World War III Is Brewing?
This past fortnight there were reports Russia was instructing its government people to bring back their kids from abroad. They were preparing for nuclear exchanges and World War III. At the same time there have been news reports saying the Pentagon is waring that World War III is looming large. Those sources are a bit fringe and hard to credit (especially in a world where fake news sites say extraordinary things in the hopes of harvesting clicks), but the main stream media all of a sudden is reporting similar things.
Other parties are also issuing warnings. The crux of the biscuit is Aleppo where Assad's forces are present and the Americans want to bomb them. Th Russians are still supporting Assad, and so it flies right in to Putin's face to be even thinking about it.
If World War III really is brewing over Syria, I'd want the West to abandon its plans in Syria. It's not worth it. Aleppo has been reduced to rubble, which is bad enough, but really, the continued conflict is creating more refugees by the day. As much as Bashar Assad is a horrible dictator to let go, turning Syria into a flashpoint for global conflict with the Russians is just unpalatable. That being said, you have to wonder about the timing. This close to the Presidential elections makes Obama a lame duck POTUS who is going into caretaker mode, so this would present an opportunity when American leadership is in a political limbo. If you're Putin and you meant to go to war with America, then this moment through to the end of the year represents an opportunity.
Anyway, it is interesting how these things are lining themselves up. I don't think there will be a world War III. I just think it's interesting people in power want to toy with the rhetoric of a World War.
Achilles' Choice
I am still shocked by the passing of Seiji Hirao. 53 seems much too young. He had everything in his life that he could ever want, but 53years is all he got. He certainly got more than Achilles, I guess. Lots of Important people have died younger. All the same I'm still shocked, and it makes me ponder about the meaning of things, this and that, and the value of life.
After I wrote my little entry on Hirao, I remembered the first time I met him in 1995. I'd left Dentsu Australia and was freelancing when Bucks Night Terry rang up and wanted me to dig up an old report I'd written for Dentsu in late 1994. The report was about the successful bid for the 2000 Olympics by the Sydney Olympics Committee, and the salient points to the strategy in how they went about trying to win. Dentsu at the time were busily preparing for the Nagano Olympics but wanted to try and get Osaka for 2004.
My report would have been about 20pages long. A lot of it was based on statements in the public record as well as Rod McGeoch's account in 'The Bid', plus ringing around a few sports bodies. When I filed it in 1994, I got no response whatsoever out of Dentsu Tokyo so I had forgotten all about it, but at the time I filed it, I would have told Bucks Night Terry what was in it and he remembered it.
Seiji Hirao came through Sydney on Kobe Steelers Rugby business but somehow made Bucks Night Terry his gopher, and Terry had told him about the report because Seiji Hirao told Terry he was part of the Osaka Committee. Terry was a classic panderer - hence his strange nickname - but he was very good at it. One thing led to another and I met Mr. Hirao in the office of Mino Metals in Chatswood. Mr. Hirao didn't want to read the report, he wanted me to give him an oral digest, so I spent 20 minutes going through the ins and outs of the Sydney bid's approach as far as I could piece together. He didn't say anything, simply nodded and walked out.
Afterwards Terry told me the report went to the Osaka Committee and that Mr. Hirao wanted to go all in on the recommendations I'd written. He also had some feedback about my presentation which I won't go into here, but basically nobody likes a smartarse and I am one. After that, he went off to the UK to coach the Japan Rugby team where the team famously got that historic drubbing of 145-17. Later that year he was backing Sydney and I had the chance to go drinking with Mr. Hirao and Bucks Night Terry. It was a bloody long night. I staggered home at 3 or 4 in the morning, drunk as a skunk.
For a few years there in the late 90s, Bucks Night Terry started being an agent for Australia Rugby payers looking for professional contracts in Japan. That's how I ended up interpreting at the contract negotiations. That was all Seiji Hirao helping out Terry. Mr. Hirao would come through Sydney about once a year and I would meet him now and then. I'm not sure I got along with him so much because when we were sober, we'd never really talk. I can remember quite a few uncomfortably silent rooms, just sitting with him. He was a gregarious guy when drunk but when sober, there were simply some people with whom he'd deign not talk, and I was one of them. Maybe he was shy, but it was hard to imagine.
