NZ Conservative

With the situation worsening in Afghanistan and western governments finding it increasing difficult to integrate increasing numbers of refugees, the West’s invite the world, invade the world strategy is proving to be increasing costly for western taxpayers.

It’s now becoming a tiresome trend for example, that every time a western power intervenes in a non-western country, a wave of refugees will leave that country and head for the West.

Since the first Vietmanese refugees arrived in Australia and the US in the early 1970s, western citizens have been discovering that not only do they have to pay for the military and reconstruction costs associated with getting involved in dubious foreign wars, but they also have to pay for the social and economic costs of relocating the resulting refugees.

It wouldn’t be quite so bad if most of the West’s wars were necessary and were supported by the majority of the population, but in most of these foreign adventures there has been no direct threat to the West and there’s also been considerable opposition at home.

The first Gulf war may have been necessary to smash Sadam Hussein’s tank army, and therefore his ability to invade his neighbors and monopolise Middle Eastern oil, but neither Gulf War II, or the extended intervention in Afghanistan, were of vital interest to western citizens.

As the domestic counter-terrorist operations in the US and UK clearly demonstrated, it’s much easier to combat terrorism on home territory than on ground of the terrorist’s choosing.

Since US and UK security forces smartened up their act following 9/11, far fewer people have been killed in terrorist attacks on home soil than in military encounters in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the British and American forces have lost over 3,500 personnel – and that’s not even taking into account the enormously greater financial cost of keeping large expediency forces out in the field for years on end.

Unfortunately, financial considerations don’t appear to be of much concern to the military planners in the US government.

Billions of dollars have been spent developing smart bombs and cruise missiles that can accurately take out specific targets from a distance. Such weapons would have ideal for taking out the suspected weapons facilities in Iraq or punishing the Taleban leadership in Afghanistan without having to actually invade either country. But just as these smart weapons were finally being perfected, the neocons did a u-turn and decided that the good old-fashioned “troops on the ground” approach was the best way to go.

Previous limited intervention proponents like Eisenhower wouldn’t have been impressed.

The precedent for getting involved in unnecessary foreign entanglements was set in the 1960s in Vietnam, where the Americans mistaken Vietmanese nationalism for Marxist internationalism at a time when the countries attention should have focused on the looming economic challenge from Japan.

The involvement in Vietnam also resulted in the great sacrifices made in the Korean War largely redundant. The US and Britain had already made their views on international communism clear in their costly, but eventually successful campaign to push the Chinese back to the 49th parallel. Following this powerful statement of intent against international communism, there was no need to send in large numbers of US troops to a country which had no intention of letting itself become a staging ground for Chinese and Russian advances into South-East Asia. And even if Vietnam had been intend on spreading international communism further East, the best place to make a stand against it would have been in defence of staunchly anti-communist Thailand.

Thanks to the United Nations, the fallout from western intervention in foreign wars is also shared by countries that aren’t even involved in the conflicts in question, with neutral Sweden and New Zealand for example, having to accept UN dictated refugee quotas from Iraq.

Currently there is a distinct possibility of US intervention in Somalia with the wave of pirate attacks on shipping in the Indian Ocean. If the US does go in, then the West can look forward to dealing with yet another wave of unwanted, difficult to assimilate refugees.