14 Million Refugees Make the Levant Unmanageable

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.

The "Levant" includes Israel, and the Muslim map of it almost resembles the Biblical borders of Israel as mandated by God Himself.

Islam is a Satanic inspired "religion."

That is all you need to know.

The present state of Syria & Lebanon is the consequence of, and the worst consequences ever, of a meddling western & Sunni-Middle East regime change agenda, creating even more of a fertile field for extremists than the failed regime change agenda that helped deliver the Taliban into power in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Prior to the regime change agenda against Assad, we had regional security issues with Syria, BUT the security situation was fairly stable and containable; & there had not been any major Syria-Israel confrontations in a long time; & the Sunni-Shia sectarian strife in Iraq had not spread to Syria.

Israel had already taken out Assad’s nuclear ambition and Assad’s forces are no match for the very experienced and weapons-superior Israeli forces.

So who was after Assad? Who was he on the outs with? The Saudis and some of the shieks of he Gulf States. Why? Religiously he is an apostate to devout Sunnis. In areas of government Assad runs a secular regime, unlike the Saudis and the Gulf States, not even allowing Islam to be the “state religion” and allowing that a Syrian president does not have to be a Muslim. In the region, Assad made friends with the fundamentalist Shia theocrats of Iran instead of the radical fundamentalist Wahabi Sunni influenced heads of Saudi Arabia. Why? Why not? With the “Arab” and Sunni-dominant regimes NOT liking him much, which regional power was he going to make friends of. Is Assad a “good guy”? NO, surely not. But THAT is not why our so-called friends were involved in the regime change agenda against him.

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