After Mosul: The coming break-up of

Iraq and the end of the Middle East

The battle against IS is a war no one will win. Here's the real
battle we should be worrying about - and fighting

Nafeez Ahmed-Monday 13
March 2017
All eyes are on the battle for Mosul. Will the coalition defeat the
Islamic State (IS) or not? In the end, it won't matter. If we have
learned anything from the last 14 years of fighting the "war on
terror" in Iraq, it is that today's hard-won victories can very
quickly metamorphose into tomorrow's epic disasters.
Whether you're pro or anti-war, the facts speak for themselves:
the toppling of Saddam Hussein created a vacuum that was filled
by al-Qaeda extremists, who previously had no presence in Iraq,
and who rapidly transformed and expanded into the apocalyptic
force known as the Islamic State.
As states become weaker, unable to cope with environmental,
energy and economic challenges, the vacuum is being filled by
extremists
But the very nature of the battle for Mosul is one sign among
many revealing that the Middle East as we know it no longer
exists, and will never return. The region is deep in the throes of an
irreversible geopolitical transition to a new, unstable disorder.
Before 9/11, several neo-conservative strategists saw their role as
marshalling US imperial power to accelerate the break-up of the
Middle East. In reality, the Middle East that we know is breaking
up under the pressure of deeper, slow-working biophysical
processes: environmental, energetic, economic. These processes
are unravelling the power of regional states from behind the
scenes.
Read: Tunnels of terror: How IS trained death squads under
Mosul
As states become weaker, unable to cope with their fundamental
environmental, energy and economic challenges, the vacuum is
being filled by extremists. But intensifying the fight against
extremists doesn't deal with those deeper issues. Instead, it is
producing more extremists.
The war in Mosul will be no exception.
From Fallujah to Mosul
"It's Fallujah on a grander scale," said Ross Caputi, a former US
marine who participated in the second siege of Fallujah in
November 2004.
"I've been hearing a lot of horror stories about civilian casualties
coming out of Mosul. An aid worker friend of mine was trying to
recruit volunteer doctors to work in a surgical unit in Erbil, where
many of the more serious cases were being redirected. She told
me the situation is worse than it's being portrayed in the media."
Caputi's concerns are corroborated by the findings of AirWars,
whose February casualty report says that the US-led coalition is
now killing more civilians in air strikes than Russia. In the first
week of March, the group found that between 250 and 370
civilians were killed by US-led coalition forces storming western
Mosul, exponentially higher than the US count of just 21 civilian
deaths from bombing since November 2016.
Although the Russians have killed more overall, Airwars noted
that Iraqi government operations to recapture east Mosul from IS
"came at significant cost to non-combatants trapped in the city.
During January, claimed civilian deaths from Coalition actions
more than doubled compared to December".
The war on Mosul is the culmination of a longer sectarian war that
preceded the emergence of IS. The US-backed Iraqi government
has, since inception, marginalised the Sunni minority. As the Sunni
insurgency against the occupation escalated, US and Iraqi
authorities together painted it as little more than an extremist
uprising by fanatics. In reality, it was the occupation itself that
radicalised the insurgency and pulled al-Qaeda into its vortex.
Caputi saw first-hand as a soldier in Fallujah that the insurgency in
2004 was not, at that time, dominated by al-Qaeda. Instead,
according to him, on the pretext of targeting al-Qaeda insurgents,
the US military was for the most part targeting and killing Iraqi
civilians.
An explosion is seen as US marines of the 3/5 Lima company
carry out operations in Fallujah in November 2004 (AFP)
He describes one astonishing example: when doctors at the main
hospital in the city announced that US bombing had led to
significant civilian casualties, the US military officially saw them
as a "terrorist-supportive staff" and the hospital itself as "little
more than a nest of insurgent propagandists" because "they had
used the facility to issue claims of non-existent civilian
casualties".
Eventually, US troops moved to take control of the hospital on the
eve of the main US assault on Fallujah. This, Caputi recalls, was
considered an "information operations" success for the US.
The US military's destruction of Fallujah was accompanied by the
role of the central Shia Iraqi government in painting the
predominantly Sunni town as a hotbed of extremism.
The war on Fallujah never came to an end. Armed by the US, Iraqi
forces have intermittently attacked and bombed Fallujah almost
daily since 2012. These operations stepped up after the city had
been captured by IS in January 2014.
