By David P. Goldman (Spengler)
Cross-posted from Asia Times Online.
Syria and Egypt are dying. They were dying before the Syrian civil war broke out and before the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Cairo. Syria has an insoluble civil war and Egypt has an insoluble crisis because they are dying. They are dying because they chose not to do what China did: move the better part of a billion people from rural backwardness to a modern urban economy within a generation. Mexico would have died as well, without the option to send its rural poor – fully one-fifth of its population – to the United States.
It was obvious to anyone who troubled to examine the data that Egypt could not maintain a bottomless pit in its balance of payments, created by a 50% dependency on imported food, not to mention an energy bill fed by subsidies that consumed a quarter of the national budget. It was obvious to Israeli analysts that the Syrian regime’s belated attempt to modernize its agricultural sector would create a crisis as hundreds of thousands of displaced farmers gathered in slums on the outskirts of its cities. These facts were in evidence early in 2011 when Hosni Mubarak fell and the Syrian rebellion broke out. Paul Rivlin of Israel’s Moshe Dayan Center published a devastating profile of Syria’s economic failure in April 2011. [1]
Sometimes countries dig themselves into a hole from which they cannot extricate themselves. Third World dictators typically keep their rural population poor, isolated and illiterate, the better to maintain control. That was the policy of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party from the 1930s, which warehoused the rural poor in Stalin-modeled collective farms called ejidos occupying most of the national territory. That was also the intent of the Arab nationalist dictatorships in Egypt and Syria. The policy worked until it didn’t. In Mexico, it stopped working during the debt crisis of the early 1980s, and Mexico’s poor became America’s problem. In Egypt and Syria, it stopped working in 2011. There is nowhere for Egyptians and Syrians to go.
It is cheap to assuage Western consciences by sending some surplus arms to the Syrian Sunnis. No-one has proposed a way to find the more than US$20 billion a year that Egypt requires to stay afloat. In June 2011, then French president Nicholas Sarkozy talked about a Group of Eight support program of that order of magnitude. No Western (or Gulf State) government, though, is willing to pour that sort of money down an Egyptian sinkhole.
Egypt remains a pre-modern society, with nearly 50% illiteracy, a 30% rate of consanguineal marriage, a 90% rate of female genital mutilation, and an un- or underemployment rate over 40%. Syria has neither enough oil nor water to maintain the bazaar economy dominated by the Assad family.
Both were disasters waiting to happen. Economics, to be sure, set the stage but did not give the cues: Syria’s radical Sunnis revolted in part out of enthusiasm for the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and partly in fear of Iran’s ambition to foster Shi’ite ascendancy in the region.
It took nearly two years for the chattering classes to take stock of Egypt’s economic disaster. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, the benchmark for liberal opinion on foreign policy, gushed like an adolescent about the tech-savvy activists of Tahrir Square in early 2011. Last week he visited a Cairo bakery and watched the Egyptian poor jostling for subsidized bread. Some left hungry. [2] As malnutrition afflicts roughly a quarter of Egyptians in the World Health Organization’s estimate, and the Muslim Brotherhood government waits for a bumper wheat crop that never will come, Egypt is slowly dying. Emergency loans from Qatar and Libya slowed the national necrosis but did not stop it.
This background lends an air of absurdity to the present debate over whether the West should arm Syria’s Sunni rebels. American hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to be sure, argue for sending arms to the Sunnis because they think it politically unwise to propose an attack on the Assad regime’s master, namely Iran. The Obama administration has agreed to arm the Sunnis because it costs nothing to pre-empt Republican criticism. We have a repetition of the “dumb and dumber”consensus that prevailed during early 2011, when the Republican hawks called for intervention in Libya and the Obama administration obliged. Call it the foreign policy version of the sequel, “Dumb and Dumberer”.
Even if the Sunnis could eject the Assad family from Damascus and establish a new government – which I doubt – the best case scenario would be another Egypt: a Muslim Brotherhood government presiding over a collapsed economy and sliding inevitably towards state failure. It is too late even for this kind of arrangement. Equalizing the military position of the two sides will merely increase the body count. The only humane thing to do is to partition the country on the Yugoslav model, but that does not appear to be on the agenda of any government.
