Germany's gamble was that it could take away from the larger empires, while their allies were hoping to regain some of the glory of the past. When the war ended empires were left dead in the history books and the great powers were sullied by deceit and betrayal. The Austro-Hungarian empire was dissolved and the Ottoman Empire devoured. Germany was defeated, but so was Russia, one from without and the other from within.
The Middle East, was betrayed. Promises of autonomy were ignored and they were cut up and added to the two greatest empires. Cut up, by bureaucrats who never walked the ground; tribes and peoples were divided in two, sometimes into threes and fours and the modern troubled nations of the area were first conceived, not born mind you, just conceived. Think how much bloodshed over the last century was caused by the willy-nilly arbitrary lines on a map. If they had given control to the ethnic peoples.
Five years ago before the start of the Arab Spring trouble was brewing. Crushing unemployment and no social safety net were pushing people to desperation. One man, a graduate of university, forced to sell fruit on the streets on Tunis, to get enough money to feed his family one day bought Gasoline instead of fruit and set himself on fire. That was the signal that the people had had enough. The squalor of the people set beside the wealth of the rulers, dictators and Life long Presidents. The people protested, the people rioted and the rulers blinked. The country of Tunisia fell and the leaders fled. And the oppressed people of the Islamic world sat up and took notice and took to the streets of the oppressive regimes. Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria, countries with more than a 'y' in common in their names. They were all lead by oppressive regimes, who used their military against their own people.
The problem with the Mid East is of course, oil. But not every oppressive regime in the Middle East, has oil and those that do there is a large variance between the amount they supply. Yemen and Syria have none and Libya and Egypt have only a little and the ones at have a lot had a strong grip on their people. Egypt also has one of the largest populations in the area and a few important strategic resources to e world's economy, for example, the Suez Canal. The international pressure as well as the internal pressures caused Egypt to fold to the pressure of its protesters, but in the years following its collapse has anything really changed?
Libya was different, there was armed conflict. The government army was relatively well equipped and the rebels poorly, but still the rebels gained some measure of control so much that the paltry oil reserves were threatened and the price of oil rose on world markets. The west reacted by sending in their air forces and they aided the beleaguered rebels. And after months of airstrikes and armed conflict the leadership of Libya collapsed and was overrun.
Yemen was also different. No one talked about it, there was no oil and the land is resource empty. It's people were forgotten and minor concessions were made to have democratic elections in the distant future, which has not happened yet, and likely never.
Syria was different again because the Syrian leadership saw what happened in Egypt when peaceful protests were allowed to happen. Bashar al-Assad, learned that if he was going to hold on to power he had to stop the people dead. He used soldiers and he used tanks to suppress protests. First with their presence but soon with force. It was close at the start, some of the soldiers refused to fire on the people, their people, but that was quickly solved.
There were news reports, one stated that an army unit was ordered fire upon the protesters in one town and they refused. The general in command solved this by ordering another unit to fire upon the unit that refused to shoot the unarmed protesters. The very next day, a different unit was ordered to shoot the protesters in that town because the previous day there were soldiers shot in the town. Never mind that the soldiers who were shot the previous day were shot by their own soldiers. That was in the early days of the civil war.
the civil war was characterized by poorly armed civilians fighting well armed soldiers and leaders were detached and had lavish vacations and posted inane comments on social media proving that they were completely detached from the reality of their country. The army had jets and they fired missiles at their mostly poor unarmed civilian combatants until they realized that there was. nothing that their opponents had that could touch them and began to fly helicopters to drop barrels of explosives in the neighborhoods of the rebels. The rebels did not have anything that could touch the helicopters and barrel bombs were cheaper than missiles. Most of all, barrel bombs kill civilians just as good as missiles.
The international communities were not eager to join the war, there is no oil in Syria. The mishandled Afghanistan conflict was wrapping up and the unjust war and occupation in Iraq was over. Most of all one of the security Council Members in the UN with full veto powers was Syria's ally and supplied the army with weapons. The most that western nations were able to give the rebels were small arms like handguns and light machine guns and those in limited quantities.
