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Comment by throwaway1974 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway1974

Some rant there not based on reality

Unless you have been living on a different planet, US and Europe (The West) have pretty much withdrawn from the Middle East.

The ones doing the bombing now in the middle east are Russia and various Muslim factions killing each other.

The west has withdrawn from the quagmire and also is the one accommodating refugees for some reason, unlike the like of rich Arab countries like Saudi and UAE who share the same religion and cultures.

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"US and Europe (The West) have pretty much withdrawn from the Middle East"

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/french-air-force-avenge...

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/led-air-strikes-kill-2...

Is not that they are out of middle East, it is that they are occupied in Libya:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-now-bombing-4-countries-as-...

The West has withdrawn, but not before wreaking havoc in the region, leaving complete chaos behind.

Chaos that was predicted while the US was drumming up the wars in Afganistan and Irak.

Complete chaos had been the default state of that region for over 2000 years. Interventions and abrupt withdrawals by Western powers certainly haven't helped, but it's naive to think that they are the primary cause.

And if the west goes back in you be screaming "interference"

damned if you do damned if you dont

Do you think that Mohaamed Bouazizi would not have set himself on fire if the US hadn't invaded Afghanistan and Iraq?

Western countries aren't accepting all that many refugees. Fear of refugees was certainly part of the reason the UK voted for Brexit; here in the US, I've seen an active political campaign attacking someone who touted supporting moving a mere 20,000 refugees from Syria.

The countries that host the most refugees are such large, rich countries as Turkey, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon. Jordan recently closed its border with Syria to stop the flow of refugees (currently at 1.4 million Syrian refugees in a population of 9.5 million or so). Compare this to the refugees fleeing to the European Union, about the same number over all in a population of 510 million.

The west is still supporting and arming rebels in Syria.

So is Saudi and Qatar and UAE, I do not see queues of refugees fleeing there despite sharing the same climate, religion and culture.

There are, though. Turkey, Iran and Jordan's proportion of refugees is a very substantial % of their population. In the gulf states there are millions of Syrians and Palestinians, just called guest workers rather than refugees. In a lot of ways that's more humane, as they can work straight away. We, bizarrely, refuse refugees the right to work while complaining that they don't contribute.

That's because in most countries that take refugees, average people own no capital (except maybe housing, an illiquid and unproductive asset) and can only contribute labor for income, resulting in a situation where "jobs" are a scarce resource. Now, if ownership of capital were more widespread, refugee labor would be much more welcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

In the long term, yes, but the labor market is quite inelastic in the short term, and without a strong and robust safety net, short term effects dominate for most workers.

> I do not see queues of refugees fleeing there

Hmmm... have you actually looked?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_the_Syrian_Civil_W...

This is doesn't even include Palestinian refugees.

http://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/jordan

Same story in Lebanon and Turkey

https://mgtvwspa.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/refugee-story-3...

To say "we're out now therefore it's not our fault" is ridiculous, pretty much every tinpot dictator/terrorist leader in those countries can be tied in one way or another back to the CIA or any of the three letter orgs from the US or Britain, just to name a couple, Saddam Hussien, Osama Bin Laden. We've been screwing with the Middle East for decades, before which it was a relatively progressive and pretty normal place, not perfect but arguably just a decade or so behind the US at the time.

As it turns out, when your only filter for "people to support financially" is "do they hate the Russians" and you never look any further, you tend to get some not-great results.

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