No, the west did not cause the refugee crisis all by itself

I find a related, but more sophisticated thesis objectionable as well. It is one of western-promoted regime change being the root cause of the refugee crisis. It is not totally wrong, but it is misleading and distorted. Moreover, it doesn’t answer an important question: was too much or too little done to promote regime change? Country-by-country assessments lead to different results. 

Many people are fleeing from Afghanistan today. The ISAF troops have largely left the country to itself, and civil war is escalating. No one doubts that ISAF withdrawal has made matters worse. The international forces had a UN mandate to stabilise the country, so western action was legitimate. Sadly, the powers involved were not up to the task. It is certainly true that the US administration of George W. Bush spent too much time hunting down terrorists in the years after 2001, thus failing to invest properly in state and nation building early on. Had ISAF stayed in Afghanistan, however, the situation today would probably be better. In this sense, there was too little support for regime change, not too much.

In Iraq, the US track record is much worse. As President Obama has said, this war was a war of choice. It lacked a UN mandate, its official reason was to take control of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and, once again, the occupying forces were clueless about state and nation building. The mess made by the Bush administration could not be undone fast – and instead of accepting the long-term task, Obama pulled the troops out, compounding the problems. One lesson of Afghanistan and Iraq is certainly that withdrawing from fragile states is not an option.  

The scenario in Syria, however, is completely different. This country’s civil war started in the Arab spring in 2011. When Syrian people began to express their opposition to the regime, the dictator’s security forces cracked down on them, and violence escalated. This crisis was not triggered by western interests. On the contrary, western governments were shocked by the Arab spring and did not know how to respond. They actually shied away from supporting the rebels in other than indirect ways. The unrest eventually turned into a proxy war of Sunni versus Shia Islam, with Turkey and Saudi Arabia becoming more involved than the US or the EU.

Syria’s drama further spun out of control with the emergence of the fundamentalist ISIS militia which managed to conquer parts of Syria and Iraq. The US, Britain and France started air raids against ISIS, and Russia claims its air force is attacking ISIS too. Syrian and western sources, however, report that Russian bombs are killing civilians and moderate rebels. Russian President Vladimir Putin leaves no doubt about wanting to keep Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, a brutal dictator, in office. Assad, so far, has made more people flee from their homes than ISIS has. It is bizarre to argue that western-promoted regime change is the root cause of the Syrian crisis.

In Libya, the picture is different yet again. As Assad is still trying to do in Syria, dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi wanted to drown the Arab spring uprising in blood. His threats were so real and so credible that the UN Security Council passed a mandate to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya. The goal was to prevent the regime from using its aircraft. Russia and China did not veto this mandate, and that was a tacit acknowledgement that a humanitarian intervention was warranted.

The Libyan crisis was definitely not something western governments had planned for in any way. Actually, EU top leaders had only weeks before they attended a huge Africa-Europe summit hosted by Gaddafi in Tripolis. Among other things, they hoped that he would shelter Europe from sub-Saharan refugees. However, mission creep turned their no-fly zone intervention into military support for rebel forces. The rebels soon toppled the regime, and when they next turned on one another, western governments proved clueless.

Making matters worse, no one took proper control of Gaddafi’s weaponry. Military stocks were raided, and some of those arms are now being used in sub-Saharan crisis areas. There are many reasons to flee from sub-Saharan countries. Poverty, climate change, population growth, changing patterns of land use, identity politics and other matters are relevant. Local violence does not always escalate into fullblown civil war. In some countries, western influence is relatively strong, in others, like Eritrea, it is negligible. Eritrea is a dictatorship from which masses are fleeing. 

It is telling, moreover, that Putin likes the narrative of regime-change promotion causing turmoil. It serves his interests. In retrospect, we know that opting for Gaddafi to avoid bloodshed would have meant massive bloodshed. We also know that not intervening in Syria early did not prevent bloodshed either.

Putin is now propping up a Syrian dictator who is unacceptable to the vast majority of his people. His philosophy is that authoritarian rule is better than anarchy. The problem with this stance is that authoritarian rule is actually quite fragile, as the Arab spring proved, because people’s consent matters.

A side effect of Russian military action is that more Syrians will flee. From Putin’s perspective that is probably fine since it means more problems for the EU, a regional organisation he resents. In this case, it would be accurate to say that support for the dictator is the cause of flight. If masses were fleeing to Russia, Putin’s stance might be quite different.