[jbeckton]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SpringCreekFarm', 'I') would love to see an artists rendition of some big city a thousand years after man has died off.

[dorlomin]

Iraq has regressed a huge amount in the past 20 years. I wonder if people realise just how balkanised it is and how it continues to break up?

Even the Shia political alliances are falling apart as it Sadrists including the nominaly loyal to Moqtada are in near open war with al Hakims Badr, factions of Sadrists such as the Fadilah party in Basra are at near open war with other factions. I could post for pages worth of the balkanisation of this country.

Perhaps the lesson is not so much technological but a clear demostration of the sort of forces that will emerge in a society collapsing.

Once a strong secular cenrtralised nation its now rapidly reverting to a tribalised non state.

I think it may be worth injecting something else into this debate, an observation. It is easy to look at Iraq, Lebanon, Zimbabwe or Somalia and believe that there is a cultural or racial weakness in its inhabitants that makes them vaulnrable to this when we are not.

But I am thinking of the UK in the 70s and 80s when economic regression, loss of place inthe world, depression, currency devaluation and mass unemployment..... many of the same forces of regionalism, racism, bigotry and political extreamism were awakened and re-emerging.
The country was convulsed by a steady stream of strikes that were more to do with a nacsent class civil war than simple work greavences. Red Robbo at British Leyland and Scargill with the miners, Militant Tendency in Liverpool and hardline socialists in London. While there were race riots across the country and a steadily rising facists movement. White youths began forming into gangs to clash with each other.

Economic turn around made all the problems largly evaporate. But they lie dormant awaiting there time underneath the skin of the most placid nation states.

Nazism and facism are becoming very popular in Russia with the FSB using such groups to attack enviromentalists and peace campaigners.

Each nation differs in where its fault lines lie, but in times of economic distress, Iraq's civil war is a pointer of where we may end up.