The refugees poured over the boarders, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and even war torn anarchy filled Iraq was seen as a safer place than Syria. Syria almost made a mistake, they fired shots on the fleeing people, bombarded the fleeing people, the attacked them inside Turkey. Turkey is a member of NATO, if the will to protect the people of Syria was present, the attack could have been treated as aggression and the conflict could have been shorter and less atrocious. But Syria realized its mistake and apologized. Besides which, Syria has no oil and people think it is a shame that people are dying, but they are just Muslims. They are not Christians, they are not white and they are not us.
Individuals migrated to Syria, because there was a need and because the cause was just. Canadians left to fight for the people just as Canadians have been doing since before the Spanish Civil War. They fought the oppressors and doctors went to treat the injured, as the government began killing wounded patients, as they were obviously rebels, children and elderly alike. Hospitals were bombed. Doctors targeted and killed.
The atrocities began to grow, but right from the start it was captured on iPhones and Blackberries and other recording devices and broadcast to the world at large. People protested, and sanctions were suggested but world binding resolutions were vetoed by Russia, the country that sold Syria, the bombs and the missiles. Nations gave the rebels bullets and guns, but nothing larger, no tanks, no bombs, nothing that equalized their position against a full trained and equipped army.
Libya sold oil to Europe and has a million barrels under the ground, a bit player all told on the world scene. But that is enough to launch Air Raids and drop bombs. Egypt has more than Libya and it has the Suez Canal, the canal that all the old flows through. International pressure pushed change there. Bahrain sold all its oil to America, so it was ignored. Yemen has nothing, not even a lot of people, also ignored. Syria has people and history and almost no oil, so people are not that willing to help them. Barrel bombs were dropped on residential neighbourhoods and the world looked on. They said words, but only words. People flowed out of the country. Syria was abandoned, by history and in this war.
The people were desperate. And they were punished. Punished harshly. The only people to come to their aid were outlawed terrorist organizations. Which displeased the Western Nation heads. But what is the difference between a Western Nation that does not give you help and a Western Nation that won't help you because you are accepting help from people that they hate? Nothing.
When the Ottoman Empire was divided, there was a choice made, whether to line the old colonial pockets and to break the land up among its peoples and the powers chose themselves, arbitrary lines in the sand that divided the people. The choice was remade, to follow the rules of the UN, set up after the second World War, to keep power among that era's rulers, or to break a broken system where one greedy nation could hold human dignity hostage. Not for the first time. The United States, China, England, France and Russia, all at one time stood against the entire world, vetoing world consensus.
The desperate people, pounded by jet planes and barrel bombs, tanks and RPG toting professional armies supplied with the very best, turned to religion and armed themselves with desperation. And they attacked. They fought for survival, with all the aid they could get, from Anti-Western terrorists. As the Mujahideen rose from their own ashes from the fight with The USSR in the eighties to be come al-Qaeda, the desperate civilians rose to become ISIS. We in the West fear them. They kill everyone that does not side with them. They kill all who are not with them. They struck first for survival, but the Fundamentalism that they were forged in has become the purpose that they strive for. That they succeed tells them that God is on their side and they are just, but it was not God that made them; it was us. We ignored them and sought the safety of money, of not being them. We did it to them this generation, the last generation and the two before that one too.
We did not give them guns and point them at people who they could kill, we ignored them. Not helping people is just as good as giving them to our enemies.
When the United States gave military aid to the Mujahideen through the back channels of one proxy war to another, they successfully propped up the Afghanistan nation against the Russians. Oliver North dealt with the unknown Osama bin Ladin feeding them military hardware. But then stopped when the Russians left. They ignored the nation. They ignored the people. Landlocked and crippled, left to drug lords extracting the wealth of a nation from its people, we let them. We acted surprised when 9/11 occurred. A people left forgotten for fifteen years, hit back. We never learned from our failures. We never learned that people, oppressed people, desperate people can kill us. We never learned that a penny of aid is worth a dollar of weapons in the long run. We never learned that we could have prevented 9/11 by investing in Afghanistan. We proved that we have not learned by ignoring oppression in Syria. The West is as much the Birth Father of ISIS as the hinterlands of Syria and the Syrian Regime is its mother.
Have we learned?
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