Something that hasn’t been widely recognized is how Germany’s willingness to accept vast numbers of military age youths from Syria is facilitating the various leaderships in Syria to push toward their maximalist ethnic-cleansing goals.

Syria’s long-term problem is that it is highly diverse, with different groups that hate each other (often for good reasons).

Fighting in such situations can go on for a long time, but usually military ambitions run into diminishing returns: e.g., If our tribal enemies hold three watersheds, we can push them out of their most peripheral one fairly easily, their next-most marginal one with more difficulty, but they’ll die in the last ditch to defend their ultimate redoubt because they have nowhere else to go. And that’s a discouraging prospect for militaries on the offensive.

I’m reminded of when I was snorkeling in Hawaii in 1981 and I decided it would be fun to harass a clown fish by chasing him around the reef. I had read in Konrad Lorenz’s book On Aggression that distinctively colored tropical fish tend to be territorial. (Lorenz’s theory was that bright colors on tropical fish are like gang colors on inner city youths — they warn rival of the same species to stay off the turf. There still doesn’t seem to be a scientific consensus on this question.)

Sure enough, the poor clown fish retreated nervously over and over until he reached, presumably, the inner sanctum of his territory. There he felt most at home, knowing every nook and cranny of the reef. (Note: I’m only guessing that’s what the fish was thinking.) He turned and faced me to make his stand. When I kept coming, he bravely lunged at me, teeth bared. I fled, and resolved to be less obnoxious toward the local aquatic residents in the future.

So, eventually, all the groups in Syria would need to sit down and negotiate something that all Syrians can more or less live with.

Unless …

If Dr. Merkel is promising military-age youths a lifetime of welfare in Germany, then massive ethnic cleansing of enemies becomes a more plausible goal for whichever of Syria’s various combatants have the upper hand at the moment (e.g., Assad/Putin and ISIS at present). Their implicit message to fighting age youth on the other side is: Why fight us when you can sponge off Merkel?