"What's emerging is what we need, which is a comprehensive plan, going after the criminal gangs, going after the traffickers, going after the owners of the boats ... and stabilizing the countries from which these people are coming." And when you have finished "stabilizing" Syria, Somalia and Libya, overthrowing the Eritrean dictatorship, and ending poverty in West Africa, could you drop by and fix my plumbing? Oh, and Yemen. Fix Yemen too.
"These people" are the 1,300 refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean in the past two weeks, the 30,000 who will drown by the end of this year while trying to cross if nothing more is done — and of course, the estimated half million who will make it safely to Italy, Malta or Greece. The speaker was Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, but he was just one voice in the European Union choir
The EU's leaders were meeting in emergency session because of a public outcry over all the refugees drowning on the crossing between Libya and Italy. These same leaders were responsible for most of the deaths, because last year they ended a very effective Italian Navy search-and-rescue operation and "replaced" it with an EU operation that had a third of the resources and was not supposed to operate more than 50 km off the Italian coast.