The entire world has been stunned by the refugee crisis unfolding in Europe, the worst since World War II, and particularly horrified by the discovery in an abandoned truck of 71 dead refugees who were believed to be Syrians trying to escape to Germany. But few have had the courage to point the finger at the one man responsible for this humanitarian debacle, President Obama.
What we are watching is more than a human tragedy. It is the direct consequence of the Obama administration's disastrous Middle East policy, which has destabilized and destroyed Libya, Syria, Iraq and very soon Afghanistan. The important lesson for everyone, including European leaders who once welcomed Obama as their partner, is that when the U.S. decides to retreat from its responsibilities, chaos ensues — and the innocent pay the price.
Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan — in each case Obama carried out the promise he made when elected president, that the United States would no longer act unilaterally as it did in the Bush years; no longer intervene militarily by putting "boots on the ground;" and certainly not pursue regime change, even in the case of the most vicious dictatorships, without consultation and cooperation with our European allies.
Now those allies are learning firsthand the results of the U.S. "leading from behind," starting in Libya.
From the start, the U.S. had no vital interest in toppling Libya's dictator Moammar Gadhafi, with whom we had achieved a cooperative, if not exactly friendly, relationship, particular in the war on terror. Obama, however, allowed himself to be drawn into the conflict by our European "partners" France and Britain. Yet once the Gadhafi regime was toppled and the dictator himself brutally murdered on camera, Obama and Secretary of State Clinton refused to take any responsibility for stabilizing the aftermath.
There were to be no U.S. boots on the ground; no comprehensive security and stability operation in cooperation with those same allies who got us involved in the first place. The Obama administration's attitude was, let the Libyans sort it out themselves; in the meantime, let chaos reign. And so we did, as the ensuing civil war cost us the lives of our ambassador and three Americans. Now it's costing the lives of those trying to flee across the sea to Italy, to escape the terrorist monsters we let slip into the vacuum in Libya: First al Qaeda and now the Islamic State.
In Syria, Obama's fecklessness was even more blatant. After calling for Bashar Assad's overthrow and publicly drawing "red lines" over chemical weapons only to let them vanish in the sand, the administration's passivity unleashed the devils who have shattered that country and who, again, have turned the country into a staging ground for the Islamic State and a YouTube arena for its serial atrocities. Some 4.5 million Syrians have now fled their country (one in five people living in next-door Lebanon is a refugee). Today they are flooding the Greek island of Lesbos by the tens of thousands, most with nothing but the clothes on their backs — men, women and children fleeing the horror Obama set in motion in Syria.
On Lesbos they've been joined by thousands fleeing similar horrors in Iraq, after Obama's disastrous decision in 2010 not to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government and to pull out all remaining U.S. troops. That left the country open to a renewal of sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiites that George Bush's victory in 2008 had stopped, which in turned opened the door for the Islamic State — the same terrorist group that just last January Obama dismissed as junior varsity, just as he has refused to use the full weight of U.S. military force to stem its murderous tide.
Obama's plans for Afghanistan include the same thing: A precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops that will abandon Afghans to the return of the Taliban. His administration claims these will be a "moderate" Taliban, not the brutal Dark Age murderers George W. Bush toppled in 2001. The people of Afghanistan know better, and so they have become a growing part of the refugee crisis on Lesbos — more than 12 percent of the refugees who are arriving at the rate of 4,000 a day. They realize, as the media and Washington doesn't seem to, that Obama has doomed their country to more or less permanent instability and bloodshed.
Unfortunately, they will have plenty of company. The picture of a Turkish soldier carrying the dead body of small child drowned trying to escape from Syria, has appeared on the front page of newspapers around the world. What Americans must acknowledge is that that child isn't the first innocent victim crushed by Obama's foreign policy blunders in the Middle East. It certainly won't be the last.