Notes:
1. See Israel the winner in the Arab revolts, Asia Times Online, April 12, 2011.
2. Egypt’s Perilous Drift, New York Times, June 15, 2013.
it looks like he pissed this guy off too 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dbCTZ5K1Iw
@ yamit82:
what is interesting to me about ghadaffi was how easy it was to put him in the meat freezer. I think ghadaffi was not playing for the winning team. I suspect that there was agreement among enough interests, possibly for varying reasons, to get ghadaffi out. there is a lot of oil in libya but there is also a good amount of gas in the med coast of N. africa. the fact that europe was so pushy makes me think that there energy interests were in that area and they would prefer a player on their team, the US also. The west has a stable and reliable partner for decades in the GCC so it makes sense that they co-opt the running of N. africa to them. resources are there and populations need to be controlled. I would not be surprised if it also involves the future of african resources which the chinese are buying up. I dont buy the gold story that much because gold has artificial value based on a historical role of currency. you cant eat gold. I read that he was about to make a large long term deal with the chinese, probably the last straw.
bernard ross Said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q84Srf48xlg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxyniAG2Lmg
Gaddafi was aligning more and more with the Chinese giving them more and more oil leases and threatening to cut loose the Europeans. There was also 20-30 thousand Chinese workers building an irrigation canal across Libya. That’s what scared the Brits, French and Italians. What sealed it for Obama was Gaddafi moves to institute Gold Dinar as a substitute for Global reserve currency much the same ideas Saddam Hussein had. Both were taken down as they were deemed a threat to Dollar supremacy and in turn to the USA itself.
bernard ross Said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q84Srf48xlg
Gaddafi was aligning more and more with the Chinese giving them more and more oil leases and threatening to cut loose the Europeans. There was also 20-30 thousand Chinese workers building an irrigation canal across Libya. That’s what scared the Brits, French and Italians. What sealed it for Obama was Gaddafi moves to institute Gold Dinar as a substitute for Global reserve currency much the same ideas Saddam Hussein had. Both were taken down as they were deemed a threat to Dollar supremacy and in turn to the USA itself.
bernard ross Said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q84Srf48xlg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxyniAG2Lmg
Gaddafi was aligning more and more with the Chinese giving them more and more oil leases and threatening to cut loose the Europeans. There was also 20-30 thousand Chinese workers building an irrigation canal across Libya. That’s what scared the Brits, French and Italians. What sealed it for Obama was Gaddafi moves to institute Gold Dinar as a substitute for Global reserve currency much the same ideas Saddam Hussein had. Both were taken down as they were deemed a threat to Dollar supremacy and in turn to the USA itself.
@ bernard ross:
John Forbes Kerry, the current United States Secretary of State, is a blue-blooded patrician oligarch and member of the infamous Yale Skull and Bones secret society as were the Bushes.
Kerry has already signaled that he will be more aggressive and ruthless than his predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, when it comes to implementing the US program of destroying the sovereign and independent nation states of the world, and replacing them with micro states, mini states, rump states, failed states, warlords, and chaos. Accordingly, Kerry wants to increase aid to the Syrian rebels, whom his own department has branded as terrorists.
Even in a millionaire’s club like the United States Senate, Kerry stood out as the richest senator. His father, Richard Kerry, was a foreign service officer for the US State Department involved in United Nations affairs. Kerry’s paternal grandparents, the Silesian Fritz Kohn and the Budapest-born Ida Löwe were Jews from a suburb of Vienna, Austria-Hungary who came to the United States and converted to Roman Catholicism at the beginning of the 20th century, changing their name to Kerry after selecting it at random from a map of Ireland. Fritz Kohn/Kerry had a shoe business which went bankrupt during the crash of 1921, leading to his suicide. Today’s John Forbes Kerry was raised as a Roman Catholic, which he says he has remained.
John Kerry’s pedigree and the initial money for his education come from his mother, who was born Rosemary Isabel Forbes. The Forbes family had arrived in Massachusetts in the mid-18th century, much later than many of the Boston Brahmins, but Ralph Bennett Forbes soon married Margaret Perkins, a daughter of the notorious family controlling Perkins & Co., one of the selected American firms partnering with the British East India Company in shipping opium from India to China, and tea from China to Europe and North America. Thanks to this strategic marriage, the Forbes were directly allied to families like the Cabots, the Cushings, and others. Ralph Bennett Forbes worked for the Perkins syndicate as an opium-runner. His son, John Murray Forbes, was for a time one of the dominant personalities of the foreign clique controlling the Chinese emperor.
John Murray Forbes made a strategic move for the family to go legit, shifting their fortune from opium and slaves into investments in US railroads. John Murray Forbes later played a prominent role in the committee of Boston Brahmins who financed and incited John Brown to carry out murderous provocations against the slaveholding states, not with the goal of ending slavery, but rather with the goal of fomenting a civil war which would destroy the United States government.
John Murray Forbes managed the acquisition by the Perkins interests of Alexander Graham Bell’s innovations in the telephone. His son became the president of the American Bell Telephone Company in 1879. The Forbes family is also noted for having financed Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transcendentalists.
