Syria: The First of the Climate-Chaged-Caused Wars

This is what it's going to be from now on: People desperate for water and food forcing governments that have neither to respond with what they do have: weapons of mass destruction.

Unless Obama is delivering water, food and climate change reversal on those missiles, he's accomplishing nothing.

Digby:

Read the whole thing here. It is the most cogent recitation and analysis of the Syrian crisis that I've seen. While my opposition to this intervention is rooted in global concerns which are unrelated to this set of circumstances, these particulars bolster my instincts and my fundamental skepticism about the wisdom of this action.

Here's just one interesting insight that should make us all step back and ask ourselves whether our long term interest might be better served by concentrating on a different issue that really does require American "intervention":

Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance. Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011. Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well. But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it.

In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others crop failures reached 75%. And generally as much as 85% of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies. Outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”

The domestic Syrian refugees immediately found that they had to compete not only with one another for scarce food, water and jobs, but also with the already existing foreign refugee population. Syria already was a refuge for quarter of a million Palestinians and about a hundred thousand people who had fled the war and occupation of Iraq. Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers. And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.

If that doesn't sound like a premonition of many more crises to come, I don't know what does. Perhaps we should stop blowing things up for a little while and concentrate on being a global leader on the real existential crisis of our time: climate change. Tomahawk missiles aren't going to solve it, that's for sure.

I know it's long but please read this entire article. If you are persuaded, send it to your Representative, particularly if he or she is a progressive Democrat who is likely to be arm twisted by the Syria hawks in the Democratic leadership. It's vitally important that we break this cycle of military intervention to solve problems that can't be solved by military intervention. There are much bigger, long term challenges underlying all of this this that are papered over by America's status as the world's policeman and it's not serving any of us well.

It's not that the US has no leading role to play in the world. It's just that we are playing the wrong one.

Yes, this is exactly what the Pentagon has been war-gaming about for years now: non-stop civil and regional wars over resources destroyed by climate change.