The EU cooperated hand-in-glove with the US in the 2011 NATO War on Libya and the ongoing War on Syria, mistakenly under the assumption that such military escapades would bring about some sort of benefit. Clothing both wars with ‘humanitarian' rhetoric, the EU tried to stave off any criticism of its actions. Ironically, it has turned out that both wars were far from humanitarian, and have actually resulted in immense humanitarian suffering instead of relief. Worse still, instead of strengthening EU security, they've actually weakened it, creating an arc of chaos along its periphery that stretches from West Africa into the Mideast.France, the leading EU interventionist state in these conflicts, has experienced the strongest blowback of all, having had its soldiers die in Mali and its citizens slaughtered in Paris as a result of its ill-thought-out policies.
‘Noble Intentions'
France has historically presented itself as the most cultured country in Europe, one that is extremely proud of its civilizational heritage and eager to spread it across the world. Nowhere has this motive been the case more lately than in the ‘Arab Spring' countries of Libya and Syria, the latter of which happens to be a former French colony. In 2011, self-described French ‘philosopher' Bernard-Henri Levy used his influence over Sarkozy to get him to agree to bomb Libya together with the US, UK, and a few others. The ostensible ‘justification' for such a crusade was to ‘free' the people from Gaddafi's ‘dictatorship', in the hopes that the country could then integrate closer with France's proposed "Union for the Mediterranean" partnership between the EU and all other non-member Mediterranean states.
Likewise, the excuse for assisting all manner of anti-government militants operating in Syria (including extreme Islamic groups) was to also ‘free' the people from what was described as President Assad's ‘dictatorship'. France apparently felt a neo-colonial urge to intrude in Syria's domestic affairs and promote its own version of ‘democracy', hence its sustained support for regime change within the country over the past four years. In both cases, France publicly presented its reasons as being of ‘noble intent' to the European audience, which willfully accepted such arguments due to the fact that it had been indoctrinated with hyper-liberal ideas for decades and thought of such ‘democratizing processes' as ‘historically inevitable' in the region.
Ignoble Results
As Libyans and Syrians can now attest, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions', and nowhere is this clearer than in the aftereffects of France and the EU's ‘cooperation' with the US in destabilizing both countries. Instead of the utopian paradise that Bernard-Henri Levy convinced Europeans would sprout up in Libya after Gaddafi's illegal ouster, the nation has plunged into a civil war between various Islamic groups and the nominal ‘government'. The country that once had the highest Human Development Index in all of Africa has now had most of its infrastructure totally destroyed and can't even provide for its own citizens.
The situation is very similar in Syria. The only truly secular country in the Mideast is now in turmoil because of foreign jihadists, with some estimates putting their numbers at over 80,000. Despite growing at a solid rate before the Color-Revolution-turned-Unconventional-War, its economy is now in shambles and inflation has surged, making many basic products unattainable for the majority of its citizens. What could have been an economic success story in the hydrocarbon-dependent Mideast has turned into a telltale disaster due to years of foreign covert intervention. Neither Libya nor Syria have experienced the subjective ‘freedom' or ‘democracy' that the West promised them, and these countries, once paragons of development and stability in their respective regions, are now inarguably far worse off today than they were before the West decided to intervene with the ‘Arab Spring' Color Revolutions.
Bitter Blowback
The Western plans for Libya and Syria, if one is to judge them by their publicly stated intent, have been cataclysmic failures that have sown the seeds of violent chaos far and wide. It took a few years after the fact, but the EU, and especially France, is now experiencing the bitter blowback to the destruction they unilaterally caused in those countries.
Libya:
After Gaddafi was overthrown and publicly humiliated in the streets, Libya turned into what one US military contractor called a ‘Scumbag Woodstock', due to the fact that so many international terrorists were flocking into the country to fight against one another and the new Western-installed government. Countless citizens fled the country as a result, with thousands still dying in the Mediterranean as they illegally tried to enter the EU.
Libya's anarchic free-for-all soon spilled over into Mali, where foreign fighters and Gaddafi-era weapons were used in an attempt to create a terrorist state. France intervened in 2012 to help stabilize the situation that it inadvertently created, losing some of its servicemen in the process. The Libyan and Malian destabilizations also directly assisted Boko Haram in Nigeria, which just killed up to 2,000 people during a weekend terrorist attack.
Syria:
The War on Syria has led to millions of Syrians becoming refugees in neighboring countries, with the vast majority barely surviving in the horrendous conditions in which they now live. Western support for regime change empowered ISIL to go on its terrorist offensive, seizing large swaths of Syria and Iraq over the summer. The governance void that resulted has created a terrorist haven that thousands of jihadist-minded EU citizens exploited to gain training and expertise in carrying out attacks back home. Last week, the dreadful consequences of this were on full display when the terrorists attacked Paris, which unfortunately brought the chaos and terror that France originally helped sow in the Mideast back home full circle to the heart of Western Europe.
