Since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in March 2011, thousands of refugees from the Middle East have fled into Europe via Greece. Flames of war spare no one. Women and children are especially vulnerable to victimization. (PHOTO: CFP)

Since October, the Syrian Crisis has escalated at a dazzling pace owing to Russia’s direct attack on the Islamic State (ISIS) and other anti-Assad forces. What are the root causes of the Syria quagmire, the rise of ISIS and the endemic humanitarian crisis in the Middle East? To address these issues Chinese Social Sciences Today recently interviewed Christopher Layne, a professor of international affairs at Texas A & M University, and Aviva Chomsky, a professor of history at Salem State University.

“My argument is that the regional turmoil fundamentally stems from the Bush administration’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq in March 2003,” Layne told CSST. Calling it a “pipe dream,” he said the administration’s Iraq misadventure was shaped by a neo-conservative mantra that was echoed by liberal hawks, who believed that a muscular US foreign policy and the aggressive promotion of American ideology could transform the Middle East. It was “Washington’s own hubris-drenched imperial ambitions” that ensnared the United States into a “geopolitical cul-de-sac in the region.” And any policymaker with a basic knowledge of the Vietnam debacle “should have known that American attempts to impose democracy at the point of a bayonet invariably end in failure,” he said.
 

While “President Obama rightly concluded that the United States needs to extricate itself from the two wars started by his predecessor,” his movements have been “contradictory and ambivalent” at best, he said. On one hand, Obama intended to scale back the US military role in the Middle East. He resisted calls from his critics to step up US military involvement in the Syrian civil war, promising “no boots on the ground” in Syria. He also tightly limited the US contribution to the campaign against ISIS. While on the other hand, “he has often lacked the courage of his convictions, when pressed by hard-liners in the US foreign policy establishment,” Payne said. The 2011 Libya intervention, the US’s recent return to Afghanistan and the redeployment of combat troops in Iraq are telling of his irresolution, he said.
 

Commenting on the current Middle East refugee crisis that is affecting European countries, Chomsky pinpointed that the United States “has the moral responsibility to provide for these refugees.” “Look at where the refugees are coming from; primarily from three countries—Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria,” she said. “Those three countries have one thing in common: that the United States is engaged in a vicious and brutal war against their civilians. We’ve learned this before. When you attack, bomb and destroy a country, its people are going to flee. We did it in Vietnam. We did it in Central America. Of course, the United States is not responsible for every war that has created refugees, but in this refugee crisis, we are the responsible party in all three countries.”
 

More importantly, in addition to compensating and rescuing those who were victimized by US Middle East policies, “the United States also has a moral responsibility to change the policies that are destroying people’s lives,” she said. “If we were to let other countries and their people solve their own problems instead of invading and bombing them, the world would have far fewer refugees.”

Feng Daimei is a reporter at the Chinese Social Sciences Today.