I learned it can suck to meet famous people. Especially those with a lifelong record of success. no mater how humble they try to be, they just can't hide their ego. Mr. Hirao was one of those characters. He wasn't arrogant or meant to be superior; he just couldn't stop himself acting that way; and he wasn't the sort to be self-reflective about it either. He was in some ways a very awkward person to be around if you weren't from rugby or of rugby or about rugby. And I decidedly wasn't from his world where he was a king.
Anyway.... I lost touch with that whole thing about the time Bucks Night Terry closed up shop with his little agency business and started a restaurant. They were good friends and stayed in touch, but I fell out of Terry's orbit. It's just how life goes. Now that he's gone I can't stop thinking about those awkward moments of silence sitting in a room with Seiji Hirao, "Mr Rugby" of Japan.
It's really rough.
I rang Terry today and he was really bummed out, but he had known it was coming for about a year. He said he wished Mr. Hirao could have made it to the Rugby World Cup in Japan in 3years time, but it wasn't to be. In honour of the man Terry said he was giving up smoking. I don't know how long that vow's going to last but the fact that Terry wanted to vow it, alone spoke volumes.
If nothing else, I am bummed out.
UPDATE:
I understated how funny he could be. I've been reading a transcript of one of his last speeches and in it is a line about how much he loved rugby. He said you have to love what you do. "Nobody I know ever became no.1 in Japan doing something they had to do because they had no other options in life".
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Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
2016/10/21
2015/10/14
View From The Couch - 14/Oct/2015
Syria Without An Endgame
Syria worries me. The Assad regime in Syria is a brutal dictatorship, of which there is no doubt or disputing. In our contemporary western sensibilities, we would like for Bashar Assad to leave the stage of politics and give up his reign as President. Yet, if there is anything that is just as clear about these Arab states is that when you remove the patriarchal secular dictator, the power vacuum left by their death invites all manners of sectarian crazies with even more violent mentation. Removing Gaddafi, Mubarak and even Saddam Hussein has not brought the light of democracy to these countries as hoped by democratic nations of this world.
What has emerged is the uncomfortable truth that democracy is possibly unworkable in the middle east, and that nobody counted on this likelihood at all. In one sense it is arguable whether we in the west are doing democracy all that well anyway; but it is also arguable as to whether democracy really does deliver the kinds of results its stated goals indicate. We think democracy is a pretty good thing - warts and all - because it fits into our cultural context and historic inheritance and reinforces our social values through its operation. It ignores the possibility that fundamental pillars of a working democracy like separation of church and state (or any religion for that matter) or separation of powers - especially the independence of courts from the executive, and for that matter women getting a vote; these things might all be an anathema in the middle east where there is simply no equivalent cultural or historic reason that would lead them to such positions.
Naturally the phenomenon of voting in extremists into government has taken place in Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt tells you quite a bit about the people doing the voting. In a kind of circular logic, the desire for extremism brings about the military junta to clamp down for peace, and that's what you had in Iraq and Egypt. It also doesn't say a lot for Yasser Arafat's tenure as PLO leader that the voters, once they were given a vote, wanted even more extreme action than a former terrorist.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying, removing Bashar Assad is no promise for better times or more peace and prosperity in Syria. If the cultural context has anything to tell us, it tells us that the alternatives to Assad are likely much worse than the secular, suit-wearing, beardless, Oxford educated Assad. Any discussion about Peace in Syria can't skirt this problem, although the rhetoric the west puts it on fairly decisive grounds that they want Assad gone.
As it turns out, Putin is dead set on keeping Assad exactly in place, in power and has somehow recruited the Iranians and the Chinese to this cause, while the USA and NATO forces attempt to supply the rebels who are not ISIS. Putin is hammering anybody and everybody who is opposed to Assad inside Syria, which means the mostly group of rebels funded by the USA are getting hit as well as ISIS positions. They're arguing about it but it's not going to present a solution for what happens after Assad is removed.