In this period, Syria's Bashar al-Assad allowed al-Qaeda
operatives to move freely across the border, to augment the Iraqi
insurgency against American forces. This policy, which continued
through to 2012, contributed to the destabilisation of Iraq.
But al-Qaeda would not have been able to intensify this foothold
in Iraq if not for the deeply sectarian violence of the US military
and Iraqi government towards the Sunni minority, as exemplified
in Fallujah, that led some among them to accept IS as a "lesser
evil" - and led some to become radicalised enough to join the
movement.
The warning
US officials were warned of this outcome early on during the
occupation. Yet they and their Iraqi counterparts have learned
little from this recent history.
According to Anne Speckhard, the Pentagon consultant who
designed the detainee rehabilitation programme in Iraq, US
officials pretty much knew they were releasing dangerous
extremists back into Iraqi society when they began dismantling
draconian prison complexes like Camp Bucca, where IS's founder
and leader, al-Baghdadi, had been detained.
Professor Speckhard of the Centre for Trauma and Community at
Georgetown University's Medical Centre specialises in the
psychology of radicalisation and has consulted for NATO, the US
Departments of State, Defence, Homeland Security, the CIA, FBI,
and numerous European governments.
"This all happened underneath our noses - while we were trying to
deradicalise these very individuals," Speckhard told me.
US soldiers stand guard in front of Iraqi prisoners of war at Camp
Bucca in April 2003 (AFP)
Other top IS commanders were also at Camp Bucca Abu Ayman
al-Iraqi, Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi, Abu Muslim al-Kharasani,
Fadel al-Hayali, Mohammad al-Iraqi, Mohammad Abd al-Aziz al-
Shammari and Khalid al-Samarrai.
But the military sweeps that had put al-Baghdadi and others into
the Bucca detention camp were indiscriminate part of an
invasion and occupation that targeted Iraqi civilians wholesale,
and disproportionately targeted Sunnis. According to Speckhard,
the internal estimates by US authorities in late 2006 confirmed
that only 15 percent of the detainees at Camp Bucca were "true
extremists and adherents to the al-Qaeda ideology".
When Speckhard interviewed former prisoners of Camp Bucca in
Jordan in 2008, she discovered that US officials had never
meaningfully implemented the detainee rehabilitation
programme. The former prisoners told her that imams handpicked
by the authorities would stand outside the fence of the prison,
reading Islamic verses, while detainees laughed and spat at them.
"This was not the engagement I had envisioned," she said.
What happened instead is now well-known. Under US tutelage,
Camp Bucca's 24,000 mostly Sunni prisoners were routinely
afflicted by systematic abuse and torture so brutal that it often
resulted in death.
Camp Bucca was a microcosm of the US-led occupation of Iraq. A
2004 US Army classified report, released by the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2006, documented the existence of 62
separate investigations into allegations of prisoner abuse at US
detention centres across Iraq, including Camp Bucca.
When Speckhard interviewed former prisoners of Camp Bucca,
she discovered that US officials had never meaningfully
implemented the detainee rehabilitation programme
The eye-watering list of abuses is hard to read, and would have
made Saddam proud: physical and sexual assaults, mock
executions, threatening to kill an Iraqi child to "send a message to
other Iraqis", stripping detainees, beating them, shocking them
with a blasting device, throwing rocks at handcuffed Iraqi
children, choking detainees with knots of their scarves, and
interrogations at gunpoint.
But there were deeper issues at play. Major General Douglas
Stone, then commanding general of the Detainee Task Force,
began authorising "quick releases of detainees putting them
through a four-day programme that basically checked a lot of
boxes and only engaged them superficially, if at all," lamented
Speckhard. "That may have been fine for the eighty-five percent
who were not adhering to the militant jihadi ideology." But it had
no affect at all on the hardcore.
Middle East Eye contacted General Stone for comment but did not
receive a reply by the time of publication.
At the time, Speckhard recalls, she warned General Stone that the
rehabilitation "will only work if the politics of Iraq support it. A
man who joined the militant jihad because you killed his sister
may agree to give up engaging in violence, but if you kill his
brother next, he'll go right back to it".
Divide and rule
But the US military hadn't decided to mass release these
prisoners as a kindness. There was a dubious, dangerous strategic
context: "The mass releases were done to keep the Sunni tribes
happy, but this was also the time we were mobilising the
Awakening to stamp out al-Qaeda in Iraq. We were releasing the
detainees to support the Awakening, to build up the Sunni
insurgency against al-Qaeda. It backfired."
