O'Rourke got his title for the book from a slogan on a US soldier's T-shirt in the Middle East. The title has always fascinated me in a black-humour kind of way, and now I've found an outlet for it.

With so many people fleeing the Middle East for Western Europe and far away places like Australia, it surely pays to give these hounded souls a chance to enjoy their home land. Imagine being dispossessed by a civil war or by a marauding band of lunatics who want to to cut off your head and enslave your kids.

Imagine having no freedoms to prosper or get an education - losing your home, dodging bullets and suicide martyrs with bombs, losing loved ones, losing your nerve and your sanity.

I'd leave if I could, and hundreds of thousands do. Statistics say that in 2014 a total of 600,000 refugees flooded the borders of the entire European Union. This year an estimated 800,000 will arrive in Germany alone, and by Christmas.

There are a million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, 2 million in Turkey and almost 700,000 in Jordan. This is becoming a human stampede and a catastrophe.

They're on the run, from terror in Syria and Iraq, through Turkey, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia, through Eastern Europe to places like German and France or Britain.

Some find their way to Australia.

The Labor Party has followed the Coalition's boat policy because the party is trying to neutralise the issue before the election next year. So the boats will be stopped, but for how long is uncertain.

Sooner or later the pressure on Europe will be too great, and nations like Australia will be asked to step up. This is bound to spark another round of breast-beating, boat-stopping, and race-based scare campaigns.

Border protection has so far cost Australia billions of dollars. Between 2008 and last year more than 50,000 asylum seekers arrived in Australian waters by boat.

Our current mission to fight Islamic State in Iraq is costing about $500 million a year to fund a detachment of combat aircraft, support aircraft and 600 Defence personnel.

I say double or triple it.

The only way to stop this human tide of suffering is to stop the reason for their displacement. If the refugee crisis is not convincing enough as a reason for giving war a chance, think of the potential for these phoney religious lunatics to spawn home-grown terrorism in Australia unchecked.

The stronger they get, the more ambitious they will become.

So I say, let's join the humanitarian effort to provide a haven for these brutally displaced people, while bombing the life out of the reason for their misery. Sooner or later the world community has got to make a stand. Extremism has no place in a civilised world.

Both sides of politics are accused of warmongering and khaki elections, only to be hounded by the same cheer and sneer squad when they embark on a border protection policy.

Ultimately there is going to be a major terrorist attack in Australia. It will fuel more local racism and paranoia. As Tony Abbott says, all they need in the first instance is a knife and a camera. They don't need grandiose plans for passenger kamikaze planes any more.

Give war a chance. It may well be the price for a lasting peace, so the millions of poor souls on the run might one day contemplate going home.