However this thing is meant to turn out, it's looking like it will be a long time before we get a picture of the endgame to this civil war in Syria - and that assumes it's not going to spread.
Putin In The Boot
One imagines Vladimir Putin must be laughing. Xi Jing-Ping probably is laughing too, but we'll go with Vlad first. Putin, in his second incarnation as Russian President has been rather like a 19th century colonialist. The incursion in to Ukraine to regain Crimea is nothing short of an imperialist land grab; his response to the mistaken shooting of MH17 has been nothing short of brazen; and Syria is offering him another opportunity to press his advantage through power projection and confrontational diplomacy against the west. In short, he's a ratbag, and he's not even our ratbag. He's just this ratbag out there behaving like the political clock stopped in 1914.
Like some parody of the boorish Russian peasant, Putin seems impervious to the opprobrium and contempt heaped upon him for his actions. He simply doesn't give a shit what we think of him - and rightly so, he is the strong and we are the weak. Behold his mighty bold moves to restore military prestige to Russia. No, it's truly impressive if it weren't like some timewarp joke.
Sarcasm aside, Putin has managed to get a port and base in Syria out of all this chaos and he even managed to wrangle an airbase out of Iraq to stage his version of anti-ISIS action. It is as if the world is playing 'Stratego' while he is playing 'Steel Fury Kharkov 1942'. One imagines the Russian forces do not have rules of engagement or any respect for human rights or international law. The only reason they're not rogue is because they sit on the UN Security Council. It's nuts, but there we have it.
In stark contrast, what have we got? Our unwillingness to jump into World War III, boots and all. Really, can you blame us for that? It's remarkable how we've ended up in this situation.
Air China Delivery
Somewhere in the media is a report that tells us China has sent war planes to operate in Syria, helping the Russians. They're trying out their new Aircraft carrier and J-15 fighter bombers. I don't know about you but this is all strangely reminiscent of Hitler sending his Stuka squadrons to the Spanish Civil war in 1935. When you're blatantly dress-rehearsing your fledgling carrier and war planes on a nation in civil war, (a country with which you have had very little historic contact, to boot), there's really no moral or ethical defence is there?
I am reminded the 'Guernica' by Picasso. I'm also reminded of the apocryphal story about the Nazis who visited him in Paris and on seeing the 'Guernica', asked him " did you do this?"; to which Picasso replied, "no, you did".
The thing that scares me is that these wildcat proxy wars and testing out troops and equipment is somehow going to turn into a full-blown World War III. It's highly likely if everybody sticks to their best senses but you just don't know with the Vladimir Putins and Xi Jing-Pings of this world.
Syria worries me. The Assad regime in Syria is a brutal dictatorship, of which there is no doubt or disputing. In our contemporary western sensibilities, we would like for Bashar Assad to leave the stage of politics and give up his reign as President. Yet, if there is anything that is just as clear about these Arab states is that when you remove the patriarchal secular dictator, the power vacuum left by their death invites all manners of sectarian crazies with even more violent mentation. Removing Gaddafi, Mubarak and even Saddam Hussein has not brought the light of democracy to these countries as hoped by democratic nations of this world.
What has emerged is the uncomfortable truth that democracy is possibly unworkable in the middle east, and that nobody counted on this likelihood at all. In one sense it is arguable whether we in the west are doing democracy all that well anyway; but it is also arguable as to whether democracy really does deliver the kinds of results its stated goals indicate. We think democracy is a pretty good thing - warts and all - because it fits into our cultural context and historic inheritance and reinforces our social values through its operation. It ignores the possibility that fundamental pillars of a working democracy like separation of church and state (or any religion for that matter) or separation of powers - especially the independence of courts from the executive, and for that matter women getting a vote; these things might all be an anathema in the middle east where there is simply no equivalent cultural or historic reason that would lead them to such positions.
