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14
Million Refugees Make the Levant Unmanageable
by David P. Goldman
PJ Media
September 8, 2014
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There are always lunatics lurking in the crevices of Muslim politics
prepared to proclaim a new caliphate; there isn't always a recruiting
pool in the form of nearly 14 million displaced people (11
million Syrians, or half the country's population, and 2.8
million Iraqis, or a tenth of the country's population). When I wrote
about the region's refugee disaster at Tablet in July ("Between
the Settlers and Unsettlers, the One State Solution is On Our Doorstep")
the going estimate was only 10 million. A new UN study, though, claims
that half of Syrians are displaced. Many of them will have nothing to go
back to. When people have nothing to lose, they fight to the death and
inflict horrors on others.
That is what civilizational decline looks like in real time. The roots
of the crisis were visible four years ago before the so-called Arab
Spring beguiled the foreign policy wonks. Hundreds of thousands of
displaced Syrian farmers already were living in tent camps around Syrian
cities before the Syrian civil war began in April 2011. Israeli analysts
knew this. In March 2011 Paul Rivlin of Tel Aviv University released a
study of the collapse of Syrian agriculture, widely cited in Arab media
but unmentioned in the English language press (except my essay
on the topic). Most of what passes for political science treats peoples
and politicians as if they were so many pieces on a fixed game board.
This time the game board is shrinking and the pieces are falling off.
The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough
hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life. Egypt lives on
a$15 billion annual subsidy from the Gulf states and, if that persists, will
remain stable if not quite prosperous. Syria is a ruin, along with large
parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile
before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a
day), and now they are utterly ruined. The hordes of combatants displace
more people, and these join the hordes, in a snowball effect. That's what
drove the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, and that's what's driving the
war in the Levant.
When I wrote in 2011 that Islam was dying, this was precisely what I
forecast. You can't unscramble this egg. The international organizations,
Bill Clinton, George Soros and other people of that ilk will draw up
plans, propose funding, hold conferences and publish studies, to no
avail. The raw despair of millions of people ripped out of the cocoon of
traditional society, bereft of ties of kinship and custom, will feed the
meatgrinder. Terrorist organizations that were hitherto less flamboyant
("moderate" is a misdesignation), e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood
(and its Palestine branch Hamas), will compete with the caliphate for the
loyalties of enraged young people. The delusion about Muslim democracy
that afflicted utopians of both parties is now inoperative. War will end
when the pool of prospective fighters has been exhausted.
That is also why ISIS
is overrated. A terrorist organization that beheads Americans and
posts the video needs to be annihilated, but this is not particularly
difficult. The late Sam Kinison's monologue on world
hunger is to the point: they live in a desert. They may be hard to
flush out of towns they occupy, but they cannot move from one town to
another in open ground if warplanes are hunting them. That is what
America and its allies should do.
More dangerous is Iran, as Henry
Kissinger emphasized in a recent interview with National Public
Radio. Iran's backing for the Assad regime's ethnic cleansing of Syrian
Sunnis set the refugee crisis in motion, while the Iraqi Shi'ites'
alliance with Iran persuaded elements of Saddam Hussein's military to
fight for ISIS. Iran can make nuclear weapons and missiles; ISIS cannot.
If we had had the foresight to neutralize Iran years ago, the crisis
could have been managed without the unspeakable humanitarian cost.
We cannot do the killing ourselves, except, of course, from the air.
We are too squeamish under the best of circumstances, and we are too
corrupted by cultural relativism (remember George W. Bush's claim that
Islam is "a religion of peace"?) to recognize utterly evil
nihilism when it stares us in the face. In practice, a great deal of the
killing will be done by Iran and its allies: the Iraqi Shi'a, Hezbollah
in Lebanon, and the Assad regime in Syria. It will be one of the most
disgusting and disheartening episodes in modern history and there isn't
much we can do to prevent it.
David P. Goldman is Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy
Research and Wax Family Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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