The
course of action decided upon by President Obama, the US Congress and the
international community regarding al-Assad's unconscionable use of chemical
weapons on his own people to maintain military and political control will have
repercussions far beyond Syria and the Middle East.
It
should come as no surprise that the situation in Syria is among the bloodiest
civil wars in recent history--conditions there created the perfect storm. Assad's rule has been dictatorial,
out-of-touch, corrupt, and mismanaged.
Syria is home to numerous combative sectarian and ethnic groups. It is in the center of power struggles
between the US and Russia, Israel and Iran, al Qaeda and a number of other
groups.
And
while Syria may be a prime example of a state poised on the brink of disarray,
there are all too many other states that display similar conditions.
The
match that set the Syrian situation ablaze was an unprecedented five-year
drought, reported to be the worst since western civilization started in the
Fertile Cresent many millennia ago. It decimated
Syria's agricultural areas. The
country's water resources dropped by half between 2002-8 when drought was added
to mismanagement, waste and overuse.
For
example, in 2009, the UN and IFRC reported that over 800,000 Syrians had lost
all their livestock. In some areas of
northern Syria herders lost around 85% of their livestock.
More
important for Syria, wheat had been a staple crop for centuries and is a part
of its identity. Syria was traditionally
an exporter, but in recent years has been forced to import it. But wheat (and cotton, the other staple crop
encouraged by the Assad regime) requires considerable amounts of water. As the drought worsened, rains came
infrequently, rivers ran dry, and underground aquifers were drained. Dust Bowl conditions set in.
Only
6-8% of global wheat production is traded across borders, so any decrease in
supply seriously impacts wheat importing countries like Syria (the world's nine
leading wheat importing countries are in the Middle East). When China and Russia experienced crop-devastating
heat waves in 2010-12, Middle Eastern countries that spend 35% of their incomes
on food (as compared with 10% in developed countries) the price of wheat
doubled and unrest followed.
By 2011
the extremely food insecure in Syria numbered at over one million, those
affected to a lesser extent came to 2-3 million.
Most
important--as far as the raging civil war in Syria is concerned--about a million
people were forced to abandon hundreds of small, agricultural villages where
their families had been farming for centuries.
They fled to cities like Aleppo and Dara'a where supplies of water and
food were already strained. These are
the cities where discontent first blossomed.
Syria's
resources were already stressed by a million refugees from the war in Iraq and
a rapidly growing population. Syria's oil
production and reserves had fallen to a level where it could not use that
precious resource--as can other nations in the region--to rescue itself from such
a dire situation.
Syria
might be the perfect storm, but storm clouds exist all over the globe--not just
in the Middle East but Central and South America, South Asia, and Africa. The
lesson for all of us is that as global temperatures warm, the numbers of
extreme weather events--droughts, heat waves, floods, storm, fires--are bound to
increase. The dice have been
loaded.
Every
climate science organization and all the National Academies of Science in the
world agree that the planet is warming--and will continue to do so. Those responsible for assessing the risks
global warming poses--our Department of Defense, US Intelligence Agencies, NATO,
large insurance companies, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and
organizations representing tens of trillions of dollars of invested assets--all
warn us of the multiple challenges we will face from the extreme weather events
such warming will bring.
We
are entering a new era when the US and the world community will have to make more
decisions like the one facing us in Syria.
The manner in which we handle this situation and the decisions we make
will provide precedents and lessons for a world in which a warmer climate and
more extreme weather events will, unfortunately, present us with ever more Syrias.
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