A Report From the Borderlines: Where Tourists and Refugees Share an Island

by Nomad

The Greek island of Chios lies at the far east edge of Europe. Beyond that is Turkey and the rest of Asia and the Middle East. This island is also one of the corridors through which thousands of refugees and migrants are risking their lives in a bid for a new life in Europe.

The reaction to the viral- indeed iconic- photo of a dead child on the beach in Bodrum in Western Turkey has ignited a worldwide discussion about the plight of the refugees and migrants attempting to enter into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa. A collective conscience has apparently awoken from its slumber.

It's been a long time in coming. This sudden reaction to the death of one child seems a little hypocritical. Especially when refugee families and their children have been dying in the wine-dark sea for months now.

Although the struggles of refugees to cross into Europe has been going on for years now, the wave of illegal migration from Turkey really cranked up at the beginning of summer.

This tragedy didn't begin in Turkey, however. The roots go back years and a lot of children and families have suffered and have died without much notice.
Before this present crisis, it was Syrian children and entire families huddled in tents during the dead of winter on the border of Syria and Turkey. At that time, European leaders paid the minimal amount of lip service.
Before that, dead children at school being shelled by mortars in Damascus.
All of these children too were innocent casualties of a needlessly prolonged war.  

The Crossing

Last week I made a similar crossing from Turkey to Greece. Similar perhaps, but certainly not the same.  I came as a welcomed tourist with Euros in my pocket, not a desperate refugee in shabby clothes.  

Actually, every summer for the past few years, my Turkish friend, Inan and I have made the journey to the quiet relief of Chios. to escape the overcrowded, noisy and generally insufferable tourist "hotspots" back in Turkey.  

How to Make Sense of a Senseless Act of Violence

by Nomad

Whenever there is a senseless act of violence against the innocent, many of us struggle to find the means to cope, or some kind of an appropriate response. That often seems like an impossible feat.

"Chapelhillvictims" 
by Source (WP:NFCC#4).

On February 10, 2015, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23,  and his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21,and her 19-year old sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha were brutally murdered in their Chapel Hill, North Carolina home. 

All three died of gunshot wounds inflicted by their neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, a 46-year-old former car parts salesman. (Reportedly the motive for the triple murder was a dispute about a parking space.

Barakat and his wife were both students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, enrolled in the School for Dentistry. Last Monday Barakat would have begun his third year there and his wife would have followed her husband with her first-year dentistry school. 

A senseless tragedy, there's no doubt about that. The question is: is there ever an appropriate response to such an event? It is too easy to match hate with hate, ignorance with ignorance, or perhaps worse, simply to shake one's head and move on.
How can we not surrender to despair?

Leftovers: Hard Times for Syrian Refugee Children in Turkey

by Nomad

An unfortunate incident in an Istanbul fast food restaurant highlights the plight of refugee children in Turkey.

Last week, Turkish newspapers reported on an incident in Istanbul which you might not have heard about. It was pushed as one of those sign of the times stories.
According to one article, a young Syrian boy was assaulted by a manager at a branch of Burger King in an Istanbul neighborhood. Why?

The hungry child was seen eating french fries left over by a previous patron.

Eyewitnesses said the boy, who was apparently homeless, was eating french fries from discarded trays and collecting leftovers when the manager of a Burger King in Şirinevler on Istanbul's European side approached him and started slapping him before throwing him out.

Customers at the fast food restaurant were appalled by manager's reaction. They immediately recorded the details and used social media to publicize them. The photos showed the child with a bloody nose, sitting outside the establishment.  

A Winter without Hope: Why Time Has Just Run Out for Syrian Refugees

 by Nomad

As you read this, the refugees of the Syrian civil war are facing yet another challenge in the wake of an intense snowstorm that hit the region this week. Resources of aid agencies are dwindling fast and time is running out for families who have been left without food and heat.

Back in early October, we reported in a blog post how things were going to get worse for Syrians who fled their country and who now live in refugee camps in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq.

At that time, an official at the UN warned that As things stand at the moment. The World Food Programme (WFP) would no longer be able to distribute food and water to Syrian refugees.  Without new funding, officials warned, the program could remain operational for only the next two months. After that, the refugees would be on their own.

That was three months ago.

The Storm 

This week the situation has gone from miserable to catastrophic. Having faced the loss of everything they own, faced with life in a tent and having endured a brutally hot summer, Syrian families might have thought that things could not get much worse.
They were absolutely wrong.

An unusually intense winter storm has swept across the region, with temperatures well below freezing, winds up to 55 miles an hour. For people reduced to living in the most primitive of shelters, a heavy blanket of snow threatened to destroy what little they have now.