Naturally the phenomenon of voting in extremists into government has taken place in Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt tells you quite a bit about the people doing the voting. In a kind of circular logic, the desire for extremism brings about the military junta to clamp down for peace, and that's what you had in Iraq and Egypt. It also doesn't say a lot for Yasser Arafat's tenure as PLO leader that the voters, once they were given a vote, wanted even more extreme action than a former terrorist.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying, removing Bashar Assad is no promise for better times or more peace and prosperity in Syria. If the cultural context has anything to tell us, it tells us that the alternatives to Assad are likely much worse than the secular, suit-wearing, beardless, Oxford educated Assad. Any discussion about Peace in Syria can't skirt this problem, although the rhetoric the west puts it on fairly decisive grounds that they want Assad gone.
As it turns out, Putin is dead set on keeping Assad exactly in place, in power and has somehow recruited the Iranians and the Chinese to this cause, while the USA and NATO forces attempt to supply the rebels who are not ISIS. Putin is hammering anybody and everybody who is opposed to Assad inside Syria, which means the mostly group of rebels funded by the USA are getting hit as well as ISIS positions. They're arguing about it but it's not going to present a solution for what happens after Assad is removed.
However this thing is meant to turn out, it's looking like it will be a long time before we get a picture of the endgame to this civil war in Syria - and that assumes it's not going to spread.
Putin In The Boot
One imagines Vladimir Putin must be laughing. Xi Jing-Ping probably is laughing too, but we'll go with Vlad first. Putin, in his second incarnation as Russian President has been rather like a 19th century colonialist. The incursion in to Ukraine to regain Crimea is nothing short of an imperialist land grab; his response to the mistaken shooting of MH17 has been nothing short of brazen; and Syria is offering him another opportunity to press his advantage through power projection and confrontational diplomacy against the west. In short, he's a ratbag, and he's not even our ratbag. He's just this ratbag out there behaving like the political clock stopped in 1914.
Like some parody of the boorish Russian peasant, Putin seems impervious to the opprobrium and contempt heaped upon him for his actions. He simply doesn't give a shit what we think of him - and rightly so, he is the strong and we are the weak. Behold his mighty bold moves to restore military prestige to Russia. No, it's truly impressive if it weren't like some timewarp joke.
Sarcasm aside, Putin has managed to get a port and base in Syria out of all this chaos and he even managed to wrangle an airbase out of Iraq to stage his version of anti-ISIS action. It is as if the world is playing 'Stratego' while he is playing 'Steel Fury Kharkov 1942'. One imagines the Russian forces do not have rules of engagement or any respect for human rights or international law. The only reason they're not rogue is because they sit on the UN Security Council. It's nuts, but there we have it.
In stark contrast, what have we got? Our unwillingness to jump into World War III, boots and all. Really, can you blame us for that? It's remarkable how we've ended up in this situation.
Air China Delivery
Somewhere in the media is a report that tells us China has sent war planes to operate in Syria, helping the Russians. They're trying out their new Aircraft carrier and J-15 fighter bombers. I don't know about you but this is all strangely reminiscent of Hitler sending his Stuka squadrons to the Spanish Civil war in 1935. When you're blatantly dress-rehearsing your fledgling carrier and war planes on a nation in civil war, (a country with which you have had very little historic contact, to boot), there's really no moral or ethical defence is there?
I am reminded the 'Guernica' by Picasso. I'm also reminded of the apocryphal story about the Nazis who visited him in Paris and on seeing the 'Guernica', asked him " did you do this?"; to which Picasso replied, "no, you did".
The thing that scares me is that these wildcat proxy wars and testing out troops and equipment is somehow going to turn into a full-blown World War III. It's highly likely if everybody sticks to their best senses but you just don't know with the Vladimir Putins and Xi Jing-Pings of this world.
2015/09/07
Syria Is The Apocalypse
'Reductio Ad Absurdum' Of State Power
The modern state monopolises power, and with it the capacity for violence. Yes it's true that in the USA there is an ardent belief that their constitution allows citizens to bear arms in order to confront this monopoly of power and violence, but strangely enough the kinds of people who subscribe to this view are also the most likely to support the kind of state power being exercised against minorities. That is to say, we would believe the protestations of the NRA more about the Second Amendment, if they were jumping up and down in support of black people getting shot by the police, and not the police. Still, this entry is not about that topic.
