The Migration Crisis in a nutsehll: Somebody Goofed up

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