Se supo: los
refugiados, y en particular los refugiados musulmanes, no salen de un repollo.
Una humanidad atónita asiste a esta revelación que todavía no fue asimilada por
la prensa corporativa de Occidente. En fin, hay que darles tiempo. La nota que
sigue es de Ghada Chehade y salió publicada ayer en el sitio web Global
Research:
Título: The Roots
of the Refugee Situation and “Muslim Terrorist Problem”: The Geopolitical U.S.
Foreign Policy Landscape
Texto: This post
is a follow-up to my previous article on the refugee situation in the United
States. For me, this is not about Trump. The fact that I even have to say this
shows how anti-intellectual and devoid of rational dialogue our society has
become, especially among the so-called left. Accusing someone of being a “Trump
supporter” simply for being analytical is not a PC scare tactic I respond to.
It is because the
majority of so-called progressives were sleep walking in an identity politics,
feel good la la land during the foreign policy disasters of the Obama
administration—which the mainstream media was completely silent on—that the
current situation has come as such a rude awakening to so many.
But for those of
us that have a political memory longer than nine weeks, the refugee situation
can be interpreted within the context of a much broader geopolitical and
foreign policy landscape that includes several previous administrations,
including and most notably the Obama administration.
At the risk of
feeding into the false and diversionary duality of good administration/bad
administration, I wish to point out the following two things. First, in the
wake of the arrest of two Iraqis in Kentucky on terrorism charges in May 2011,
the FBI suggested that dozens of terrorists might have entered the US posing as
refugees. This led the Obama administration to reexamine the records of 58,000
Iraqis that had been settled in the US and to impose more extensive background
checks on Iraqi refugees, limiting intake for up to six months, according to
the Washington Post. I do not mention this simply to point out that previous
administrations were already scrutinizing and limiting refugees from certain
Muslim countries—that is just a side note and something that has already been
noted by others.
The larger point
I wish to make—and this is the second point—is that US officials and agencies
are likely aware that US misadventures aboard, which includes arming and
supporting terrorist groups, could come back to affect them at home (blowback).
This is probably why the Obama administration restricted Iraqi refugees in 2011
and why the current administration has temporarily banned all refugees (for 120
days) and is calling for “extreme vetting” in the future.
If there is a
“Muslim terrorist problem” it is reasonable to say that the US is largely
contributing to, if not creating, it. Following a recent four-day fact finding
mission to Syria, U.S. congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard told the US media that the
United States is arming and supporting terrorists in the country and urged for
it to stop. Speaking to CNN, Rep. Gabbard said:
“We must stop
directly and indirectly supporting terrorists—directly by providing weapons,
training and logistical support to rebel groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and
ISIS; and indirectly through Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Turkey, who, in
turn, support these terrorist groups…. From Iraq to Libya and now in Syria, the
U.S. has waged wars of regime change, each resulting in unimaginable suffering,
devastating loss of life, and the strengthening of groups like al-Qaeda and
ISIS.”[1]
All this from a
state that claims to be fighting a ‘global war on terrorism.’ Interesting.
Connecting the
Dots/Seeing the Bigger Picture
To understand
what is happening today we should be cognizant and critical of the decades-long
imperial agenda in the Middle East and how that has shaped, for better or
worse, the present reality. In 2007 retired US general Wesley Clark stated that
the US was planning to take out seven countries in five years in that region.
Six of these seven countries (with the addition Yemen) are now the objects of
Donald Trump’s executive order on Muslim entry to the US: Iraq, Syria, Somalia,
Libya, Sudan, Iran and Yemen. [2] Most of these countries are ones in which the
US (and its NATO and Middle Eastern allies and proxies) has unleashed its
imperial agenda—through invasion, intervention, regime change, destabilization,
proxy wars and/or funding and arming of terrorists and ‘rebels.’ If US
officials are calling for stricter refugee controls on individuals from these
Muslim counties—whether it’s under the Trump administration presently or as has
happened with the Obama administration in the past—it may be largely because
they know that those countries are crawling with terrorist mercenaries that the
US has, and continues to, assist in creating. It is this issue that ought to be
at the centre of the present protest movement.
Perhaps the FBI
currently has “inside information,” as it did back in May 2011 during the Obama
administration, about terrorists from certain countries—that may or may not
have worked for the US in these countries—currently entering or trying to enter
or planning to enter the US. If so, then perhaps the new administration is
trying to undo some of the blowback created by previous administrations.