The ultimate state control of monopolised power is the modern military junta. Military juntas exist as proof that a stable state is not necessarily democratic or pleasant. People go on about stability ("vote Tony Abbott for Stability," the SMH said! Ha!) Many military juntas come into being at the end of civil strife, and enforce the military power as policing in order to keep a lid on the civil strife. This is true of Franco as it was of Pinochet, Saddam Hussein's or Bashar Assad's regimes. We in the democratised 'developed' world view these political arrangements with a great deal of contempt, but as the experience of Iraq has demonstrated, there are far worse things than the stability assured by a military junta.
Similarly, Syria is turning out to be the second recent case whereby our own idealism for democracy has brought to an end a stable junta government. In writing that sentence, I am overcome with a cultural revulsion, for I - in no way in hell - support military juntas anywhere on this planet. It is hard for me to write a sentence that even vaguely validates their existence. Yet the historic evidence is pretty clear that some of these juntas are sitting on great fissure lines of civil conflict and once unleashed, the state cannot even survive. This is a terrible state of affairs, where on one extreme you have the Orwellian regime and Room 101 and the torture never stops; and when we remove this horrible state that keeps the populace in a social stasis of uncomfortable peace, we end up with Bosnia and Kosovo, the battle of Fallujah, or the Islamic State which is an attempt to reconstruct a state, but around religious laws instead of common laws.
All of which is to say, military juntas come into being to stave off a slide into complete chaos, but then overstay their welcome as it goes through its own paranoia phase, torturing and killing people to maintain this uncomfortable stability. Again, I'm not writing this in praise of these horrible arrangements; I'm simply pointing out that in the absence of strong democratic credentials and traditions, a military junta ends up being the compromise arrangement to keep civil peace. You have to think of Tito's Yugoslavia as the shining example - but all these nasty regimes exist because of necessity. Nobody likes this stuff. And when they fail, they tend to fail spectacularly as they descend into chaos.
The refugee exodus of Syria isn't just an issue of Assad and his brutal regime or the fact that Vladimir Putin will not give-up his ally facing the Mediterranean Sea. To that end, Putin has now stationed his own warplanes in Syria. In the mean time we have Tony Abbott trying to engineer a 'request' from the President of the USA to enter into bombing runs on ISIL-held positions in Syria. Not only is Tony Abbott exacerbating the problems inside Syria which is already a war-torn post-apocalyptic landscape, he is adding to the reasons for residents to flee as refugees, while risking coming to blows with Russian warplanes. The people are running because civilisation has collapsed around them. Their civilisation collapsed because it was held together by the military might of the state, and then the state wasn't there any more - just the violence. And we want to ad to the violence.
The Syrian Collapse
Syria came to this collapse because of the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring of course was prompted by high commodity prices, which led to staple foods being too expensive to buy. Not even the long-standing regime of Muamar Gaddafi could hold on in the face of the high commodity prices. Similarly, in Egypt, the high commodity prices drove people into the streets to protest and that brought down Mubarak's regime which had stood solid since the assassination of Anwar Sadat. The irony is that the commodity prices surged because oil prices surged, and the oil prices surged because these very same OPEC regimes opted to make a killing out of surging oil prices thereby creating the conditions for their own demise. Oh the irony!
All the same, what is not well known is that Syria underwent a crippling drought between 2006 and 2011. This was such an historic drought that it decimated longstanding farming operations and communities. The drought pushed whole populations into urban areas without any means of survival. And the military junta remained locked in its rigid "maintain-order-at-all-costs" sort of thinking, which made things worse. The historic drought was most likely (nobody ever gets to prove these things) due to Global Warming and Climate Change. Again, these countries that export oil for combustion created the conditions whereby they strangled themselves. Oh the double irony!!
Today, Bashar Assad is in charge of his military, but Syria itself has collapsed as a civilisation. It is every bit like a failed state - much like Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and on the same trajectory as Iraq and Afghanistan. As Global Warming and Climate Change continue, there will be more and more places that succumb to its effects. There will be more refugees from failed states. The wave of refugees coming from these places are people who want to remain civilised. It's time we accepted this simple fact. We could do much worse than to take in these people.