Here's Why the Syrian Refugee Problem Could Soon Get Much Worse

by Nomad

The number of Syrians fleeing the hell of civil war is staggering. As Syria's neighbors are struggling to keep the situation under control. Still, the costs and tensions continue to rise.
Just keeping the thousands fed, sheltered and protected is becoming more and more of a burden. But, as bad as they are, things could soon become worse.

According to an article in the Middle East Monitor. Valerie Amos, the UN Under-Secretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator made this chilling announcement this week. As things stand at the moment.The World Food Programme (WFP) would no longer be able to distribute food and water to Syrian refugees. 

Unless additional funding is found, Amos declared, the program would be closed within two months.

The WFP announced in the middle of September that it would reduce its food supplies to around six million Syrian refugees due to a shortage of funds, reiterating the need for an additional $352 million in support before the end of 2014.

Al-Quds newspaper quoted Amos as saying that the WFP has already reduced the portions of food aid in order to stretch them as far as possible. 

Amos also pointed out that an estimated 600,000 Syrians in the east, in Deir Al-Zour, and north, in Al-Raqqa, have been unable to get food aid for the third month in a row, due to the on-going violence.

The timing couldn't be any worse. Amos warned:

"Winter is coming and basic items are urgently needed in order to help protect people from the cold."

For people who have had to endure a blistering summer with temperatures staying in the triple digits for months, a cold and wet winters will be just another test of endurance, some weary refugees will be facing. 

Last December, camps in Lebanon and Jordan were dealt a little more misery, with below-freezing temperatures, torrential rains, and unusually severe snowstorms, The best aid agencies could do for the tent-city residents was to distribute plastic sheeting and tarps. Conditions in Lebanon were particularly appalling. 

Taking a more clinical view, without adequate medical care, these camps will become the perfect breeding ground for epidemics. which could easily spread to host countries.

The Syrian refugee crisis has become the worst humanitarian crisis with one of the largest forced migrations of people since World War II. According to reports, there are an estimated 9 million Syrians that have been forced to flee their homes region, since the civil war began in March 2011.

Roughly 2.5 million have fled to Syria's immediate neighbors Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. with the rest have been internally displaced inside Syria.

Desolation Row: Scenes from the Syrian Civil War

by Nomad

Scenes of destruction in Syria demonstrates what national suicide looks like.

Here are some images of the devastation in the three-year Syria Civil War. In addition to this appalling destruction and the deaths of over 191,000, it has sparked one of the biggest refugee crises since WWII.

The UN has recently released a report on the Syrian Civil War. The number of dead had to be revised from an earlier UN figure. Navi Pillay, the U.N.'s top human rights official told the press:

Tragically it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict."

Arming ISIS: The Danger of Listening to Warhawks

by Nomad

Two years ago, as the Syrian Civil War dragged on, Republican war hawks had the answers about what President ought to do in Syria. Sending weapons to the freedom fighting rebels was the only answer. 

Today we can see the folly of McCain's foreign policy solutions.

Back in February 2012, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were indulging in their favorite hobby, telling President Obama what he ought to be doing in the seemingly insolvable Syrian Civil War.
Their answer was to send American weapons to the anti-Assad rebels.

McCain's Folly

“I believe there are ways to get weapons to the opposition without direct United States involvement,” McCain told reporters at a news conference during a visit to the Afghan capital, Kabul, “The Iranians and the Russians are providing Bashar Assad with weapons. People that are being massacred deserve to have the ability to defend themselves.”

“So I am not only not opposed, but I am in favor of weapons being obtained by the opposition.”

In other words, the best policy was to return to the proxy wars of the Cold War.

(Nobody on the Republican side bothered to inform the senators that arming rebels in any country is a violation of international law. The International Court of Justice has in the past ruled that such shipments violated the UN charter. The last time this matter came up was curiously enough in the Reagan era with the covert arming of the Nicaraguan contras.)

According to a Wall Street Journal article (behind a firewall), legal advisers to President Obama repeatedly warned that aiding the Syrian rebels probably "violated international law and risked a direct conflict with the Assad regime."

Furthermore, it could easily lead into a larger conflict involving Turkey, Iran, Russia, Israel and other regional neighbors. The President had every reason to proceed with extreme caution. It's the kind of thing a president- as Commander in Chief- is paid to consider.

It was clear that the Obama Administration was never fully committed to the idea of sending weapons. In any event, it made no sense to openly discuss that option. What is the benefit of publicizing such a policy? 

The then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also a little less hawkish about the idea. However according to one source, (her own recently-published memoirs) suggests that early in the country's civil war, she thought the proposal was one option.
Importantly, she adds, that view was overruled by the president.

"The risks of both action and inaction were high, [but] the president [Obama]'s inclination was to stay the present course and not take the significant further step of arming rebels," she added.

