Having One's Enemy And Eating It Too
Surveying today's myopic Middle East on the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks
There has been much talk in recent months about the prospect of Syria bolting the Iranian axis and becoming magically transformed into an ally of the West. Although Syria's President-for-life Bashar Assad's daily demonstrations of fealty to his murderous friends has exposed this talk as nothing more than fantasy, it continues to dominate the international discourse on Syria.
In the meantime, Syria's ongoing real transformation from a more or less functioning state into an impoverished wasteland has been ignored.
Today Syria faces the greatest economic catastrophe in its history. The crisis is causing massive malnutrition and displacement for hundreds of thousands of Syrians. These Syrians - some 250,000 mainly Kurdish farmers - have been forced off their farms over the past two years because their lands were reclaimed by the desert.
Today shantytowns have sprung up around major cities like Damascus. They are filled with internally displaced refugees. Due to a cataclysmic combination of irrational agricultural policies embraced by the Baa'thist Assad dynasty for the past 45 years which have eroded the soil, and massive digging of some 420 thousand unauthorized wells which have dried out the ground water aquifiers, Syria's regime has done everything in its power to dry up the country. The effects of these demented policies have been exacerbated in recent years by Turkey's diversion of Syria's main water source, the Euphrates River, through the construction of dams upstream, and by two years of unrelenting drought. Today, much of Syria's previously fertile farmland has become wasteland. Former farmers are now destitute day laborers with few prospects for economic recovery.
Imagine if in his country's moment of peril, instead of clinging to his alliance with Iran, Hizbullah, al Qaida, and Hamas, Assad were to turn to Israel to help him out of this crisis?
Israel is a world leader in water desalination and recycling. The largest desalination plant in the world is located in Ashkelon. Israeli technology and engineers could help Syria rebuild its water supply.
Israel could also help Syria use whatever water it still has, or is able to produce through desalination and recycling more wisely through drip irrigation - which was invented in Israel. Israel today supplies fifty percent of the international market for drip irrigation. In places like Syria and southern Iraq which are now being dried out by the Turkish dams, irrigation is primitive — often involving nothing more than water trucks pumping water out of the Euphrates and driving it over to fields that are often less than a kilometer away.
Then there are Syria's dwindling oil reserves. No doubt, Israeli engineers and seismologists would be able to increase the efficiency and productivity of existing wells and so increase their output. It is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that Israeli scientists and engineers could even discover new untapped oil reserves.
But of course, Syria isn't interested in Israel's help. Syria wants to have its enemy and eat it too. As Assad has made clear repeatedly, what he wants is to receive the Golan Heights - and through it Israel's fresh water supply - for nothing. He wants Israel to surrender the Golan Heights, plus some Israeli land Syria illegally occupied between 1948 and1967, in exchange for a meaningless piece of paper. In this demand, Assad is supported by none other than Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan whose country is drying Syria out. It is Erdogan after all, who mediated talks aimed at convincing then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to give up the Golan Heights for nothing and it is Erdogan today who is encouraging the Obama administration to pressure Israel to surrender its water to Syria for nothing.
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Love of the Land: Having One's Enemy And Eating It Too
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