Mick Hartley

Terry Glavin, on The global horror that Obama left behind:

It took the traumatic shock of al-Qaeda’s 9-11 attack to teach us all a lesson that we are all being forced to learn again in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Yemen: you can’t just walk away from the world. Abandon parts of the globe to mayhem, warlordism and lawlessness and the state-power vacuum will quickly fill with horrors that the NATO capitals will not be able to ignore.

It’s not just that the Obama-led retreat from a century’s worth of covenants on war crimes, chemical warfare and other crimes against humanity in Syria has already all but destroyed the values-based international order. Nearly a half million Syrians have been killed, and the shadow of millions of refugees pouring across the Mediterranean is darkening all hopes of holding together a 70-year consensus that had united Europe.

Six years ago, France and the Arab League had to drag Obama into a NATO operation that aimed to prevent a Syrian-scale mass slaughter of Libyans by the lunatic dictator Moammar Gadhafi. After the collapse of the Gadhafi regime, Obama opposed a UN peacekeeping force that could have prevented Libya from falling apart, and following Obama’s fashionable lead, we all walked away. After more than two years of stumbling towards a secular, representative democracy, Libya eventually collapsed into pandemonium, becoming the Islamic State and human-smuggling haven that it is today.

In Yemen two years ago, Obama took the opportunity of what was then a ragtag, marginal and containable Houthi insurgency to close down the CIA station running operations against al-Qaeda in the country and shutter the American garrison entirely. Saudi Arabia immediately began a bombing campaign that has resulted in at least 10,000 deaths. Qasem Soleimani, who heads up Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, is supplying the Shia Houthis with military equipment and advisers in a proxy war waged against Yemen’s Saudi-backed Sunni forces.

This week in Geneva, the United Nations is appealing to international donors to help stave off the famine facing nearly seven million Yemenis in what UN officials now call “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.”

This brings us back to Afghanistan, where at least 160 fresh Afghan Army recruits were murdered while they were concluding their Friday prayers last week at Camp Shaheen in Balkh. Two of the attackers blew themselves up in the crowds of soldiers outside the camp’s mosque, and the rest went on a shooting spree that lasted several hours….

On Monday, U.S. General John Nicholson, who heads up the NATO-led operation, stood beside U.S. Defence Secretary James Mattis, who was paying a surprise visit to Afghanistan. They both hinted strongly that the Kremlin, which has played host to the Taliban in meetings in Moscow, might now be arming the Taliban as well.

This is exactly the kind of horror show that should be expected when NATO’s democracies, which have always been dependent upon American power, simply walk away from the world.