"No one likes to lose a debate, including me. But this was the president's call and I respected his deliberations and decision," she wrote, according to CBS News.

As we shall see,  Hilary's version of events was not exactly the final chapter in the whole story. Ultimately, everybody in Washington and in Europe agreed that the Syrian President Assad had to go but nobody could decide how it should be done.
For the war hawk Republicans, the most expedient way seemed to be shipping weapons into the country covertly. It had worked in other cases. After all, it worked for Reagan and the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan...hadn't it?

McCain’s Syrian Adventure: Should He Be Charged with Violations to the Logan Act?

Here’s an astounding bit of news from The Daily Beast.

McCain, one of the fiercest critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy, made the unannounced visit across the Turkey-Syria border with Gen. Salem Idris, the leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army. He stayed in the country for several hours before returning to Turkey. Both in Syria and Turkey, McCain and Idris met with assembled leaders of Free Syrian Army units that traveled from around the country to see the U.S. senator.

Inside those meetings, rebel leaders called on the United States to step up its support to the Syrian armed opposition and provide them with heavy weapons, a no-fly zone, and airstrikes on the Syrian regime and the forces of Hezbollah, which is increasingly active in Syria.

Idris praised the McCain visit and criticized the Obama administration’s Syria policy in an exclusive interview Monday with The Daily Beast.
“The visit of Senator McCain to Syria is very important and very useful especially at this time,” he said. “We need American help to have change on the ground; we are now in a very critical situation.”

McCain’s unannounced visit- one conservative website called it “gutsy”- raises all sort of questions. Is it possible that the State Department could have given authorization for such a trip? 
It would surely have taken an approval by the executive branch. Think about it. A high-ranking official slipping across the border of one NATO country into another country in the midst of a bloody civil war? (Could there be grounds for another Issa investigation? Obama "scandals" are being sold to the gullible press at a dime a dozen nowadays.)
Reuters adds this:

The White House had no immediate comment.

A senior State Department official, in Paris with Kerry, confirmed that McCain did "cross into Syrian territory" but referred all questions to McCain's office. 

That suggests the trip was not authorized at all. The Secretary of State would surely have supplied further information if he had any. That implies that McCain took it upon himself to traipse into the messy conflict. A thumbing of the nose to the president, as it were. If true, then it raises some serious political and diplomatic questions.

Firstly there is the sticky question of legality. Did Senator McCain make it clear to the leaders of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army that he is in no way authorized to speak or to make promises or to negotiate on behalf of the United States? 
His statements have no more weight than, say, Angelina Jolie. The statement by General Idris doesn’t suggest that McCain made that clear.

There's another question. Did John McCain commit a felony by violating the Logan Act, which forbids anybody but the president (or anybody the president authorizes) to conduct foreign policy.

Presidentially-Unfit Mitt Romney’s Loose Talk about Syria

by Nomad

W

hen it comes to foreign policy, Republican nominee Mitt Romney gives every indication that, as a leader of the nation, he would prove to be a full-scale ("un-mitt-agated"?) diplomatic disaster.
All of the warnings signs are already apparent.

Take this example. In July of this year, The Washington Post reported:

Appearing via video at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual meeting Saturday morning, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) delivered a speech that hinged on social issues but also focused in on what remains the top issue in the presidential election — the economy.

However, that subject seems to have been a little too boring for the members of the Christian Right organization.

And to the third question — “How would Romney strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship?” — Romney had a quip at the ready.

“Basically, I think you could just look at the things the president has done and do the opposite,” he said to laughter.

Nothing striking about that remark; it is pure Romney- an appeal to the sense of Christian Right’s disgust that Obama is actually their president. However, in ad-libbing, the candidate also stated this:

He added that he would “be leading in Syria by encouraging our friends there like the Turks and the Saudis to provide weapons to the insurgents.”

This casual, (some would call it reckless) remark says a lot about the manner in which Romney as president would conduct foreign policy. 

Why The GOP Can't Be Trusted with Foreign Policy 1/3

  by Nomad

In this three-part series we take a look back at the evidence in the case against the Republican attitude on foreign policy. We begin with John McCain who seems to have an unfailing record of being dangerously wrong on almost every pronouncement he has made about foreign relations.

Part 1- McCain’s Speech in Tampa

Lost in Paul Ryan’s flagrant dishonesty and Romney’s sticky-gooey sing-song speech, the incoherent silliness of Clint’s burlesque with an empty chair, there was an appearance that might have gone unnoticed at the Republican convention.

His was a familiar face- a bit too familiar, actually: Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Whoever decided that McCain’s appearance at the convention would enhance Mitt Romney’s paltry foreign policy credentials should probably defect to the Obama campaign before somebody catches on.