The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Is this how West ends, with colonizers being colonized?

- Pat Buchanan He writes for Creators Syndicate.

“Fortress Europe is an illusion.”

So declares the Financial Times in its editorial: “Europe Cannot Ignore Syrian Migrant Crisis.”

The FT undertakes to instruct the Old Continent on what its duty is and what its future holds.

Can Europe not repel this unwanted home invasion from the Global South?

It is “delusional” to think so, says the FT. Europe must be realistic and set about “providing legal routes for migrants and asylum seekers.”

What occasioned the editorial was Greece’s rough resistance to Turkish President Erdogan’s funneling of thousands of Syrian refugees, who had fled into

Turkey, right up to the border with Greece.

Erdogan is threatenin­g to inundate southeaste­rn Europe with Syrian refugees to extract more money from the EU in return for keeping the 3.5 million Syrians already in Turkey away from EU frontiers.

Another Erdogan objective is to coerce Europe into backing his military interventi­on in Syria to prevent President Bashar Assad from capturing all of Idlib province and emerging victorious in his civil war.

When the Arab Spring erupted and protesters arose to oust Assad, the U.S., Turkey and the Gulf Arabs aided and equipped Syrian rebels willing to take up arms. The “good rebels,” however, were routed and elements of al-Qaida soon assumed dominance of the resistance.

Facing defeat, Syria’s president put out a call to his allies — Russia, Iran, Hezbollah — to save his regime. They responded, and Assad, over four years, recaptured all of Syria west of the Euphrates, save Idlib.

The 21st-century interventi­ons and wars of the West in the Islamic world have not gone well.

George W. Bush was goaded into invading Iraq. Barack Obama was persuaded to overthrow Colonel Moammar Gadhafi in Libya and the Assad regime in Damascus. Obama ordered U.S. forces to assist Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in his war to crush Houthi rebels.

And what has the West reaped from our Mideast wars?

In Syria and Yemen, we have helped to create two of the world’s greatest human rights disasters. In Libya, we have a new civil war. In Iraq, we now battle Iran for influence inside a nation we “liberated” in 2003.

In Afghanista­n, we have concluded a deal with our enemy of two decades, the Taliban, that will enable us to pull our 12,000 troops out of the country in 14 months. America is washing its hands of its longest war.

In five wars over 20 years, we lost 7,000 soldiers with some 40,000 wounded. We plunged the wealth of an empire into these wars.

And what did these wars produce for the peoples we went to aid and uplift, besides hundreds of thousands of dead Afghans and Arabs and millions of people uprooted and driven into exile?

Now, Europe is being admonished by the FT that, having done its duty by plunging into the Mideast, the continent has a new moral duty to take in the refugees the wars created, for decades to come.

But if the EU opens its doors to an endless stream of Africans and Arabs, where is the evidence European nations will accept and assimilate them?

The colonizers of yesterday are becoming the colonized of tomorrow. Is this how the West ends?

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