The Guardian reports: The full horror of the human tragedy unfolding on the shores of Europe was brought home on Wednesday as images of the lifeless body of a young boy – one of at least 12 Syrians who drowned attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos – encapsulated the extraordinary risks refugees are taking to reach the west. [Continue reading…]
This image of the body of a Syrian boy drowned today on a Turkish beach is emblematic of the world's failure in Syria pic.twitter.com/IYiIPgvieG
— Liz Sly (@LizSly) September 2, 2015
To speak of the world’s failure in Syria, presupposes some sort of global responsibility, yet many war-weary Americans might wonder: what makes Syria our responsibility?
The answer is simple: the war in Iraq.
Had the U.S. and its allies not invaded Iraq in 2003, it’s hard to envisage that the region with Syria at its epicenter would now be ripping itself apart.
That’s not to suggest that absent the Iraq war, there would now be something that could reasonably be called Middle East peace.
Yet it’s fair to assume that however the region’s systemic injustices might have metastasized over the last decade, the result would most likely not have been the worst refugee crisis since World War Two.
