Discussion for article #242947
Other are more skeptical of that argument: âThere is a water problem in the Middle East," Freier said. âThe Middle Eastâs political problems predate the heightened water problem.â
Well, sure. Almost all problems exist already in some form or another. Iraq wasn´t an Edenic representative democracy before the Bush administration debathified the country, alienating the Sunnis and leading eventually to ISIS. But when you add 1.5 million Syrians displaced by drought to the refugees streaming in from our ill-advised and bungled Iraq War, you have a prescription for political upheaval, and ISIS was there and ready.
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If you folks in the media would devote at least as much attention to the national security communityâs concerns about climate change as you do to the stupid shit said by Trump, the public would be exponentially more informed on the issue.
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True. That said, Ms. Sneed did a great job putting together this article â itâs very informative. Id love to see more here and Iâd love to see more of the Main Stream Mediaâand, gee, that includes FOX Entertainmentâtackle this issue from these angles. Our nationâs security people have been working on it for the better part of a decade and more ⌠so no rational reason for the news media not to perform some comprehensive reporting.
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Iran didnât come to the bargaining table because it enjoys the process. Part of the driving force behind the decision to talk was water. Iran is facing increasing problems with water shortages. It has not done a good job of managing water resources and with sanctions, has faced increasing problems trying to address the problem.
Iranâs rulers are increasingly worried about this matter and aware that drought is driving more and more people off the land and into major cities, increasing the potential for civil unrest. They are also competing with neighbors for water. Sanders is no dummy, nor in this case are the threat analysts in the military. This is going to get worse and it is not going to be pretty, and to be blunt, climate deniers are not only incredibly stupid, they are increasingly dangerous in their diversion of attention from a problem that affects the entire globe.
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A Bernie Sanders story containing substantive information! Color me shocked!
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It is hard to imagine that it would not really. In an already disordered part of the world if you take away resources or hit with more natural disasters than it puts more strain on people and adds more conflict. The more instability the more conflict the more people are open to the terrorist sort of notions.
In some parts of the world right now the Jihadies are the only ones paying living wages and if somebody wants to make anything that is what they have to do.
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âTrue. That said, Ms. Sneed did a great job putting together this articleâ
True dat. Well done Tierney. As well written as the articles at CounterPunch.
Problem is, too nuanced and sophisticated. âBomb 'em anywayâ seems to always win the day.
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I think Ms. Sneed writes the best articles here.
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Beat me to it. Political problems evolve and adjust. Just because water wasnât an issue several hundred years ago doesnât mean a water shortage wonât exacerbate existing problems.
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If you put yourself right into the mix and consider that you were dying of thirst or your family was, what would you do to survive?
When we get down to the skinny of things, the survival instinct is everything.
But water WAS an issue âseveral hundred years agoâ. Water to irrigate and land to irrigate water with have been, understandably, the central economic fixation of the entire region in which the related systems collectively referred to as the Great Rift Valley lie for centuries.
The GRV systems all connect to the larger picture of ongoing shifts in the planetâs mantel that are the focus of academic study in plate tectonics. The seven larger plates engage to cause continuing massive change over millions of years; but at increasingly smaller scales, over decreasing time periods, the results of shifts in among minor plates and microplates is more readily felt at the human scale.
Many if not most of us are acquainted with people living here whose grandparents or parents or even they themselves came to this country from one the political states or regions in the area southeast Turkey south into Mozambique, and laterally from the central Congolese countries to the east African coastline at the bottom and from eastern Libya to the western edges of India and deep into central Pakistan at the top.
Itâs not necessarily a universal theme, at least at the level of their consciousness while living there unto them leaving, but for many single most pervasive themes of OBJECTIVE reality about living anywhere in the GRV region have to do with land and irrigation. And in the context of the lives of the ones Iâve spoken with, this has actually played out in the form of decreasing access to and availability of fresh water stores WITHIIN THEIR CONSCIOUS LIVES. I know a family of first generation Maronite Christian landholders from Lebanon in which the members of it older than 40 have personal recollectin of relatively thriving orchards and other farming crops on land that for several decades now has received insufficient to effectively no fresh water.
