Europe has a problem (tip to Instapundit):
The latest tragedy in the Mediterranean, where a fishing ship smuggling possibly as many as 600 people capsized on Wednesday with about 200 presumed dead, is a portrait in miniature of the mess of policy mistakes, unintended consequences, and human folly that’s turning the Mare Nostrum into a graveyard. (A mark of how bad things are: 200 deaths can be considered “a portrait in miniature”.)
According to the WSJ, many of those aboard the ship came from Syria. For four years, the West has refused and/or been unable to do anything about the plight of that war-torn country, and no wonder people are fleeing it. Meanwhile, the port of immediate departure was in Libya, where the West—at the urging of many European nations—did intervene, but without any intention to stick around or plan to deal with the aftermath. Even as it becomes increasingly clear that Libya’s disorder is at the root of the current immigration crisis, Europe has not the foggiest clue how to fix things there.
I just thank God that we learned that it was a mistake to destroy an aggressive and evil Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, remain to establish a democracy, and stay to defeat evil insurgents and terrorists threatening it.
Well, except for that nearly 3-year gap during which the evil terrorists recovered, got even stronger, and established their own Islamic State.
Some say we should have just overthrown Saddam and gotten out--counting on locals to sort out the mess without our meddling. See Libya.
Others said we should have supported internal opposition to Saddam to let locals solve the dictator problem--see Syria, which also saw everybody else jump in to support their favored side even as we largely stood aside.
So thank goodness we learned lessons from Iraq!
