Recommended: Sherman's 300,000 and the Caliphate's 3 million

It is important to listen to people who have perspectives different than our own. The Asian Times Spengler columnist (actually David P Goldman, Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the Was Family Fellow at the Middle East Forum) is one of those people we ought to listen to, because he comes at the world from a different perspective - not one we might find comfortable, but quite possibly one which is more in tune with reality than the common America views.

His recent piece Sherman's 300,000 and the Caliphate's 3 million is a good example.  While the administration and the UN struggle, largely ineffectually, to find a a way to contain the violence in the Middle East, he reminds us of General Sherman's comment in the Civil War, that it simply wouldn't be over until 300,000 more Southern soldiers died and the South simply couldn't find enough new volunteers to continue. Much the same is true, he argues, of the Middle East, except that the populations are larger so the number that need to die before the madness peters out is more like 3 million.

This sounds cruel and heartless, at least from the liberal America point of view (and certainly provoked a lot of nasty comments from readers who simply don't want to see the world that way), but it may well be reality, whether we like it or not. The problem, he argues, is rooted in the vast mass of young people born over the past few decades in a region that is simply incapable of supporting them or giving them meaningful jobs. The fighting, he predicts, will simply go on as long as there are enough young people left alive whose lives have no meaning outside of fighting and who have nothing to go back to if fighting ends - another thirty years war.

Certainly nothing we or our allies or the UN has done to date has addressed this root problem, and it is not clear that there is anything anyone could do to address it effectively, however much we wish we could do something.  A decade of American military interference in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly hasn't done anything to the help the cause; in fact, it seems to have made it worse. The fanatics of the Islamic State are now all well armed with good America weapons as a result of our well-meaning meddling.

It is worth reading this piece, somber as it is, and pondering if he isn't perhaps right.