Syria today therefore offers us a glimpse into the post-apocalyptic future we ought to fear. The fragile, brittle state collapses as result of economic and environmental chaos, there's nowhere to run. We can't go around assuming this is stuff that only happens in far away lands.
How Many Refugees?
Before the recent surge of Syrian refugees, I did a quick search on Google and found that in 2015, the refugee count according to the UN was 60 million people. Out of the 195 or so UN member nations, let's hypothetically say 100 are up to receiving refugees. The other 95 are candidates to send out more, rather than receive, but we'll leave that issue for a moment. I know this is a gross oversimplification, but I want to lead you through this so you understand the scale of numbers. That would make it 600,000 per nation to take in from the refugees that exist right now. If we said the realistic number of nations that are able to take refugees was more like 50, we're talking about 1,200,000 per nation.
That's a big number, but it goes to show that Germany is doing pretty well when Angela Merkel says they will take 800,000 people. It's effectively saying they'll add 1% to their population with refugees. In any case, 800,000 is not entirely out of the order of magnitude that sits between 600,000 and 1,200,000 people.
Australia on the other hand, says it will take 20,000 this year. It's an amazingly paltry figure, really. It's a whole order of magnitude out from the problem as it exists. If it were left to Australia, it would take 60years' worth of refugee visas before it took in its share of 1,200,000. So one wonders just what on earth Peter Dutton is asking "what can Australia do to help?" when the mathematics are very simple - Australia needs to up its refugee intake to about 240,000 before it can claim it's punching its weight.
More to the point, that 1% rise in German population is probably going to add a whole bunch to GDP growth in the coming years. Think about all the new whitegoods and TVs and demand on real estate that will arise out of the arrival of these people. Its not a half-dumb move to be taking these people in. Australia's economy could do a lot worse than adding 240,000 people straight off the plane from Syria.
The modern state monopolises power, and with it the capacity for violence. Yes it's true that in the USA there is an ardent belief that their constitution allows citizens to bear arms in order to confront this monopoly of power and violence, but strangely enough the kinds of people who subscribe to this view are also the most likely to support the kind of state power being exercised against minorities. That is to say, we would believe the protestations of the NRA more about the Second Amendment, if they were jumping up and down in support of black people getting shot by the police, and not the police. Still, this entry is not about that topic.
The ultimate state control of monopolised power is the modern military junta. Military juntas exist as proof that a stable state is not necessarily democratic or pleasant. People go on about stability ("vote Tony Abbott for Stability," the SMH said! Ha!) Many military juntas come into being at the end of civil strife, and enforce the military power as policing in order to keep a lid on the civil strife. This is true of Franco as it was of Pinochet, Saddam Hussein's or Bashar Assad's regimes. We in the democratised 'developed' world view these political arrangements with a great deal of contempt, but as the experience of Iraq has demonstrated, there are far worse things than the stability assured by a military junta.
Similarly, Syria is turning out to be the second recent case whereby our own idealism for democracy has brought to an end a stable junta government. In writing that sentence, I am overcome with a cultural revulsion, for I - in no way in hell - support military juntas anywhere on this planet. It is hard for me to write a sentence that even vaguely validates their existence. Yet the historic evidence is pretty clear that some of these juntas are sitting on great fissure lines of civil conflict and once unleashed, the state cannot even survive. This is a terrible state of affairs, where on one extreme you have the Orwellian regime and Room 101 and the torture never stops; and when we remove this horrible state that keeps the populace in a social stasis of uncomfortable peace, we end up with Bosnia and Kosovo, the battle of Fallujah, or the Islamic State which is an attempt to reconstruct a state, but around religious laws instead of common laws.
All of which is to say, military juntas come into being to stave off a slide into complete chaos, but then overstay their welcome as it goes through its own paranoia phase, torturing and killing people to maintain this uncomfortable stability. Again, I'm not writing this in praise of these horrible arrangements; I'm simply pointing out that in the absence of strong democratic credentials and traditions, a military junta ends up being the compromise arrangement to keep civil peace. You have to think of Tito's Yugoslavia as the shining example - but all these nasty regimes exist because of necessity. Nobody likes this stuff. And when they fail, they tend to fail spectacularly as they descend into chaos.
