“God protects fools, drunkards, and the United States”: Here’s Hoping.

In his new
USA Today column, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit produces a tidy and edited
list of the current crises in the Middle East:

In reverse order: ISIL is winning in Iraq, and we are
losing. Airstrikes — quite modest ones compared to
those unleashed against Saddam Hussein’s armies over a
decade ago — aren’t doing the job, and the Defense Department
doesn’t seem to be able to round up enough (any?) of those
much-touted “moderate” Syrian rebels to form a serious
opposition force. The Kurds are stressed, and we’re not
getting them enough supplies. Meanwhile, the Kurds’ long-term
enemies, the Turks — Turkey is a NATO ally of the United States —
are actually bombing the Kurds rather than ISIL.

Then there’s Ebola, of course:

We don’t seem to be doing very well at treating the handful of
cases of Ebola we already have. Dallas patient Thomas Duncan has
infected at least two nurses who treated him,
and about 1,000 people are being monitored. The Dallas
hospital that treated Duncan is hemorrhaging patients and
money as no one else wants to stay there. And this is just the
consequence of one imported case of Ebola….

As quite a few people have remarked, the most troubling
thing about the Ebola crisis isn’t even the Ebola, but rather
the widespread incompetence it
has revealed among people who are supposed to take threats to the
nation seriously. And that incompetence,
alas, isn’t limited to
Ebola.

Read the whole thing.