As refugees are stranded at train stations, attacked by riot police, and killed during the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, Europe’s failure to address the rising humanitarian crisis is being met with global outrage and sorrow.
Now, many are also looking across the Atlantic to the United States, where observers say key responsibility for the crisis lies—not only because the country is lagging in its humanitarian response, but also because its war policies lie at the root of the ongoing displacement.
“Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, and Libyans are not running away from their homes because of a natural disaster,” Raed Jarrar, expert on Middle East politics and government relations manager for the American Friends Service Committee, told Common Dreams. “The U.S. should see this crisis as partially caused by its own actions in the region.”
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said at a press briefing on Thursday that the United States sees no “impending policy changes” in light of the worsening crisis. He indicated the U.S. plan will remain focused on lending assistance from afar while letting EU nations take the lead on confronting the crisis. “There is certainly capacity in Europe to deal with this problem,” Earnst said, “and the United States certainly stands with our European partners.”
“Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, and Libyans are not running away from their homes because of a natural disaster. The U.S. should see this crisis as partially caused by its own actions in the region.”
—Raed Jarrar, American Friends Service Committee
Since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in March 2011, the U.S. estimates it has contributed over $4 billion in aid to those impacted by the conflict. That figure, Earnest declared, is “certainly more than any other country has done.”
But Phyllis Bennis, senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Common Dreams that such claims are factually true, yet misleading. First of all, explained Bennis, the European Union donates money as a group. “But more significant,” she continued, “is the fact that the U.S. is—by a high margin—the largest economy in the world, representing somewhere near 25 percent of the global economy. We should be paying 25 percent of whatever the United Nations says it needs, just as a starting point, without blinking. We don’t do that.”
What’s more, many have pointed out that aid dollars pale in comparison to U.S. military spending. Yacoub El Hillo, the top United Nations humanitarian official in Syria, recently noted to the New York Times that while the U.S. government spends $68,000 an hour on warplanes targeting ISIS, the UN grapples with dramatic funding shortfalls in which it has less than 50 percent of what it needs to care for Syrians uprooted by war.
Oxfam America is calling on the United States to immediately boost the amount of money it sends to the World Food Program, which warned in mid-August that it is facing “critical funding shortages that forced it to reduce the level of the assistance it provides to some 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt.”
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