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The Developing Global Crisis: What Security Practitioners and Policy Makers Need to Know

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The Developing Global Crisis: What Security Practitioners and Policy Makers Need to Know 1 The Developing Global Crisis: What Security Practitioners and Policy Makers Need to Know Abstract (d7, for “Global Security and Intelligence Studies” of American Military University.) General Michael Flynn asks why we don’t win wars anymore.i Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claims we cannot fix the problems in the Middle East where so many of our troops and related forces have been deployed for so long.ii This essay attempts to explain why. We have been addressing mainly symptoms instead of causes, and since the causes continue, the wars don’t stop. The “Developing Global Crisis” involves at least six factors that are difficult for anyone to deal with. Each has military consequences, but few respond well to military force. The result is hundreds of millions of poorly educated teen aged males maturing into desperate circumstances of failed or failing states where they encounter demagogues and WMDs instead of opportunities. The factors I allude to include: 1) population growth and population pressure (not the same things)iii, 2) corruptions of governance that prevent solutions, 3) growing income inequalities within and between nations, 4) militant religion(s), 5) rising authoritarianism in politics worldwide, and 6) global warming. Bombing global warming cools nothing and brings no rain, but global warming can definitely contribute to the collapse of states like Syria, which then export millions of their desperate people into neighbors like Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey that are in turn destabilized to some degree. Even Europe feels the stress of a million sudden immigrants, so we will consider the case of Syria in particular. But what is happening there is happening in far too many other desert states today. Keywords: demographics, failed states, terrorism, intelligence, corruption 2 The Developing Global Crisis – as Illustrated by Syria We will now march through those six very difficult factors that are causing so much chaos today using Syrian metrics wherever possible. So, for example, prior to the collapse of public order in Syria the CIAiv (and the UN’s population demographics bureau) listed Syria’s population growth rate as 2.4% in 2010. This coincided with four years of the worst drought in Syria’s recorded history, which drove at least 1.5 million people off of now barren farmland into cities where opportunities were already scarce.v 2.4 percent growth per year means that the population would double in less than 30 years if that continued.vi It also means that the “age distribution” of that population will be heavily skewed toward younger members, with an average age under 25 years. Such age distributions are often called “pyramidal” by demographers, and because they include many young who are just entering prime reproductive ages, they have considerable “momentum of growth.” Here is the CIA’s estimate for Syria’s age distribution as of 2014: vii 3 And here is how the CIA defines age distributions for readers of their annual World Factbook: “A population pyramid illustrates the age and sex structure of a country's population and may provide insights about political and social stability, as well as economic development. The population is distributed along the horizontal axis, with males shown on the left and females on the right. The male and female populations are broken down into 5-year age groups represented as horizontal bars along the vertical axis, with the youngest age groups at the bottom and the oldest at the top. The shape of the population pyramid gradually evolves over time based on fertility, mortality, and international migration trends. It is very difficult for the CIA or any observers to estimate birth, death and growth rates in active war zones, which Syria has been for several years now. But one can measure other critical demographic variables, numbers of people displaced or fleeing the country as refugees. About half of Syria’s pre-war population of about 22 million have been displaced, with at least five million fleeing as refugees into Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey and about one million more forming a stream into Europe during late 2015 and early 2016.viii,ix These were joined by refugees from other desert war zones, especially Afghanistan and Iraq. Also note that population growth (in numbers) has essentially stopped in Syria in the ages from 0-14 years. This truncates the ends of the population pyramid, making it look more like a Hershey’s chocolate kiss. That is how this chart displays the ferocious rise in death rates that came with the civil wars (best current estimate in Syria ~ 450,000 killed) and many more babies not born at all due to the general chaos and economic deprivation the wars brought. How do corruptions of governance and income inequalities factor into this tragic situation? 4 Corruptions of Governance and Income Inequalities Corruption of governance has been with us since the beginning of time, but it is among the least studied basic causes of war. The main reason for this is that most funding for social science comes from governments, which are generally not interested in people studying corruption of governance. In the context of this paper, this factor is important because it prevents many governments from solving obvious and sometimes even lethal problems for their peoples. Income inequality is also global and eternal, and is more obviously related to the civil wars that predominate today. The case of Syria is actually a small example of a very global problem. Some inequality is inevitable and even essential for healthy economies. But in general, the probability of conflict increases with large income inequalities, both within and between nations. These topics are too complex for a simple review, so I will illustrate them briefly with how both factors affect external actors, specifically the US response to the Syrian crisis. When 1.5 million Syrians left unproductive agricultural lands, they went to cities for opportunity. But the Assad family had run Syria like a Mafia estate for decades, and most of the good opportunities in Damascus were reserved for children of Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect, and favored minorities like the 10% Christians in Syria. There were not enough opportunities for all of the large numbers of young people graduating from colleges already, much less for poorly educated new arrivals from rural areas. So Assad’s security forces used the old methods against what started as mainly peaceful protests. 5 As the civil wars unfolded and metastasized in Syria, the USA wondered what to do. But its frame of reference for understanding the conflict had to be military. And because of our own domestic political dynamics it had to focus on personalities like Bashar al-Assad and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (the barbaric leader of ISIS/ISIL to whom we will return) rather than impersonal forces like population growth, systemic corruptions of governance, or climate change. So rather than deal with any of those expensive and very difficult problems, the practical question in the USA was and has been whether to bomb targets, and if so which ones? The fact that military responses, especially bombs, have zero positive effect on climate change, produce no jobs for teenagers in targeted areas, and have no therapeutic value when applied to mass migrations and income inequality does not even cross most Congressmen’s minds. They prefer simple good-and-evil stories. Meanwhile, failures of US policy pile up along with failed states in the Middle East, while forces of tribal rebellion against corrupt governments there grow inexorably. So, hundreds of millions of very poorly educated teen aged males are now maturing into desperate circumstances where demagogues like Baghdadi are eager to focus their anger. Militant Religions and Rising Authoritarianism Worldwide x Authoritarian Law is not the same as Militant Religion, but they both increase the probability of organized armed conflict in several ways. As importantly, they react synergistically such that both in combination are more dangerous than either alone. I dealt with this in more detail in a book on the causes of war in 2001 (chapter 13) xi but the essence is that authoritarian law provides the practical means for political repression or conquest, with or without justification, while militant religion provides “moral” rationales for the use of state violence against others. 6 Consider ISIS for one current example, or Al Qaeda for another. But there have been many other moral crusades in history based on some theory of religion that designates enemies (like, the Islamists point out, the medieval Crusades to free Jerusalem during the 11th – 13th centuries CE). In the Syrian case, the government of Bashar al-Assad always was authoritarian (his father Hafez infamously killed an estimated 20,000 people in Hama for resisting his rule in February, 1982).xii That authoritarian law legitimized violence for the son Bashar as well, and funded well-armed police and soldiers who repressed the early protests in 2011. After years of abuse, barrel bombs on neighborhoods, chemical attacks, and funded by a lot of Saudi money, ISIS arose in both Iraq and Syria on the principle of militant religion, claiming that the regimes they opposed were agents of Shaytan (Satan) and that “good Muslims” had a responsibility to attack such evil regimes.xiii If you are Muslim but don’t agree, well you are a “bad” Muslim, subject to execution, and they have executed thousands. If you are Shi’ite, you are infidel to them, almost worse than a Christian or Jew. There is no middle ground with ISIS; you are with them or against them, but cannot be neutral. The current ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, takes this goal and style to its limit by claiming a mission from “god” to rule everyone on earth under a “new Caliphate.” Either factor is very dangerous.
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