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What connection exists between the war in Syria and the war in Iraq? The Iraqi war started fifteen years ago, and continues now. The Syrian war started seven years ago. Do we not want to think about this question, because of our complicity? What do people in Iraq and Syria think about these two conflicts and their connections?
About three years into the Iraq war, King Abdullah of Jordan warned the war across his border with Iraq would cause a breakdown of peace in the region. The sectarian war so close by threatened to spread, with bad consequences for his country and other neighboring regions. Jordan has managed to escape the worst of the breakdown he predicted, but Syria has not.
The civil war in Syria started in 2011, eight years after the United States initiated war in Iraq. What threads of human activity connect these conflicts? How will historians connect them? What currents of weapons, refugees, tribes, sects, militias, emotions, leadership, loyalties, rivalries and hatreds have crossed the Iraqi-Syrian border during these years to cause the war we started in 2003 to spread?
The civil war in Syria started in 2011, eight years after the United States initiated war in Iraq. What threads of human activity connect these conflicts?
I ask these questions without answering them because I do not have extensive information about the situation in these countries, now or in the recent past. Few people do, given the way media have covered the war. By now we have all heard of Sunnis and Shiites, but why they find themselves in such long running conflicts is another matter. The same goes for the history of other religious, tribal, and military groups in the region. This portion of the world is not an open book to us.
I do know something about the theory of warfare, though, which includes a theory of contagion. It analyzes how wars spread from one territory to another, once they start. The analogy to fire, such as the wildfires we have in the West, is not so far off. Warfare, once underway, is extraordinarily difficult to contain. During the 1930s, military actions in Europe and in the Far East came together in a fire that engulfed almost every continent. Germany and Japan threatened, attacked, and occupied other countries until global war ensued.
Historians may wonder why we and the rest of the world stumbled into widespread warfare via pathways so well understood, yet so little noticed.
The same contagion affects North Africa and the Middle East now. Journalists looked at the spreading fire seven years ago, and optimistically called it the Arab Spring. You don’t hear that term, or any other hopeful description now. Now you hear about the latest efforts to end the war in Syria, if you hear about anything at all. Egypt, Libya, Chad, Mali, Tunisia, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Kurdistan, Islamic State, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, even Israel and Iran are largely off our scope unless casualties cross some threshold, or weaponry such as poison gas catches our eye.
Historians may wonder why we and the rest of the world stumbled into widespread warfare via pathways so well understood, yet so little noticed.
Revised version of Syrian Connections, published in The Jeffersonian May 4, 2013.
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