As a child, Kerry summered at the Forbes family estate in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, France. Here he became a close friend of Brice Lalonde, his first cousin and later one of the leaders of the French radical environmentalist movement. Kerry attended the Fessenden School near Boston, and then St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. His tuition was paid by his great aunt, Clara Winthrop. One of Kerry’s schoolmates at St. Paul’s was Robert S. Mueller III, who has implemented the fraud of the global war on terror over the past 10 years in his capacity as FBI Director. Kerry also signaled his Anglophilia by founding the John Winant Society, named after a pro-British US ambassador to London. Kerry met President John F. Kennedy and dated a half-sister of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
Read More: Kerry’s Skull and Bones Pedigree Is Ominous for the World
Recorded in the 1980’s Dr. Anthony Sutton foretells what can be seen today.
The description: Through his scientific historical research he saw the bigger picture of how the secret US establishment (largely operating through the Skull & Bones secret society) uses the Hegelian dialectic (create thesis & antithesis to control synthesis) to create, manage and perpetuate conflict.
Syria, Egypt, Malthus:
Malthus predicted that if the population grows faster than the ability to feed itself, then people would eventually start to starve. Liberals tend to dismiss this idea, particularly if applied to third world countries.
The population of Syria was 4.5 million in 1960, and is 22.5 million today. The population of Egypt was 26 million in 1960, and is 82.5 million today.
Neither country has enough water to feed itself, and no natural resources to sell. And they have no industries that can compete with China for manufacturing, or ultra-low wage southeast Asia. Their education systems are mediocre, and the few smart people they have emigrate (brain drain).
The population boom came from their islamic “culture”: arranged first-cousin marriages, polygamy, and dislike of birth control. Allah will provide.
Both countries are on the verge of becoming failed states. Syria will break apart. Egypt may well begin to starve.
In Israel, The Jew-hating Israeli arabs are breeding like their fellow muslims in Syria and Egypt. They are subsidized by welfare collected from tax-paying Israeli Jews. The dominant liberal media in “Jewish” Israel are proud of this, while denouncing Torah-true ultra-orthodox Jews as “parasites”.
Good riddance.
I was not aware of Libyan loans propping up Egypt. this may explain egypts involvement in the Libyan “spring”. The idea of Libya continuing its ability to fund externally, including Africa, may have something to do with its Nato/GCC sponsored “revolution”.
further to my last post:
the west believes that only authoritarianism can quickly mobilize a large population to action, whether war or other.
If russia and the west come to agreement I expect syria to follow the example of Iraq in an interim autonomy agreement for kurds, sunnis and alawites zones.
For egypt war seems to be the most logical way that the overpopulated non producing hungry mouths can be reduced. For Egypt to avoid war it would need an authoritarianism so pervasive that only Islamic rule can be successful in getting Egyptians to stay poor under austerity. Unless there are potential sources of revenue such as offshore gas/oil war is the likely pressure reducer. Inevitable austerity begs for Islamic authoritarianism. Secular authoritarianism cannot achieve full compliance with leadership directives. The west may see this coming and thus another motive for collaborating with GCC to install islamic govts.
US already has been aiding GCC to arm and train mercenary jihadis. the so-called impasse over arming the FSA “rebels” is a red herring and fig leaf. I do not belive the west wishes to support democratic rule because I believe the perception is that authoritarian rule is more succesful at getting things done and more importantly controlling a hungry and hostile population. Only authoritarianism can quickly mobilize
yamit82 Said:
Against Israel, of course! Their armies can no longer play the role of the anti-Israel Praetorians assigned to them. Egypt now worries about Ethiopia choking off the Nile, the lifeblood of Egypt with a new dam and Syria is forced to enploy its army to put down a restive population. To get back to Egypt, the backbone of the Arab World, it has a population it can’t feed, it doesn’t have the educated base to run a modern economy and in a proverbial Catch-22, any attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood to modernize the economy would endanger the basis of its own rule. It wants to take Egypt back to the Middle Ages when the country really needs a revolution to catch up with Israel. Egypt is wallowing in Jew-hatred instead of trying to learn from and emulate its neighbor. Personally, I could care less if the Arab Spring regimes make it – the pathologies of the Arab World are too big to solve and they do not want to take responsibility for saving themselves – hey, its just easier to sit around and blame the Jews for their misery and that’s basically where we are today. I don’t see them ever getting out of their self-inflicted victim complex.
Yea, what an opportunity for Israel!
I just Israelis were ready, they could get rid of all the “Palestinians”.
@ NormanF:
A prescription for war. I wonder against who?
Based on Egypts population explosion they must find employment for almost 2 million new workers entering into the work force every year. They can’t but modernizing increasing productivity will put more in unemployment. A catch 22. They don’t have enough skilled and educated to modernize quickly enough.
Both Syria and Egypt are headed for collapse – they cannot feed themselves and they can barely sustain their rusting war machines. Neither are capable of undertaking the reforms needed to revive the country – whether its the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the Assad family dictatorship in Syria. And the kind of foreign aid that would help them do it is not in the cards any time soon.