Oh, Fuck Off. We Have Enough Problems.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

You go over to help and they all turn on you. A bad Muslim is better than an infidel trying to help. It's in their psyche. The west is not the better of two evils for we are the cause of everything bad that happens to them!

This constant 'it's the west's fault!' discourse has to stop. The west has done some seriously dumb shit in the ME, yes, but it is not the sole root cause of instability in the ME.

Are we forgetting some of the harshest theocratic and totalitarian regimes in the world that are clustered around that area? Poverty and war existed in the ME long before the west was even a thing. People have been murdering each other there for over a millennium. Syria is/was a country full of secular middle class and educated people who were willing to stand up to Assad to create a fairer society. They tried, and failed, and are now either refugees in Europe (because no rich countries in the ME will take them) or have their heads mounted on a pike.

If people want to revert to isolationism, then fine. But let's not kid ourselves of the fact that there were thoroughly modern, decent and innocent people in Syria who were not religiously inspired fanatics who genuinely wanted to oust a dictator in order to build a better society who asked for the west to help. We said no, and now they're dead or living in Europe. I'm more than happy to let them in, personally, because that's the least we can do after turning our back on them in the first instance.

If we're going to have an open and honest discourse about what to do in the ME, it should start by admitting the west made mistakes but also by acknowledging that the west didn't behead a journalist in Syria, and that sectarianism in Iraq and pretty much everywhere else in the ME didn't suddenly begin when the US went into Afghanistan and later Iraq. The US haven't repeatedly tried to genocide the Kurds, for example (though the lack of help given to the Kurds is another stain on the international community record of just intervention), or forced hundreds of thousands into de facto slavery to build football stadiums, killing tens of thousands in the process. The west is not executing and torturing people en masse in Saudi for homosexuality or, even worse, being an 'atheist'.

Genuine question, what happens if and when ISIS do gain control of both Iraq and Syria? What happens if they follow through with their plans and expand into North Africa and the rest of the ME? What happens then? Genuine question as I certainly don't know. Do we just ignore them and hope they will go away?