Nafeez Ahmed 30 Oct 2015, Military solutions are not the answer to the perfect storm of climate, energy, food, economic and geopolitical crises facing Russia
Nafeez Ahmed: "So the US is not targeting the Islamic State’s financial lifeline - its black market oil infrastructure - but instead is teaming up with the same al-Qaeda affiliated groups that spawned IS in the first place, to undermine Assad. And Russia, for all its muscle-flexing rhetoric, sees its main priority as countering US-led efforts to topple Assad, by targeting his most immediate opponents.
This is, in other words, a New Cold War between competing empires, the unending victims of which are the Syrian people. As for the Islamic State, it is little more than the proxy bastard child of a conflict that looks set to escalate.
Gail Tverberg: "In my view, oil and gas resource limits are major contributors to the conflict in Syria. This is happening in several ways: 1. Syria is an oil exporter that is in increasingly perilous financial condition because of depleting oil resources. When oil production is increasing, it can help an oil exporter in two ways: (a) part of the of the oil supply can be used internally, to grow more food and to support increased industry, and (b) exports of oil can be used to provide revenue for governmental programs such as food subsidies, education, and building highways. Syria’s population grew from 8.8 million in 1980 to 22.8 million in 2012, at least in part because of the wealth available from oil extraction."