> I didn't think that the US devoted a great deal of their military capacity to the problem.

We devoted a carrier group. We have more than one, so it wasn't a huge deal for us. And, since we have several, there is always at least one fairly close to almost anywhere there's an blue-water ocean.

However, a carrier group has a lot of capacity. It's at least one fairly significant medical facility, an airstrip and transport, a lot of housing and trained personnel, a huge amount of desalinization, and so on.

It would be a huge deal for the EU to provide the same capacity.

A single USN carrier group probably has more capability than the current Royal and French navies combined. The EU nations spend in total about half of what the US does on defence, but have about a tenth of the capability to show for it. That's what I mean about bickering and incompetence.

The British govt is finally realizing that, hence the RN will in a few years have 2 near-US-equivalent carrier groups (the US has 14 IIRC). The rest is a joke. The EU "rapid reaction corps" would take 2-3 months to deploy anywhere...

What happened there was a failure to learn from history. It's like the Irish Potato Famine. Conspiracy nuts like to think it was deliberate but the truth is that it was hugely embarassing for the British Empire to have a disaster like that in their own back yard. What sort of imperials think they can rule the world when they can't even deal with a local crisis? The far-flung reaches of empires are glamorous and exciting, but what matters really is the bread-and-butter stuff at home.

That is an interesting historical perspective, one that I had not considered before. Still, if anything, it supports the notion that the US is faltering as the world power.

BTW I'd be interested to see a comparison with deaths in rural Soviet Union under Stalin with the Irish situation. Seems to me like a similar situation and yet the deaths are pretty much attributed as murder under Stalin.

Ummm, that's because it was murder. See the (well written) works of the historian Robert Conquest. By the way, when the Soviet archives were opened up during the Yeltsin era, his estimations of the number of Soviet murders turned out to be almost exactly right (actually, a little on the low side).

I think of this sometimes when I think of my wife. She survived, with years of hunger, Mao's "Great Leap Forward", when 77,000,000 human beings -- men, women, children dying as their mothers held them and watched -- were systematically starved to death.

"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." -- Stalin, an expert on the subject

I was, of course, refering to the agricultural deaths. To some extent those seem similar to the situation in Ireland and possibly China under Mao. To what extent can attribute a failed policy as murder? Is the US responsable for the 1 million or so deaths in Iraq? Probably not.