua Non of Enduring Freedom).

The principles of limited government as expressed in the Bible and codified in the Constitution of the United States apply just as much to foreign policy as they do to domestic policy. Many American conservatives, and in particular American Christian conservatives, believe in limited government at home while advocating militarist interventionism abroad. The two don’t mix. The consistent constitutional and Biblical position is to advocate for liberty at home and non-intervention in the affairs of foreign nations abroad. John Quincy Adams articulated the Christian position on foreign policy with his famous statement, “[America] does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

It is common for advocates of empire to smear those who advocate for a Biblical foreign policy of peace, friendship and trade with other nations as “isolationists.” To them, this is the ultimate insult. Yet it is more a caricature of non-interventionism than any sort of serious attempt to understand it. Non-interventionists do not insist, as some neoconservatives do, of not talking to foreign governments with which they disagree. For example, at a Republican presidential debate Carly Fiorina responded to a question about the situation in the Middle East by stating, “Having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t talk to him at all. We’ve talked way too much to him. What I would do immediately, I would begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would also conduct military exercises in the Baltic states, I’d probably send a few thousand more troops o Germany.” Good grief! Even at the height of the cold war with thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at each other, the leaders of the US and Soviet Union still talked, but Carly Fiorna says she won’t speak to Putin over Syria. Who, one might ask, is the real isolationist. Those who believe in diplomacy, or those like Fiorina who would rather go to war than deign to talk to one of the world’s most powerful heads of state?

Had Americans listened to Adams rather than to the neoconservative interventionists that have shaped our foreign policy in recent years, the US would not find itself in the absurd position of conducting a global war on terror by fighting alongside ISIS, perhaps the most brutal group of terrorists in recent history. We would not be one stray bomb or missile away from going to war with a nuclear armed Russia over Syria. European and American citizens would not be faced with the prospect of being inundated with a flood of refugees, some of whom may not mean well, and then, to top it all off, of finding themselves forced to pay for the privilege. Any discussion of what to do with the refugees must include a reassessment of the policy of foreign intervention that created the problem in the first place. To do otherwise is to treat the symptom rather than the disease and to ensure more, and possibly even bigger, such crises in the future.