Modern news coverage often suggests that we are perpetually in crisis. Every day economies falter, terrorists strike and politicians stumble from one embarrassment or scandal, to the next. It becomes hard to tell the difference between short term crises – food shortages in Venezuela, corruption in Brazil, an escaped cartel boss in Mexico, the sudden devaluation of the yuan – and situations that could turn into something much worse. We have learned to think of disasters as unpredictable events (hurricanes, tsunamis, floods and drought) when many are in fact entirely of our own making (war, pollution, poverty). Our collective lack of interest in faraway countries often means that little is done to address these crises while they are still manageable, and they are allowed to deteriorate into man-made catastrophes.
Crises in the Middle East, for example, have become a background hum to the rest of the world. Every week brings fresh reports of monstrous acts that claim innocent lives. These occur so frequently that many of us believe that nothing can be done to resolve the region’s irreconcilable sectarian hatreds, and little changes. Occasionally the violence is sufficiently egregious to produce political action, as happened a year ago when a coalition of Western countries agreed to bomb the Islamic State and offer assistance to its rivals. Despite the focus on IS, and the billions of dollars spent on the air war, far too little attention has been paid to the wider crises in Syria and Iraq, nor to the increasingly desperate humanitarian situation that military action has done so little to improve.
Fighting in Iraq has displaced more than 3 million people but most of the news coming out of Iraq focuses on the military campaign against IS. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Activities (OCHA) estimates that another 5 million are in need of assistance. To date, less than half of the necessary relief budget has been raised. Furthermore, Iraq is struggling with the arrival of 250,000 Syrians fleeing the carnage in their homeland.
In addition to the coping with the internal threats posed by IS, or the country’s newly empowered Kurds, Iraq’s capacity to address such a large refugee crisis has been further strained by the sudden drop in oil revenues. It is not hard to see how quickly this situation could devolve into something far worse. (When a much smaller number of child migrants fleeing violence in Central America recently sought refuge in the United States most were turned away after weeks of strident xenophobia and shameful politicking – during which they were housed like cattle.)
A similar lack of information, shapes our response to the waves of migrants who die trying to enter Europe each year, and the millions of others trafficked for exploitative labour or sexual services. Individual news items shock us, especially when dozens of women and children drown within sight of a European coastline, yet we hardly notice the fate of hundreds who die in isolated crossings of the US-Mexico border each year. Instead of pressing for humane solutions, we often allow politicians to implement the quick-fix of simply making it harder for people to cross borders. Our indifference lets them neglect the political origins of the violence and despair underlying these crises.
The current crises in Syria have been simmering for years; Iraq’s political quarrels, for decades, at least. Depending on your perspective the crises of the Middle East go back generations, or centuries. None of that makes compromises unattainable. Thirty years ago communism seemed an unalterable fact of European life, as did apartheid in South Africa. But both were swept into the dustbin of history, with astonishing speed, when their moral bankruptcy could no longer be hidden. The fallout from the Arab Spring has been far more complex. One analyst calls the repression of revolutionary movements in the Middle East a “systematic war of the Arab regimes against their people.” Nowhere is the cost of this war more acute, and noticeable, than in Syria and Iraq. But a lasting solution – as the US Intelligence itself has recently concluded – cannot be produced by bombs alone. Credible military action, and tenacious diplomacy – such as that which produced the recent nuclear deal with Iran – will be needed, sooner rather than later.
