The brilliant and knowledgeable David P. Goldman writes in PJ Media:

There are always lunatics lurking in the crevices of Muslim politics prepared to proclaim a new Caliphate; there isn’t always a recruiting pool in the form of nearly 14 million displaced people (11 million Syrians, or half the country’s population, and 2.8 million Iraqis, or a tenth of the country’s population)….Many of them will have nothing to go back to. When people have nothing to lose, they fight to the death and inflict horrors on others. That is what civilizational decline looks like in real time.

Goldman has been predicting this kind of disaster in the Middle East for years.  He also writes under the pen name of Spengler after Oswald Spengler, a German historian who is best known for his book, Decline of the West.  Goldman continues:

The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life. Egypt lives on a$15 billion annual subsidy from the Gulf states, and if that persists, will remain stable if not quite prosperous. Syria is a ruin, along with large parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a day), and now they are utterly ruined. The hordes of combatants displace more people, and these join the hordes, in a snowball effect. That’s what drove the 30 Years War of 1618-1648, and that’s what’s driving the war in the Levant.

There’s a lot to be said about what we should do about ISIS and the other terrorist groups militarily, and it is being said. Here at RRW I’m wondering whether the State Department thinks 14 million refugees with nothing to go back to, rootless and dispossessed and many filled with a destructive rage beyond our comprehension, are our responsibility, a great pool of potential United States citizens.  I’m wondering if the resettlement agencies see a potential windfall and meat packers see cheap labor without end.  God help us if so. Ann has written extensively about Syrian refugees and the pressures on other countries to take them. I’m sorry, but you can’t place 11 million Syrians and 3 million Iraquis in western countries.

If there were anyone in the government looking after America’s interests, we would recognize that this catastrophe is not something we can fix.  If we’re going to help, we should be looking only to Christians and other selected religious minorities.  I wish we had the will and the strength to find them a piece of land of their own over there, but that’s a fantasy.  Goldman writes:

When I wrote in 2011 that Islam was dying, this was precisely what I forecast. You can’t unscramble this egg. The international organizations, Bill Clinton, George Soros and other people of that ilk will draw up plans, propose funding, hold conferences and publish studies, to no avail. The raw despair of millions of people ripped out of the cocoon of traditional society, bereft of ties of kinship and custom, will feed the meatgrinder. Terrorist organizations that were hitherto less flamboyant (“moderate” is a misdesignation), e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood (and its Palestine branch Hamas) will compete with the Caliphate for the loyalties of enraged young people. The delusion about Muslim democracy that afflicted utopians of both parties is now inoperative. War will end when the pool of prospective fighters has been exhausted.