So now there is no money left for the Syrian refugees created by the civil war fomented and fanned for years on end by Western governments. (Who, bizarrely, then prosecute any of their citizens who go off to fight in the war their governments promote as a noble and worthy cause.) For want of $64 million — the amount of money the US spends in an eyeblink on its drone campaigns and death squads, the kind of money that’s just chump change for, say, oligarchs who prowl the world destabilizing governments and monetizing misery for their own pockets — the UN says it must halt a vital support program for Syrian refugees.
What is happening in Syria is sickening and surreal. Almost all of the public discourse surrounding this vast and vile slaughterhouse has been completely divorced from reality. The critical work of As’ad AbuKhalil, the “Angry Arab,” has been one of the very few places where one can thread the labyrinth of bullshit that all sides in this shameful conflict spew forth.
Today, AbuKhalil points us to this pertinent piece by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian:
Western governments are tiring of Muslim wars. They are also tiring of their victims. The UN is reported to have run out of money to relieve the refugee tide now spreading across the Middle East. Some 4 million people are living in camps reliant on the UN’s World Food Programme, not to mention other camps caused by wars in Sudan, Somalia and the Central African Republic. A million Syrians have fled to Lebanon and a million to Jordan, creating new desert cities of indolence and disease.
Now the cash vouchers that supply liquidity to the camps and sustain food supplies are to end. Some £500m has been pumped into the Jordanian camps by the UN alone and money has run out. Food rations are to be cut and host governments, facing an apparently ceaseless human migration, are starting to close their borders. The means by which the world relieves such suffering are seizing up. …
The US, Britain and Nato played a major part in disrupting the region, indulging in “wars of choice” in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. For a decade they toppled regimes and either fought or backed insurgents with bombs and troops. Peace they did not bring.
There was always money for military action. America spent $3tn fighting in Iraq. Britain spent £40bn on Afghanistan alone, under the obscene rubric of “humanitarian intervention”. David Cameron yearned to go to war in Syria. Yet Britain’s eagerness for war contrasts with an aversion to the consequences, whether frantic young Afghans in Calais camps, Libyans adrift in the Mediterranean or Iraqi translators desperate for asylum.
What is happening across the “Arc of Conflict” that now takes in the Middle East, the Horn of African and North Africa (and penetrating ever deeper into the African continent) is almost beyond description. It is a madhouse engineered by the most “advanced,” “sophisticated” and “enlightened” “democratic” governments in the world. They have gone into country after country and reduced them to howling chaos — Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Libya (and the countries now groaning from the knock-on effects from these inhumane interventions, such as Mali, Nigeria and Kenya). They do it for profit. They do it for the political and personal (and who knows, the psychosexual) aggrandizement of the pathetic wounded souls who spend their days climbing the blood-greased pole of power. (And who are then cheered and served by the even more pathetic lickspittles in our national media and political circles.) None of it — not a single bit of it — is related in the slightest way to the peace, prosperity or “national security” of the people they purport to represent.
We live in a time when the entire system of government in the “enlightened” West is based on lies. Not just the usual hypocrisies and the all-too-human falling short of a nation’s professed ideals, but on knowing, deliberate, cold-blooded lies. There is no way that Barack Obama or David Cameron actually believe their policies are helping their own people or the people they are “liberating” or “aiding” in their murderous campaigns, or that they are advancing the ideals of freedom and humanitarianism. While they may be moral cretins, they are too intelligent, too educated, too aware to fool themselves on these points. They know they are serving a monstrous system of elite domination, a system that doesn’t give one good goddamn how many refugees it creates, or how many of these non-entities wither and die because of their policies. And our leaders serve this system gladly, eagerly; “man, they did make love to this employment.”
So let the refugees die. Who cares? The main thing is that the war goes on — in Syria, in Iraq, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, where the hell ever. Who cares? None of these nations matter. None of these people matter. Nor do the “folks at home.” Barack Obama and David Cameron — and all of their wanna-be successors — know that their policies are simply creating more terrorists, more extremism, more violence, more repression.
They know this, all of them, across the whole “Anglosphere” political class. They know it. But they do not care. So let us return this disregard to them. Let us not care what happens to them. Let us not fret about, OMG, which “team” of murderers and moral idiots is gonna win at the next election? We already know who will win: the profiteers of death and domination.