The West can't handle the human cost of wars it starts

While we all face higher petrol prices, increasing cost of living impacts and the inconvenience of cancelled overseas flights, spare a thought for the hundreds of thousands of people across the Middle East who are the direct victims of the latest conflict.

The European Union Agency for Asylum has indicated that even 10 per cent of the Iranian population of 92 million trying to escape the country would unleash a refugee wave of “unprecedented magnitude” across the bloc.

Iran is also host to almost four million migrants, including refugees from Afghanistan, and the wider region already has a refugee population of about 25 million souls.

Such numbers surging across borders is a distinct possibility as, within days of the joint US/Israeli bombardment in Tehran, some 100,000 locals had already fled the city.

Along with those fleeing Iran, Israel’s latest incursion into Lebanon has forced hundreds of thousands to leave their homes.

A United Nations report says that there are 700,000 displaced persons in Lebanon, including 200,000 children. Almost all of them are victims of Israel’s multiple incursions over recent years, including in recent days.

Many asylum seekers from either conflict are likely to head for Turkey and Iraq, where limited infrastructure is already creaking under the strain of high numbers of refugees.

As a result, many will feel it necessary to head for Europe. But there they will face a similar shortage of services – by virtue of a swing towards prevention of migrants entering the EU zone rather than developing programs to help them – and recent statements from the EU suggest they are concerned the bloc will be overwhelmed.

The worldwide refugee population is 117 million. If taken as a single country, the global refugee population is roughly the size of Japan or Egypt.

A refugee nation would be hovering around the top 10 largest in the world.

Yet, while the US and Israel continue bombing, and world powers feel compelled to fall into lockstep behind the aggressors, clearly none are prepared for the likely refugee waves.

Most haven’t even thought about it.

Yet, it is clear that the impact of war on civilian populations is as high as ever in terms of human history.

The destruction of urban centres, food sources, energy, health and other infrastructure facilities via increasingly sophisticated weapons technology ensures that today, not only are civilian deaths high, but the means people need to survive are more easily and rapidly obliterated.

The world is mired in an atmosphere of anti-immigration and anti-internationalism.

Virtually every advanced economy is finding ways to block both documented and undocumented migrants. Regulatory and literal walls are going up and/or are being strengthened as more and more people seek security across borders.  

This movement, like a serpentine tail flick, is overturning much of the infrastructure built up since the end of World War II. Then, about 30 million people were displaced and sought refuge.

While the system to absorb them was hastily constructed and often snagged on historic prejudices, it worked for millions of victims.

The legacy of international human rights law, and migration and asylum seeker systems that have been well established since is the result.  

In the 1940s and 1950s, of course, most of the refugees were European. Most of those now trapped in ever-tightening migration choke points are not.

We saw in 2022 that Ukrainian victims of the Russia invasion were quickly absorbed, unlike those from other more far-flung conflicts.

Migrants coming from Iran or Lebanon or Syria or Iraq, Afghanistan, or from other conflict zones in the Middle East, can be easily cast as “not like us”.

We need to consider that the apparent reason for the US/Israeli campaign in Iran is the interests of those millions of Iranians who prayed for the demise of the Khamenei regime.

Does that only apply if those same Iranians clamouring for, fighting for and dying for freedom, stay in Iran?

Mainstream political trends across Europe, the US, and here in Australia suggest that freedom, ultimately, is selective not universal.

The world’s major powers are clearly very good at starting wars, less good at ending them and even worse at dealing with the humanitarian consequences of their actions.

War equals displaced people. How is that equation so readily ignored?

If our leaders are going to start wars, nominally to protect the innocent and/or to bolster global peace, then surely there needs to be a similar commitment to facing up to the impacts of their wars.

That needs to be at the human level first and foremost, and it must start on Day One.