The dreadful loss of life of desperate migrants in the Mediterranean Sea is shockingly not unique or even unusual, but it is the worst so far and it has forced EU leaders to confront their own woeful performance in a crisis of their own making. In fact it is a crisis costing human life for which the cause can twice be traced back to both EU and Anglo-American foreign policy. First, the destruction by force of stable government in Iraq and Libya, the muddle in Afghanistan, the failure to insist to Israel than it finds a route to peace with the Palestinians and the mishandling of the rise of Islamic militancy in the Middle East and Africa, have brought about murder, mayhem and destruction of innocents and their environment on a scale far exceeding any rational person’s worst nightmare.
Second the refusal by the EU to get together a proper naval force to patrol and rescue these victims of war and trafficking, leaving the Italians and Maltese to struggle on their own beyond their resources, is both heartless and immoral. It is to be hoped that a joined up and realistic programme will now fast come into effect. It will need to accept that such are the blunders in foreign policy and strategic thinking of which all parties are guilty, but perhaps Britain and the US most guilty of all, that the diaspora of the desperate can be expected to grow to hundreds of thousands, even millions, and there will have to be a plan about where they are going to go.