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| This harrowing image of a toddler who drowned while his family sought asylum from ISIS is spreading around the world as a debate ignites about the migration crises. |
They are fleeing ISIS, repression, death, and destruction.
On ships and boats, often overfilled with desperate humanity,
across the Mediterranean, they are coming. On bicycles and on foot down from
the Arctic Circle they are coming. Through any hole they can find in the nation
of Hungary’s new razor-wire fence they are crawling, a swarming mass of
refugees, in the worst crises of mass migration of human souls since the Second
World War
In Eastern Europe, while countries desperately try to figure
out what to do, with Germany offering asylum to up to 800,000 refugees, and
Britain accepting so far a few hundred, although promising to take 20,000 more,
there is no coherent plan to deal with this.
The Greek islands have been overrun with refugees from the
Syrian Civil war and those fleeing from ISIS, while the nation of Greece itself
is in the middle of political upheavals, a disastrous economy, and an inability
to cope with much of anything right now, let alone the swarms of hundreds of
thousands of desperate people who are swarming or trying to swarm into Europe.
The response from the industrialized countries has been
incoherent at best; with Hungary building its razor-wire fence that is over a
hundred miles long, Britain taking a few hundred refugees, and Germany taking
hundreds of thousands, while calling on others to do more.
However, in recent days many minds have been changed by the
harrowing images of a young Syrian boy, just three years old, who drowned and
whose body was washed ashore after the boat he was on capsized as his family fled from the unrest in the Middle East. Since then, there has been a mad scramble by
politicians the world over to prove that they have a heart.
While America has not done much so far, yesterday the
administration promised that in the weeks and months ahead they would be
developing a strategy to try and take more refugees, while at the same time
trying to vet and be certain that no members of ISIS or any other terrorist
organization was not using this crises to infiltrate Western civilization and
attack us. At the same time, former Shadow Prime Minister in the UK Edward
Milliband has said that America should probably take about 50% of all the
refugees.
The West has always been and continues to be the world’s
cornerstone of stability, with strong, capitalistic economies, democratic forms
of government, (in recent years, at least) and massively strong armies. We in
the west have economic disasters from time to time, but we don’t have coups. We
argue with each other, but we don’t kill each other. We throw out our
governments at election time, but we do it with votes, not bullets. And our
leaders are supposed to be the best the world has to offer.
But they goofed this one up.
The reason these migrants are coming to us and not going
farther east, into Iran, or countries like that is because they know in the
west they will be free. They may have to worry about their kids getting good
grades, but not about getting their head chopped off for not bowing to the
twisted, semi-Islamic “religion” of ISIS.
Of course, this is not a problem that has grown up overnight.
It has festered for a long time, with more and more people coming in, until
suddenly it has exploded over into a breaking point, like water over a dam, and
nobody knows what to do.
But that was not where they goofed up, not in the beginning.
For the migrant crises, like a line of dominoes knocking each other over, is a
direct result of the rise of ISIS, and the inability of America and its
coalition to do much about it.
It could be argued that countries like Germany and the UK
should have been and should still be more involved in the fight against ISIS,
but the American president is called the leader of the free world for a reason.
And Mr. Obama has been woefully slow and ineffective in mobilizing the west and
the developing and stable members of the eastern world into a real force that
ISIS needs to reckon with,
Turkey is not fully engaged, and other middle-eastern nations
stand idly by. And while we can debate about how this crises is best fixed in
the short term, the only way we are going to fix it in the long run is by this
administration showing real leadership in the fight against ISIS, and building
the sort of global, massive coalition there was a more than a decade ago when
we fought Iraq. There does not need to American ground troops, but there can be
Syrian rebels that are armed and trained by us, Turkish troops who do not want
to see this spill over into their homeland, Iraqi military who are taught to
stand their ground and fight, and Kurds, who have good reason to fight ISIS.
The fix won’t be fast and it won’t be easy, but destroying
ISIS, and putting real energy behind the fight so that ISIS finally falls, has
to happen. If we don’t fix it, no matter if Hungary takes down its fence, or
the UK takes half a million refugees, this is only going to get worse, and
worse, and worse.
Our leaders goofed up by not taking ISIS seriously enough,
and they haven’t help things very much by letting the wound fester, and now a
vast migration rivaling that of the German hordes pouring into Rome, running
from the horsemen from the east, has begun. The only way to stop this migration
is to kill the horsemen, to destroy ISIS.
Andrew C. Abbott
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