The Awakening represented a US-led effort to mobilise Sunni tribal
leaders against al-Qaeda in Iraq. It was believed that the mass
release of Iraqi detainees would help engender confidence in
American intentions with the Sunni tribes, and augment them
with manpower. But US intelligence agencies also knew that many
of those who would go on to fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq under
the Awakening were often themselves former al-Qaeda
sympathisers.
It was classic counterinsurgency strategy attempt to break the
resistance by turning parts of the resistance against itself. As I
previously reported for MEE, elements of the strategy are
described quite candidly in an insightful RAND Corporation report
commissioned by the US Army Training and Doctrine Command's
Army Capability Integration Centre, published in 2008.
What I didn't emphasise in that story is that the
RAND report explicitly acknowledged that its proposed "divide and
rule" strategy to exploit Sunni-Shia sectarian tension across the
region was then being implemented in Iraq by US forces. US
forces must use covert strategies to sow "divisions in the jihadist
camp. Today in Iraq such strategy is being used at the tactical
level," said the report.
Iraqi school children look at a poster distributed by the US army
offering $5 mn dollars for the capture of al-Qaeda operative Abu
Mussab Zarqawi in March 2004 (AFP)
The report elaborated on what exactly this meant in Iraq: the US
was forming "temporary alliances" with al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni
"nationalist insurgent groups" that had fought the US for four
years in the form of "weapons and cash". Although these
nationalists "have cooperated with al-Qaeda against US forces" in
the past, they were now being supported to exploit "the common
threat that al-Qaeda now poses to both parties".
The idea was to fracture the insurgency from within, by co-opting
its wider support base in the Sunni population. It sounds clever in
theory, but in practice we now know that the strategy sowed the
seeds of the birth of IS.
But the Americans had made their bed, and they were laying in it.
While funnelling support to a whole spectrum of disgruntled Sunni
jihadists with various past affiliations to al-Qaeda, the US was
simultaneously backing the central Shia government of Iraq. Both
sides in receipt of US support were heightening sectarian
tensions. And the Iraqi government in particular increasingly
displayed a brutal contempt for the Sunni minority. In this context,
the US strategy was doomed from the start.
"Since withdrawing from Iraq, we have seen the anti-Sunni
sectarian bias of the Iraqi regime and Shia security forces become
emboldened. Prime Minister Abadi has failed to reign in these
forces," Speckard said.
"Iraqi authorities have even profiled and arrested top Sunni
politicians. This is reinforcing biases within the Sunni tribes, and
increasing the sorts of sectarian resentments that are leading a
minority of Sunnis to support IS. These were the same sentiments
that originally fuelled support for al-Qaeda."
The next insurgency
While IS atrocities in Fallujah, Mosul and beyond, have
undermined its traction amongst local Sunnis, atrocities by the
US-backed anti-IS coalition are alienating the population in the
long-run.
"On the whole, I don't think people in Mosul look at the anti-IS
coalition as their heroic saviours, although I do think they've
changed their assessment about IS being the lesser evil," Ross
Caputi said.
Iraqis displaced from Mosul wait to receive aid at a camp in the
Hamam al-Alil area south of the embattled city on 11 March 2017
(AFP)
"Last year, both in Fallujah and Mosul, anti-IS forces were holding
these cities under siege, while IS was forbidding anyone from
trying to escape, trapping everyone inside as human shields.
Consequently, food prices skyrocketed and people soon started to
starve. The non-profit that I work for was able to smuggle some
food into Mosul, and we didn't see any feelings of support for IS."
In early 2014, IS was tolerated by some as a fringe part of a
diverse uprising against the US-backed central government. But
IS crimes have changed that. So the coalition might well succeed
in killing off the terror group's remaining chain of command in
Iraq. But will this be the end of the war?
One top Kurdish intelligence official doubts it. Lahur Talabany, a
senior counter-terrorism official in the Kurdish Regional
Government (KRG), believes that even if IS is defeated in Mosul,
the group will continue and escalate its insurgency from
mountains and deserts.
"Mosul will get taken I think it is the asymmetric warfare that
we need to be worried about," he said.
While IS might disband, another more extreme group would
probably emerge in its place if nothing is done to resolve Iraq's
deepening sectarian tensions. " Maybe not Daesh (Islamic
State), but another group will pop up under a different name, a
different scale. We have to be really careful," Talabany told
Reuters.
