Saturday Morning Essay: Things to Know About Syria

I was, as a kid, an avid reader of the World Book Encyclopedia.  Our family had a nice set of volumes bound in white leather which my parents bought from Mr. Moses, who had been a PE teacher at one of the schools I attended.  It was strange to see Mr. Moses in our living room making his pitch, but, then as now, American society tends to denigrate primary teachers and pays them accordingly.  Mr. Moses was just going door-to-door to help make ends meet.

Anyway, I found you could learn a lot just by leafing through the World Book's colorful pages.  It was a good way to get oriented on a new subject: atomic energy, how an internal combustion engine works, types of wheat grown in Kansas.  In modern times, we can use the on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia; we can, as the kids say, Wikipedia that shit whenever a new topic comes up.

Such as Syria.  There is what I regard as a pretty good entry on Syria in Wikipedia.  It sets the stage for the question: should we bomb it?

I take as my point of departure that the "official discussion," the back and forth between our boring Secretary of State, John Kerry, whose heart bleeds Heinz Ketchup for the gassed Syrians (h/t: Linh Dinh, one of our most talented writers that you've never heard of) and Vladimir "The Gangster" Putin.  The public announcements which President Barack Obama has been asked to make by whoever it is that controls the United States are all by way of distraction and propaganda.  We're not going to bomb Syria "to teach Bashar al-Assad a lesson" about using Sarin gas on his fellow Syrians. We're not worried about "red lines" being crossed, because they're not being crossed here in the U. S. and A. (h/t: Borat).

Lacking an official rationale, or even an apparently cogent reason, for bombing Syria, should we nevertheless do it?  This is another way of asking: would it do any good?

This is where I think Wikipedia comes in.  What kind of country would we be bombing this time?  First of all, Syria is a dry, hot and crowded country with a burgeoning population and dwindling resources (sort of like Earth itself).  In 1960, when Syria was still a member of  Nasser's socialist United Arab Republic (mostly, Syria and Egypt), Syria had a population of about 4 million.  That was 50 years ago.  Today the population is 22 million.  Economically, Syria relies on agriculture and hydrocarbon production.  Its oil fields are contiguous to and part of the same geological formation as Iraq's northern fields in Mosul and Kirkuk.  However, Syria's oil production is in serious decline. As recently as 1995 its oil production was about 600,000 barrels per day; today the figure is around 140,000 barrels a day.  A country where the population increases by 500% while its cash cow dries up and yields no more milk is a country circling the drain, to mix a bunch of metaphors, such as a wizened cow circling your bathtub drain. I mean, who needs that?

Syria is about half the size of California in land area, with a population about two-thirds the size of the Golden State.  Syria's latitudes (between about 32 degrees N. and 35 degrees) place it on a level with the area from Tijuana to Los Angeles, if that helps.  It became Muslim, predominantly, in about 640 A.D, so that looks like a stable trend.  What we call Syria's international borders are the usual fabrication by imperial powers (the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France after World War I) enacted after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Whether the Alawite sect, the Sunni, the Shia, the Coptics, the Christians, the Jews, the Kurds and the usual mishmash of ethnic odds and ends can ever form any kind of coherent democracy is an open question.  Certainly, on a Wikipedia-based analysis, the prospects are far from certain.  Bashar al-Assad, the current potentate, inherited the presidency from his father Hafez, who participated in the military coup in 1963 that overthrew the UAR leadership and installed the current Ba'ath dynasty.  You'll recall "Ba'ath" from Saddam Hussein's peeps.  One must admit that it doesn't sound like a democracy when presidents inherit the position from their fathers; the Syrians should follow the American example and have a scion of a dynasty imposed upon the people by a Supreme Court.

Syria is riven by droughts, no doubt a harbinger of climate change dynamics that are not going to help its other main industry, agriculture.  Thus, lots of factions who hate each other, moiling poverty, poor prospects, a civil war (no doubt because of all the other factors), a de facto dictatorship.  Syria is a geographical pawn in an oil and natural gas pipeline game being played by Russia and the West, with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran playing walk-on parts.  Nothing has anything to do with poison gas, other than as an excuse to drop bombs into this chaotic maelstrom in the hope that Bashar decamps to Monte Carlo with Asma so the West can install an anti-Russian tough guy and build a natural gas pipeline from Qatar to the Mediterranean so that Europe can get out from under Putin's iron hand on the spigot.  So, Vladimir Putin, whose most recently developed persona is that of an Op-Ed writer for the New York Times, is trying to finesse the U.S. out of its excuse to bomb the holy bejesus out of Saul of Tarsus's old stomping grounds, and doing a pretty good job since the Chief Executive Officer of America, Inc. was forced to dispatch John Ketchup, with his magnificent head of steel gray hair (under which resides a much less impressive brain), to Geneva to go through the motions of "securing" Syria's chemical weapons.

Yeah, that's what we want.  Anyway, thought I'd share my deep research with you, having Wikipediaed dat shit.  I don't think Syria is on my travel destination list.  Not only are they not taking me to Marrakech, tell Aleppo to forget the whole thing.