Who Should Pay For the Syrian Refugees?By RON PAUL
November 24, 2015
The House legislation was brought to the Floor after last week's attacks in Paris that left more than 120 people dead, and for which ISIS claimed responsibility. With the year-long U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, there is a good deal of concern that among those 10,000 to be settled here there might be some who wish to do us harm. Even though it looks as though the Paris attackers were all EU citizens, polling in the U.S. shows record opposition to allowing Syrian refugees entry.
Syrian Refugees
For the past ten years the U.S. government has been planning and executing a regime change operation against the Syrian government. It is this policy that has produced the chaos in Syria, including the rise of ISIS and al-Qaeda in the country. After a decade of U.S. destabilization efforts, we are now told that Syria is totally destabilized and we therefore must take in thousands of Syrians fleeing the destabilization that Washington caused. Has there ever been a more foolish and wrong-headed foreign policy than this? The American people have been forced to pay untold millions for a ten-year CIA and Pentagon program to undermine and overthrow the Syrian government, and now we are supposed to pay millions more to provide welfare for the refugees Obama created. Who should pay for the millions fleeing the chaos that Washington helped create? How about the military-industrial complex, which makes a killing promoting killing? How about the Beltway neocon think-tanks that continue to churn out pro-war propaganda while receiving huge grants from defense contractors? How about President Obama's national security advisors, who push him into one regime change disaster after another? How about Hillary Clinton, who came up with the bright idea that "Assad must go"? How about President Obama himself, a president elected to end wars, but who has ended up starting more wars than his predecessor? It's time those who start the wars start paying for the disasters they create. Then perhaps we might have some relief from an interventionist foreign policy that is destroying our financial and national security. If Obama wants to take in refugees from the chaos in Syria, there are probably plenty of vacant rooms in the White House.
Ron Paul is a former Congressman and Presidential candidate. This column has been edited by the author. Representations of fact and opinions are solely those of the author.
|