'These operations are creating the context for a long-term
insurgency against the Iraqi government and Iranian influence
throughout the region'
- Ross Caputi
"These next few years will be very difficult for us, politically We
know some of these guys escaped.
"They are trying to send people out for the next phase, post-
Mosul, to go into hiding and sleeper cells.
"You have to try and find them when they go underground, you
have to try and flush out these sleeper cells. There will be unrest
in this region for the next few years, definitely."
Caputi agrees that a "victory" in Mosul could just be the beginning
of a prolonged conflict, but he is sceptical of talk of sleeper cells'.
If the strategy is to kill every single last IS member, it will fail, he
warns. And that's why the current operation will not end the war
because it's not dealing with the conditions that created IS in the
first place.
"These operations are creating the context for a long-term
insurgency against the Iraqi government and Iranian influence
throughout the region," Caputi told me. "The phenomenon of IS is
more the product of several historical, social, and political
conditions, which this war against IS has done nothing to change.
Since those conditions are still there - injustice, poverty, political
repression - I expect we'll see continued insurgency Sunni Iraqis
will remain second class citizens under this government and they
will not stand for it."
System failure
Meanwhile, the conditions that laid the groundwork for the rise of
IS are worsening. Those conditions include what's happened on
the surface of geopolitics: the destruction of Iraqi society under
decades of war and occupation; the collapse of Syria into
internecine warfare due to Bashar al-Assad's comprehensive
destruction of civilian infrastructure, and atrocities by extremists
who have increasingly captured the rebel movement with the
support of the Gulf states and Turkey.
But accelerating the conflict from behind the scenes are
fundamental biophysical processes unfolding across the region.
I have studied these processes and published my findings on
them in a new scientific monograph, Failing States: Collapsing
Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence, published by
SpringerBriefs in Energy.
Read: Climate change: How Trump could become the world's
greatest sponsor of terrorism
Among my findings is that IS was born in the crucible of a long-
term process of ecological crisis. Iraq and Syria are both
experiencing worsening water scarcity. A string of scientific
studies has shown that a decade-long drought cycle in Syria,
dramatically intensified by climate change, caused hundreds and
thousands of mostly Sunni farmers in the south to lose their
livelihoods as crops failed. They moved into the coastal cities, and
the capital, dominated by Assad's Alawite clan.
Meanwhile, Syrian state revenues were in terminal decline
because the country's conventional oil production peaked in 1996.
Net oil exports gradually declined, and with them so did the clout
of the Syrian treasury. In the years before the 2011 uprising,
Assad slashed domestic subsidies for food and fuel.
While Iraqi oil production has much better prospects, since 2001
production levels have consistently remained well below even the
lower-range projections of the industry, mostly because of
geopolitical and economic complications. This weakened
economic growth, and consequently, weakened the state's
capacity to meet the needs of ordinary Iraqis.
Drought conditions in both Iraq and Syria became entrenched,
exacerbating agricultural failures and eroding the living standards
of farmers. Sectarian tensions simmered. Globally, a series of
climate disasters in major food basket regions drove global price
spikes. The combination made life economically intolerable for
large swathes of the Iraqi and Syrian populations.
Outside powers the US, Russia, the Gulf states, Turkey and Iran
all saw the escalating Syrian crisis as a potential opportunity for
themselves. As the ensuing Syrian uprising erupted into a full-
blown clash between the Assad regime and the people, the
interference of these powers radicalised the conflict, hijacked
Sunni and Shia groups on the ground, and accelerated the de-
facto collapse of Syria as we once knew it.
From this maelstrom, as billions of dollars of funding poured in
from the Gulf states and Turkey into the financing of armed rebels
most of which ended up empowering the most extremist
factions the monstrosity known as Islamic State emerged.
Meanwhile, across the porous border in Iraq, drought conditions
were also worsening. As I write in Failing States, Collapsing
Systems, there has been a surprising correlation between the
rapid territorial expansion of IS, and the exacerbation of local
drought conditions. And these conditions of deepening water
scarcity are projected to intensify in coming years and decades.
An Iraqi man walks past a canoe siting on dry, cracked earth in
the Chibayish marshes near the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah in
2015 (AFP)
The discernable pattern here forms the basis of my model:
biophysical processes generate interconnected environmental,
energy, economic and food crises what I call earth system
disruption (ESD). ESD, in turn, undermines the capacity of
regional states like Iraq and Syria to deliver basic goods and
services to their populations. I call this human system
destabilisation (HSD).
