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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

> I’d like to point out that the open door policy to refugees came because Europe was trying to escape the demographic trap and the collapse of the social safety net.

Also, the US was bombing a couple of Middle Eastern countries then: creating the said refugees who could reach Europe on foot and/or boat, but not the American mainland .

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It’s true, but as cold hearted as it is, they didn’t have to let them in. Poland sure decided to pick and choose. The Greeks are not having it either.

One day there will be a massive wave of climate refugees rushing out of the uninhabitable zone and there will be US soldiers in the border guard towers with flamethrowers. The US will welcome immigrants when it suits them and roast them when it doesn’t.

As I am in Berlin right now I’ll remind us it wouldn’t be the first time people on top of a wall had kill on sight orders.

> One day there will be a massive wave of climate refugees rushing out of the uninhabitable zone

Are you talking about Canada?

Sorry to break it to you, but by the end of the century Canada will be the bread basket of America. Go quietly and pretend like it was your idea and you may even get statehood.

Are you saying canada will be uninhabitable, or people will be going to canada?

This is just plain wrong. The millions of refugees came from Syria. The US was hardly bombing Syria at all, it just bombed Libya. Actually it was mostly EU countries, in particular France, that pushed for fighting the Assad regime at the time. The Obama government didn't even want to be involved at first.

I think you got things backwards. France wanted to bomb libya (as well as the UK) whils the US was a reluctant partner.

The US went for Syria/Assad leading the intervention and whilst France picked up it's involvement against ISIL & the like particularly after the Paris attacks it wasn't as big on it as Libya.

France was also eager to bomb Libya, that's true. But the US really didn't want to intervene in Syria at first.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-united-states-has...

> The US was hardly bombing Syria at all, it just bombed Libya.

I was mostly thinking of Syria and Daesh, and had forgotten about Libya. A non-insignificant chunk of refugees headed to Europe transit through Libya - which didn't use to be the case before Gaddafi was deposed.

Relevant:

https://www.businessinsider.com/qaddafi-warns-france-if-i-go...

No, the US was not causing massive Syrian refugee flows to Europe by bombing Syria.

Which countries? I imagine they were already churning out refugees. Syria, for example.

US intervention turned Syria from a relatively quick civil war (to be won by Assad and his Russian pals) to a conflict of interminable duration. Elements of the fight against Assad were connected to groups arising from the chaos in Iraq, in the wake of the US invasion (remember ISIS?) complicating matters and surely leading to even more suffering for non-combatants. IIRC the bulk of the refugee waves came after the initial clashes, when US aid and air cover let the resistance dig in for the long-term rather than getting quickly crushed by government forces and their allies. Somewhat later, the ISIS mess made it all even worse.

Whether all this was in some sense worth it for mysterious realpolitik greater-good reasons—I dunno. Looks pretty bad on its own, anyway. Not enough help to win—but just enough to keep the fight going forever. Doesn't make much sense to me unless the point was to accomplish exactly that (to disrupt Russian and/or Iranian interests in the area without pushing too hard? To keep Syria too distracted to mess with Israel? Destabilize Syria so it can't interfere with Iraq's fledgeling state? I have no idea what the real motivation is or was, but it sure as hell doesn't seem to have been "help the Syrian people"—if it was, we've screwed that up pretty badly)

US didn't want to be involved in the Syrian conflict at all in the beginning. It were its European allies, in particular France, that were pushing to intervene and fight the Assad regime.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-united-states-has...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-un-idUKBRE87...

Interesting, thanks for the context.

[EDIT] Worth noting that (and, yes, I checked Wikipedia because I don't trust my mental timeline on this) US aid dates back to 2011, before even that 2012 article about Euro allies agitating for intervention, but overt direct action (air strikes) by the US didn't start until 2014. Probably one of those things that only the youngest of us will ever get anything resembling a full, clear story on, given some of the early intervention ('12 and '13) beyond non-lethal aid was evidently by the CIA (unsurprisingly) and carried a price tag (I gather over ~4-5 years, to be fair) of perhaps a billion dollars. Maybe in my twilight years I'll get to read an account of this whole thing that makes any amount of sense. I'm really hoping it's not just one of those "yeah, we fucked up and couldn't admit it so we kept fucking up for quite a while longer, on the taxpayer dime and at the cost of immense human suffering" things we do sometimes. But at least it looks like, if it was a mistake, the UK and France were making the mistake with us. Which is... something, I suppose.

[EDIT EDIT] Looks like Jordan and Israel played a key role in tipping the scales for getting Obama to agree to that early CIA op, and the Saudis were also participants once it got going. Sigh. The usual players, for US intervention in that region, I suppose. Israel and the Saudis make sense, but I'm not well-read on Jordanian foreign relations. I'd suppose they're just broadly Saudi-aligned, and I know they're relatively friendly with the Israelis.

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