Did Drought and Climate Change Cause Middle Eastern States to Collapse in 2014?

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The Middle East, from North Africa to Afghanistan, has seen an unusual number of governments collapse in recent years. Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen have abruptly become something akin to failed states, and masses overthrew dictators in Egypt and Tunisia. It is unclear how strong the Afghanistan state is, which was built by the US and NATO, but surely President Barack Obama is leaving 10,000 US troops there even after he declared the war over on Sunday because he is afraid that Afghanistan’s government and army might fall apart, as well.

Severe drought hit Afghanistan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, contributing to the turbulence of the country under and after the Taliban. The drought has recurred in recent years.

Heat exacerbates the effects of drought, so as climate scientist Michael Mann at Penn State argues against the NOAA study that did not find a climate explanation, “most inexplicably, they pay only the slightest lip service to the role of temperature in drought, focusing almost entirely on precipitation alone. This neglects the fact that California experienced record heat over the past year, and this certainly contributed to the unprecedented nature of the current drought.”

Climate change not only makes agricultural problems worse, it has a direct negative affect. When it is hot, people fight more.

http://www.juancole.com/2014/12/climate-eastern-collapse.html

I agree with Mr. Cole. Syria started with food riots. Nobody wants to talk about that.

[Igel]

1. No, they started with food price increase riots.

There's a difference between a food shortage and a money shortage brought on by underemployment.

I can't find the reference now, but by 2009 the message had gotten through to NATO from the researchers writing in 2002-2005: There was a wave of instability about to strike some countries, and there was sod-all that could be done to stop it in practical terms.

http://www.nato-pa.int/Default.asp?SHORTCUT=2342 summarizes a lot of the findings that had been put out over the previous decade. We had warnings, and a lot of them.

A bulge of young Arab men was maturing. They had needs. Society demanded that to be men they had to marry and establish families, but at the same time their economies were barely moving. The result would inevitably be a lot of unemployed young men. They'd be an economic burden to established families. They'd grow through their 20s not able to set up decent apartments, get a good job, and be able to support a wife and kids. They'd be fairly sexually repressed, since open sexuality was frowned upon and extramarital sex punishable in at least some societies by honor killings.

These men would be resentful. They'd be single and easily radicalized because they'd be bitter. And they'd demand things like jobs, free education, apts. Expensive things. And they wouldn't get them.

Price hikes would make it more obvious they were dishonoring their parents by staying at home and leeching off of them; it would make it less likely that they'd be able to start their own families. It would be easy to blame others for their problems, and in many cases state-controlled economies were to blame for poor growth. The high numbers of marginally educated workers, some would say, was also a reason. The levels of corruption would be another reason (with "corruption" being a property not primarily of a system but of the people).

Then look at the crowds in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria. Look at who primarily joined an-Nusra and the FSA and IS. Elderly men? Young women? No. Single men in their 20s and now into their early 30s.

Problem is there's no political, religious, or ideological foe here that makes the problem grist for some American media mill or allowing us to score domestic political points. It's a hard problem.

And explains not the food riots because people were starving, but riots at loss of subsidies (or reduced subsidies) for food ... and for gasoline and rent. It's money, it's standard of living, not primarily food. It explains why in some countries they've had loony-toons mass weddings with marriage bonuses paid by some religious or political movements: It's not food, it's enabling young men to find their Allah-granted dignity through having an apt. with a wife, and having an outlet for their sexual drives. It explains why the military junta in Egypt is doing better, now that somebody else is funding their population's subsidies. For living space, gasoline and, yes, food staples. Large, young, not incredibly well educated and therefore not very mobile, unemployed male populations are good for war and revolution. Not so good for social stability.

This hypothesis produced predictions. It was testable. It was tested. It turns out to be a pretty good fit in more than a half dozen instances (and, in fact, it's hard to see an example where it didn't yield sufficiently accurate predictions). Even if Johnny Cabbage here does try to co-opt an already solved problem in hindsight as grist for another mill. If we can't have a "push for democracy" or "a push against imperialism" or a "struggle with capitalism," we may as well have "it's the climate change, and we awful Westerners are again, for reason #1032, the real botulinum of the world" manta. The warnings that we were given by researchers didn't fit any perceptual sieve, it didn't make it through our confirmation bias. So we had all kinds of post-hoc reasons, some that flattered us (but not US), some that just served to confirm that we (meaning not us, but US) were ultimate evil.

However, these same factors produced the same effect in the banlieux, the same consequences without the causes--the riots that drought and hot summers supposedly produced--including those torrid summers that happen, apparently, even in some countries north of the equator in February, March, and April.