The refugee exodus of Syria isn't just an issue of Assad and his brutal regime or the fact that Vladimir Putin will not give-up his ally facing the Mediterranean Sea. To that end, Putin has now stationed his own warplanes in Syria. In the mean time we have Tony Abbott trying to engineer a 'request' from the President of the USA to enter into bombing runs on ISIL-held positions in Syria. Not only is Tony Abbott exacerbating the problems inside Syria which is already a war-torn post-apocalyptic landscape, he is adding to the reasons for residents to flee as refugees, while risking coming to blows with Russian warplanes. The people are running because civilisation has collapsed around them. Their civilisation collapsed because it was held together by the military might of the state, and then the state wasn't there any more - just the violence. And we want to ad to the violence.
The Syrian Collapse
Syria came to this collapse because of the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring of course was prompted by high commodity prices, which led to staple foods being too expensive to buy. Not even the long-standing regime of Muamar Gaddafi could hold on in the face of the high commodity prices. Similarly, in Egypt, the high commodity prices drove people into the streets to protest and that brought down Mubarak's regime which had stood solid since the assassination of Anwar Sadat. The irony is that the commodity prices surged because oil prices surged, and the oil prices surged because these very same OPEC regimes opted to make a killing out of surging oil prices thereby creating the conditions for their own demise. Oh the irony!
All the same, what is not well known is that Syria underwent a crippling drought between 2006 and 2011. This was such an historic drought that it decimated longstanding farming operations and communities. The drought pushed whole populations into urban areas without any means of survival. And the military junta remained locked in its rigid "maintain-order-at-all-costs" sort of thinking, which made things worse. The historic drought was most likely (nobody ever gets to prove these things) due to Global Warming and Climate Change. Again, these countries that export oil for combustion created the conditions whereby they strangled themselves. Oh the double irony!!
Today, Bashar Assad is in charge of his military, but Syria itself has collapsed as a civilisation. It is every bit like a failed state - much like Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and on the same trajectory as Iraq and Afghanistan. As Global Warming and Climate Change continue, there will be more and more places that succumb to its effects. There will be more refugees from failed states. The wave of refugees coming from these places are people who want to remain civilised. It's time we accepted this simple fact. We could do much worse than to take in these people.
Syria today therefore offers us a glimpse into the post-apocalyptic future we ought to fear. The fragile, brittle state collapses as result of economic and environmental chaos, there's nowhere to run. We can't go around assuming this is stuff that only happens in far away lands.
How Many Refugees?
Before the recent surge of Syrian refugees, I did a quick search on Google and found that in 2015, the refugee count according to the UN was 60 million people. Out of the 195 or so UN member nations, let's hypothetically say 100 are up to receiving refugees. The other 95 are candidates to send out more, rather than receive, but we'll leave that issue for a moment. I know this is a gross oversimplification, but I want to lead you through this so you understand the scale of numbers. That would make it 600,000 per nation to take in from the refugees that exist right now. If we said the realistic number of nations that are able to take refugees was more like 50, we're talking about 1,200,000 per nation.
That's a big number, but it goes to show that Germany is doing pretty well when Angela Merkel says they will take 800,000 people. It's effectively saying they'll add 1% to their population with refugees. In any case, 800,000 is not entirely out of the order of magnitude that sits between 600,000 and 1,200,000 people.
Australia on the other hand, says it will take 20,000 this year. It's an amazingly paltry figure, really. It's a whole order of magnitude out from the problem as it exists. If it were left to Australia, it would take 60years' worth of refugee visas before it took in its share of 1,200,000. So one wonders just what on earth Peter Dutton is asking "what can Australia do to help?" when the mathematics are very simple - Australia needs to up its refugee intake to about 240,000 before it can claim it's punching its weight.
More to the point, that 1% rise in German population is probably going to add a whole bunch to GDP growth in the coming years. Think about all the new whitegoods and TVs and demand on real estate that will arise out of the arrival of these people. Its not a half-dumb move to be taking these people in. Australia's economy could do a lot worse than adding 240,000 people straight off the plane from Syria.
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