Whatâs also noteworthy among those ârecentâ immigrants is a decided inclination to blame POLITICS for what is, in the longer view, a panregional phenomenon. Agrarian families from all across the Levant blame upstream countries, particularly Turkey and âthe Kurdsâ for effectively diverting âall our waterâ away from flowing south to get to their land. And thatâs been the case they could âsee with our own eyesâ since around 1980 - as could their parents and grandparents going back more decades.
The parts of the GRV opening up has been most dramatic, and most dramatically played out, in the Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, where itâs been manifesting itself as a huge steaming salty destructive megasnake cracking open the earth. So, not surprisingly, the folks in those countries were whose nation states fell first to failure, war, nihilism, warlords & chaos (See Ridley Scottâs portrayal in Blackhawk Down.), and, for the lucky few, emigration, mainly into Europe and the Americas.
Why does it come as any surprise that this has all been playing out in the near Middle East more recently? AGAIN the easy blame is cast on its ephemeral manifestations in politics, and again, as in the West & East African Rifts, itâs proceeded relatively quickly from shortages, internal migrations and political upheaval to ordinary lives dominated by militias, extremists, war lords, nihilism and chaos.
Yes, of course climate change is a huge factor; but that factor is playing out on a field of plate tectonics.
Now, if we humans outside that field, especially those of us most obviously not living thru the horror of it and also most easily reached, refuse to take on the quite natural challenge of masses of refugees, then the resentment of that refusal is bound to go SOMEWHERE. Many of them will hang in stubbornly and die, but the younger generations, those born into and raised up in the constant consciousness of this phenomenon, theyâre going to want to blame somebody, and many of them are bound to find themselves inexorably attracted to what are objectively extreme politics, tactics and âsolutionsâ.
Seen in this context, for some percentage of young people to dedicate their lives to religious fanaticism really doesnât seem in the least surprising.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) may have been mocked for his claim during Saturdayâs Democratic debate that âclimate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism.â
Alter that statement to
âmocked by FOX news and criminally tolerated by the MSMâ
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Geologic and Geographic ignorance in the GOP is matched by their ignorance in everything but the art of amassing votes for the Party.
And because the 0.001% (through its action arm, the GOP) is quite successful in (a) securing a base in Congress from which to thwart political action on a wide range of thrusts (b) channeling Fourth Estate presentations into the areas of âThe Political HorseRaceâ, fluff and wedge issues, this state affairs may come down to the fact that profit may surpass survival in this human race of ours.
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Well, maybe from oil companies dicking with a lot of these countries and the folks that live there, but I just donât see where the effects have push some folks to religious extremism yet.
Well of course this is true. At the macro-historical level, we have always had mass migrations of (tribal) populations based upon changing local climatic conditions affecting their ability to raise crops or tend to the grazing of their livestock.
When your community experienced a drought, you packed your earthly possessions, folded your tent, and moved.
When you got out of your current desert zone, to a more fertile âland of milk and honeyâ, guess what? It was already occupied.
The people already there, most times, didnât want to accept the competition/presence of the new immigrants, nor did they want to leave themselves. The result? Conflict occurred resulting in Displacement, Rejection or Elimination by war.
This was all before the advent of the nation state and fortified boundaries, which now serve to prevent such climate-caused migrations.
The current situation with the Middle East refugees has much of the same element to it - regardless of the modern ability to transport in water, food and other relief supplies - but now the borders are guarded and the movement is prohibited and we have a very well publicized crisis to solve.
With great leadership and statesmanship, perhaps the world can turn this into a window of opportunity to solve multiple interlocking problems with long-term solutions.
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Religious extremism isnât so much a cause of violence as it is a concurrent result of other factors, and a convenient context for manipulating people.
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There is a lot of great potential. The money people could really be of useâŚif they cared just a tad more than they do about people.
This is exactly whatâs being taught at Universities by real experts that study this for a living. Military commanders have called climate change âthe greatest threatâ in terms of foreign policy, and a major contributor to the rise of extremism and international unrest. Letâs be clear â this is their main priority.
Sanders was the only person in the debate that brought this up, and heâs being mocked by conservatives and some Democrats that want to see him lose. He was absolutely correct to make the association.
The more they laugh at Sanders, the more they are basking in their own ignorance.
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Like X 10,000,000
(the number the Democrats need to ADDITIONALLY come out to get our Congress back)
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