As states like Iraq and Syria begin to fail as HSD accelerates,
those responding whether they be the Iraqi and Syrian
governments, outside powers, militant groups or civil society
actors don't understand that the breakdowns happening at the
levels of state and infrastructure are being driven by deeper
systemic ESD processes. Instead, the focus is always on the
symptom: and therefore the reaction almost always fails entirely
to even begin to address earth system sisruption.
So Bashar al-Assad, rather than recognising the uprising against
his regime as a signifier of a deeper systemic shift symptomatic
of a point-of-no-return driven by bigger environmental and energy
crises chose to crackdown on his narrow conception of the
problem: angry people.
Equally, the Syrian resistance saw the problem as little more than
the nefarious, corrupt and extractive nature of the oppressive
Assad regime, without noticing that his regime was now being
undone by deeper, biophysical processes that even without his
regime will continue to unfold.
And so, as Syria has become a failed state, no one is dealing with
the very escalating process of earth system disruption that is
driving human system destabilisation across the region. This is
not surprising. If anything acts as an impediment to dealing with
root causes, to re-building environmental resilience, new energy
systems and enhancing social and political empowerment it is
war.
The slow demise of the old oil order
This myopia still afflicts officialdom in Iraq, which is not as far
down the road of systemic state failure as Syria. US and Iraqi
officials are pinning their hopes on the ephemeral dream of
converting the country into a booming oil producer, capable of
pumping out profitable petroleum at a rate to rival its neighbour,
Saudi Arabia.
It is, quite literally, a pipe dream.
In my new study, I cite robust data showing that Iraq's
conventional oil production is forecast to peak within a decade, by
around 2025, before declining. This means that after 2025, the
principal source of the central government's revenues will begin
to concertedly decline.
It will only be a matter of time, in this context, before the state
without identifying a new and sustainable source of income will
be forced to retract. In this scenario, we may see the central
government increasingly unable to maintain basic social
expenditures, which are already deeply strained. On a business-
as-usual trajectory, Iraq as we know it is headed for full-blown
systemic state failure by approximately 2040.

Excess natural gas burns at the Bin Omar natural gas station in
January 2017, north of the southern Iraqi port city of Basra (AFP)
This is a conservative projection that, in my view, is likely to be
accelerated by the amplifying feedback between underlying ESD
processes of conventional oil depletion, climate change, water
scarcity, and agricultural crisis; and the HSD processes of US-
backed state-sectarian repression, intensifying geopolitical
competition, and a long-term sectarian insurgency from IS, al-
Qaeda or other actors.
In short, while earth system disruption slowly and quietly unravels
state power, short-sighted responses result in human system
destabilisation, leaving the vacuum to be filled increasingly by
those seeking autonomy from the central government, and the
extremists who are at open war with it.
It's not just Iraq and Syria who sit on the path of systemic state
failure. Other countries in the region exhibit similar dynamics.
Yemen
In Yemen, for instance, conventional oil production peaked in
2001, and has now virtually collapsed according to the latest
data. As of August 2016, net exports of oil have reduced to a
trickle, and have so far stayed that way
Post-peak Yemen, like Syria and Iraq, exhibits similar features of
intensifying water and food scarcity. Electricity production is
intermittent, and nationwide fuel shortages are routine, forcing
factory closures, and prompting foreign companies and
international organisations to suspend operations, withdrawing
capital and personnel.

The UN says nearly 500,000 children are suffering from acute

malnutrition in Yemen (AFP)
As livelihoods are destroyed, the geopolitics of the ongoing
conflict involving US and UK support for Saudi Arabia's bombing
campaign, and the persistent Houthi rebellion, are serving to
erase whatever remnants of civil society remain. Now 12 million
Yemenis are at risk of starvation, and 7.3 million have no idea
where they will find their next meal.
This means not only that the state's main source of revenues is
almost obsolete, but that its capacity to respond to the crisis in a
way that is not simply reactive to the symptoms has been fatally
inhibited.
The Gulf states are next in line. Collectively, the major oil
producers might have far less oil than they claim on their books.
Oil analysts at Lux Research estimate that OPEC oil reserves may
have been overstated by as much as 70 percent. The upshot is
that major producers like Saudi Arabia could begin facing serious
challenges in sustaining the high levels of production they are
used to within the next decade.
