The line from drought to war is not nearly as straightforward, though on the surface it doesn’t seem to involve any leaps of faith. It makes sense that a severe drought would lead to massive crop failure, and that in a country heavily dependent on agriculture the results would be disastrous.
The drought lasted several years and forced hundreds of thousands of poor farmers off their lands and into cities that were already overcrowded by refugees (1 million or so, by most accounts) from the war in neighboring Iraq.
However, the drought alone may not have been what forced the farmers from their land. The cancellation of diesel and fertilizer subsidies also had a crippling effect on the farmers. Political, economic and technological forces at work in the modern world also play a major role in economical collapse.