STRATEGYPAGE’S ANNUAL WARS UPDATE: Empires Versus The Rest Of Us.
This is our annual (formerly twice-a-year) summary of current war zones and an overview of where it is all heading. Doing this once a year rather than twice is a reflection of the decline in the number and severity of wars since the 1990s. After the overview there is the alphabetical list of the war zones and a quick summary of how the local mayhem has been proceeding.
The report includes an overall global assessment and regional or country assessments, from Afghanistan to Yemen.
Some extracts. From the global assessment, comments on overall violence:
Since the end of the Cold War in 1991 deaths from wars and large scale civil disorder (which is often recorded as some kind of war) have led to a sharp (over 20 percent so far) drop in violence worldwide. This occurred despite increasingly active and lethal Islamic terror groups. While the terror attacks themselves were news, the current and historical causes of Islamic terrorism were not. Examining that would have revealed that Islamic radicalism has a large anti-technology component, which is why Islamic terrorist violence tends to be low tech and disorganized. Thus most war deaths are not caused by terrorists and even in 2014 (a peak year for Islamic death cults seeking to revive the Caliphate), terrorism-related deaths (mostly Islamic terrorism) accounted for 20 percent of all war-related deaths. Islamic terrorism gets the most publicity but less glamorous disputes do most of the killing.
An extract from the Iran summary:
Since late 2017 Iran suffered continuing nationwide outbursts against the religious dictatorship running the country. There was similar activity in 2009 to protest the lack of fair elections. The 2009 protests were put down with force as were the recent ones (with over a thousand dead in 2019). What started in late 2017 was different, with the protestors calling for the corrupt religious rulers to be removed, even killed if necessary. Some protestors called for a return of the constitutional monarchy the religious leaders replaced in the 1980s (after first promising true democracy). Even more disturbing was that some of the protestors are calling for Islam to be banned and replaced with something else, like Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion that Islam replaced, violently and sometimes incompletely in the 7th and 8th centuries. Right before the late 2017 unrest, the religious rulers saw Iran on the way to some major victories in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. The optimism turned out to be premature. The good times were supposed to begin in the wake of a July 2015 treaty that would lift the many sanctions Iran operated under. That did not, as many financial experts pointed out, solve the immediate cash crises because oil prices were still low. This was because Saudi Arabia refused to cut production to keep oil prices high. This was made worse by the continued use of fracking in North America which triggered a massive (more than 70 percent) drop of the price of oil in 2013. Iran made their situation worse by trying to avoid complying with the 2015 treaty while still getting most of the sanctions lifted and for a while, that seemed to be working. That deception turned out badly as the U.S. accused Iran of violating the 2015 deal and by the terms of that agreement the American could and did withdraw. That meant many of the sanctions returned in 2018. Even before the American action foreign economists believed the Iranian economy wouldn’t get moving again until the 2020s. Now it is going to take even longer and Iranians, in general, are not pleased with that at all. The 2017 protests are continuing and intensifying. The violent reaction to the demonstrations has not halted them. The protests keep reviving. The senior clerics are worried and openly seeking a solution that does not include them losing their power. Few Iranians are willing to accept that kind of compromise. The religious dictatorship is not only hated but also seen as corrupt and untrustworthy.
And there’s much more. Check out the whole thing.