A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Energy Policy by Dr
Steven Griffiths, vice president for research at the Masdar
Institute for Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, corroborates
these concerns. Dr Griffiths points out that OPEC countries in the
Middle East and North Africa in particular may have exaggerated
their proven reserves. He notes evidence that "Kuwait's proved
reserves may be closer to 24 billion barrels and Saudi Arabia's
reserves may have been overstated by as much as 40 percent".
Read: Made in Britain, tested on Yemenis: The reality of
working for bombmakers
Another clear example of exaggeration is in natural gas reserves.
Griffiths argues that "resource abundance is not equivalent to an
abundance of exploitable energy".
While the region holds substantial amounts of natural gas,
underinvestment due to subsidies, unattractive investment terms,
and "challenging extraction conditions" have meant that Middle
East producers are "not only unable to monetise their reserves for
export, but more fundamentally unable to utilise their reserves to
meet domestic energy demands".
This is particularly prominent in the Gulf states: "The GCC [Gulf
Cooperation Council] countries, for instance, have substantial
associated and non-associated natural gas reserves, but all GCC
countries with the exception of Qatar are now faced with a
shortage of domestic natural gas supply."
Griffiths thus concludes that "stated proved hydrocarbon reserves
in the MENA region can be misleading with regard to the outlook
for regional energy self-sufficiency".
Food threat
While this "does not necessarily imply an imminent shortage of
oil, it does raise the question about peak conventional oil". He
goes on to spell out the potentially destabilising implications:
"MENA countries that have historically relied on resource rents to
support social, political and economic agendas face risks
regarding their actual timelines for implementing reforms needed
for their post-oil' economies."
And oil depletion is only one dimension of the ESD processes at
stake. The other is the environmental consequence of exploiting
oil.
Over the next three decades, even if climate change is stabilised
at an average rise of 2 degrees Celsius, the Max Planck
Institute forecasts that the Middle East and North Africa will still
face prolonged heatwaves and dust storms that could render
much of the region "uninhabitable". These processes could
destroy much of the region's agricultural potential.
In September 2015, an image captured from NASAs Aqua
satellite showing the dust storm over the Middle East (AFP/NASA-
Terra Modis)
Yet the Arab Organization for Agricultural Development
(AOAD) reports that the Middle East is already experiencing a
persistent shortage in farm products, a gap that has widened
steadily over the last two decades. Across the region, food
imports now run above $25bn a year on a net basis.
If nothing is done to address these challenges, the period from
2020 to 2030 will see Middle East oil exporters experiencing a
systemic convergence of climate, energy and food crises. These
crises will weaken their capacities to deliver goods and services to
their populations. And the process of systemic state failure we are
seeing unfold in Iraq, Syria and Yemen will extend across the
region.
Broken models
While some of these climate processes are locked in, their
impacts on human systems are not. The old order in the Middle
East is, unmistakeably, breaking down. It will never return.
But it is not yet too late for East and West to see what is
actually happening and act now to transition into the inevitable
future after fossil fuels.
The battle for Mosul cannot defeat the insurgency, because it is
part of a process of human system destabilisation. That process
offers no fundamental way of addressing the processes of earth
system disruption chipping away at the ground beneath our feet.
It is not too late for East and West to see what is actually
happening and act to transition into the inevitable future after
fossil fuels
The only way to respond meaningfully is to begin to see the crisis
for what it is, to look beyond the dynamics of the symptoms of the
crisis the sectarianism, the insurgency, the fighting and to
address the deeper issues. That requires thinking about the world
differently, reorienting our mental models of security and
prosperity in a way that captures the way human societies are
embedded in environmental systems and responding
accordingly.
At that point, perhaps, we might realise that we're fighting the
wrong war, and that as a result, no one is capable of winning.
As the old oil order in the Middle East collapses over the next few
years and decades, governments, civil society, business, and
investors have an opportunity to build grassroots, post-fossil fuel
structures that could pave the way for new forms of ecological
resilience and economic prosperity.
- Nafeez Ahmed PhD is an investigative journalist, international
security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls
the 'crisis of civilisation.' He is a winner of the Project Censored
Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian
reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and
economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has
also written for The Independent, The Sydney Morning Herald,
The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz,
Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique and New
Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert
operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed
to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner's Inquest.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do
not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Photo: Iraqi residents flee their neighbourhood to safer locations
during a heavy dust storm in an eastern district of Mosul on 2
December 2016 as soldiers of the Iraqi Special Forces battle
against Islamic State (IS) group (AFP)
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