Daniel Pipes describes the looming tragedy more clearly and vividly than I've seen elsewhere. The future looks chilling. If anarchy weren't enough, there looms a shortage of food and water, and a massive human exodus. Pipes foresees
. . . an unprecedented emptying out of Yemen, with millions of unskilled and uninvited refugees, first in the Middle East, then in the West, many of them Islamist, demanding economic asylum.
The future looks ominous for many reasons.
[...] As a London Times headline put it, Yemen “could become first nation to run out of water.” Nothing this extreme has happened in modern times, although similar patterns of drought have developed in Syria and Iraq.
Scarce food resources, columnist David Goldman points out, threaten to leave large numbers of Middle Easterners hungry. One-third of Yemenis faced chronic hunger before the unrest. That fraction is growing quickly.
The prospect of economic collapse looms larger by the day. Oil supplies are reduced to the point that “trucks and buses at petrol stations queue for hours, while water supply shortages and power blackouts are a daily norm,” according to the Arab Times. Productive activity is proportionately in decline.
If water and food shortages are not worrisome enough, Yemen has one of the highest birth rates in the world, exacerbating the resource problem. With an average of 6.5 children per woman, almost one woman out of every six is pregnant at any given time. Today’s population of 24 million is predicted to double in about 30 years.
Politics exacerbate the problem. If Saleh is history (as he likely is, since too many forces have arrayed against him for him to return to power, and the Saudis may not let him leave), his successor will have difficulty ruling even the meager portion of the country that he controlled.
Because many factions with diverse aims are competing for power — Saleh’s allies, Houthi rebels in the north, a secessionist movement in the south, al-Qaeda-style forces, a youth movement, the military, certain tribes, and the Ahmar family — they will not coalesce into a neat two-way conflict. Anarchy, in other words, looks more probable than civil war; Somalia and Afghanistan could be models. . . . [more..]
The Bible speaks of major famines . . . It's all becoming a little too real.