But “banning”
Muslim refugees from countries that the US meddled in, destroyed, and/or
fostered terrorism in, in the first place, is not a long-term solution. The
current executive order does not ban Muslims. It suspends all refugees for 120
days, Syrian refugees indefinitely, and restricts US-bound travel from the
aforementioned countries for 90 days. [3] It is similar to but more extensive
than the Obama administration’s restriction of Iraqi refugees in 2011. Still,
whether it is under Obama or Trump, refugee-vetting measures that do not
address the larger and far greater problem of US foreign policy in the Middle
East, miss the mark. What is needed is a drastic change of course in US Middle
East policy as well as the cessation of the western fostering of terrorism,
globally. While the Trump administration seems intent on changing course in the
areas of international trade (with the recent withdraw from the TPP), and while
Trump continues to make claims about improving US-Russia relations, his
administration’s Middle East policy intentions are not clear or fully known at
this time.
While it remains
to be seen how the current administration’s Mid East policy will play out, [4]
limiting refugees from war-torn countries is not a comprehensive solution to
the (US-facilitated) problem of terrorism. The US should be willing to address
its role in creating this problem as well as move towards ending its policy of
endless wars, imperial interventions and meddling in the region. I do not
believe that any US administration is prepared to do this, though some may be
more willing to take basic steps. To begin to solve the current crisis, the US
must acknowledge and alter the deeply flawed foreign policy trajectory that
helped to create it in the first place.
The Failure of
the Contemporary “Left”
And the people
have to be willing to both recognize it and call it out. While so-called
progressives are up in arms over the current executive order, where was this
“left” flank of the establishment during the eight years of the brutal
escalation of the imperial war and devastation machine during the previous
administration? They were supporting this agenda in the name of ‘humanitarian
intervention.’ The sad reality is that the US-imperial project has been able to
successfully exploit and/or co-opt liberal progressives’ concerns for human
rights in order to gain “left-wing” support for self-serving western
interventions and wars aboard—in Libya, Syria; places where the Arab Spring
went rogue—by presenting it as a “duty to intervene” in the name of so-called human
rights.
This co-optation
is possible because the contemporary “left” lacks a basis in anti-imperialist
politics and a broader, historical critique of Empire that properly situates
such interventions within the larger agenda and interests of militarized
neoliberal/economic imperialism, [5] which was never more robust than under the
previous administration.
Ironically, what
passes for the Left these days (i.e., identity politics-based reactionaries),
actively contributed to a problem they are now reacting to. As I have argued
elsewhere, US-led ‘humanitarian interventions’ often involve western backing of
and collusion with Islamic extremists and terrorists against secular Muslim
regimes and leaders. Supporting these so-called humanitarian interventions
ironically indirectly throws liberal social justice warriors—that back
initiatives such as western intervention and ‘regime change’ in states like
Syria—in bed with violent Muslim extremists and terrorists like ISIS, in that
they both support the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, albeit for different reasons.
The modern “Left”
is too caught up in clichés and feel good sound bites (i.e., “Assad must go”)
and also lacks the traditional-left analytical /ideological faculties to see
the irony and contradictions of their actions. [6] The naïve notion that all
power is bad everywhere lacks a critical awareness of proportionality; meaning
in politics, size absolutely matters. Not all powers/governments exist on par,
and are equally able to abuse their power on a global scale, effectively
terrorizing the rest of the planet.
If one takes all
of the above into consideration, and understands the larger regional and
geopolitical contexts, then we begin to see that the current refugee
restriction is not an indiscriminate ban generally targeting Muslims. It is a
tragic, ironic and predictable outcome of the US’ never ending war on
terror—that later morphed into the R2P (right to protect) narrative—which seems
to have ultimately and ironically created and/or inflated the phenomenon of
global terrorism. For instance, in the not too distant past, Afghanistan and
Somalia were two of the few—if not only—terrorist hotbeds that anyone may have
had to be concerned about. But since the inception of the US-led global war on
terror, and more so since the “humanitarian” interventionist policies of the
Obama administration, there seems today to be an ISIS terror cell in every
corner of the world. This includes secular Muslim countries such as Iraq, Libya
and Syria, where there was no substantial Islamist or terrorist presence prior
to western interventions.
In closing,
current and previous US refugee restrictions might reflect efforts to try and
contain a situation that has gotten completely out of hand. But the bigger
monster that should be contained is US foreign policy and imperial wars and
meddling abroad, which analysis shows to be the true root of the problem. Thus,
efforts to protest the current refugee ban and vilify its proponents would,
ironically, be totally unnecessary if as much effort had gone into protesting
US foreign policy under the previous two administrations.
And I say all of
this as a Muslim immigrant in North America that is clearly not a proponent of
banning Muslims.
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