The tragedies we choose to consider versus the ones we choose to ignore.

From Sunday West 42 by Ed West.  The subheading is The return of the War on Terror era

Christopher Caldwell on the scale of the migration crisis.

The number of migrants who arrived in the UK in boats last year – 46,000 – looks like small potatoes in comparison with refugee flows in the Mediterranean. What is going on in Lampedusa now is a civilisational rather than a conjunctural problem. It is tied up in the West’s misplaced priorities and warped threat assessments.

Lampedusa was once an imperial frontier, a place where the free world and the third world were in communication. It used to be an asset for the free world; now that is less certain. Viewed by posterity, the invasion of Libya launched by Barack Obama, Nicholas Sarkozy and David Cameron in 2011, which opened a corridor for the large-scale trafficking of migrants, will probably be seen to have posed a larger threat to the ‘European way of life’ than the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin last year.

I’ve long come around to the idea that the overthrow of Gaddafi was a foreign-policy error of gigantic proportions, worse even than the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

The evidence of the strategic catastrophe that was the overthrow of Gaddafi has been curiously under-discussed in American news.  I don't know whether it is because the architects were Obama and Hillary Clinton, because virtually none of the negative consequences affect Americans, or because it is so far away, or some other reason, but I don't know.  

It is, however, curious because the evidence for the magnitude of the human tragedy out of Libya, for both Europe and Africa/Middle East has been accumulating for years.   Some reasonably sizable blog periodically points a sharp ironical jest at the Democrats for having restored the slave trade and slave markets in Northern Africa after having spent three centuries stamping them out.  

I occasionally wonder speculatively whether Iraq or Libya was the greater human catastrophe were one to tote up all the dead, the wounded, and the lost prosperity of a nation.  The answer would seem to obviously be Iraq.  But was it?  Immense losses no doubt, but in a somewhat constrained time frame.  Is it possible that Iraq is, at this remove, better off than it was under Hussein.  I am not certain, but possibly.  Violence and tragedy rumble along at a low level and the economic damage is still there.  But is it better?  And separately, might it in some ways have been worth it?  I don't know.  Yet.

For context, the Iraq War totaled perhaps 60,000 killed among combatants and maybe 120,000 among civilians.  Numbers which are both very infirm and eye-watering.  

But the fate of Libya is both clearer and murkier.  Murky because, since its collapse in 2011, it has remained collapsed.  There is an on-going low level civil war.  There are various catastrophes because there is essentially little or no central government.  It is a smaller country so the absolute numbers are smaller.  But the danger, and damage have been greater and for a much more sustained and prolonged period of time.  How many illegal migrants transiting the Mediterranean via Libya drown each year?  5,000?  10,000?  15,000?  

For 12 years.  Maybe a couple of hundred thousand?  And those are just the ones for whom we have some visibility.  And just at sea.  How many die en route across the desert or in the slave markets?  

We don't know and the American clerisy don't care.  But from a humanitarian perspective, it is quite possible that the overthrow of Qaddafi was a far greater strategic and humanitarian catastrophe than was the defeat of Hussein.