[prakruti] The War on Iraq is also a War on the Environment

[Guest guest]

The War on Iraq is also a War on the Environment

 

By Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, AlterNet

Posted on October 29, 2007, Printed on November 14, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/66449/The

ecological effects of war, like its horrific toll on human life, are

exponential. When the Bush Administration and their Congressional allies

sent our troops in to Iraq to topple Saddam's regime, they not only

ordered these men and women to commit crimes against humanity, they also

commanded them to perpetrate crimes against nature.

The first Gulf War had a horrific effect on the environment, as CNN

reported in 1999, " Iraq was responsible for intentionally releasing

some 11 million barrels of oil into the Arabian Gulf from January to May

1991, oiling more than 800 miles of Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian coastline.

The amount of oil released was categorized as 20 times larger than the

Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and twice as large as the previous world

record oil spill. The cost of cleanup has been estimated at more than

$700 million. "

During the build up to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, Saddam

loyalists promised to light oil fields afire, hoping to expose what they

claimed were the U.S.'s underlying motives for attacking their country:

oil. The U.S. architects of the Iraq war surely knew this was a potential

reality once they entered Baghdad in March of 2003. Hostilities in Kuwait

resulted in the discharge of an estimated 7 million barrels of oil,

culminating in the world's largest oil spill in January of 1991. The

United Nations later calculated that of Kuwait's 1,330 active oil wells,

half had been set ablaze. The pungent fumes and smoke from those dark

billowing flames spread for hundreds of miles and had horrible effects on

human and environmental health. Saddam Hussein was rightly denounced as a

ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti

oil fields.

However, the United States military was also responsible for much of the

environmental devastation of the first Gulf War. In the early 1990s the

U.S. drowned at least 80 crude oil ships to the bottom of the Persian

Gulf, partly to uphold the U.N.'s economic sanctions against Iraq. Vast

crude oil slicks formed, killing an unknown quantity of aquatic life and

sea birds while wrecking havoc on local fishing and tourist

communities.

Months of bombing during the first Gulf War by U.S. and British planes

and cruise missiles also left behind an even more deadly and insidious

legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb fragments laced with

depleted uranium. In all, the U.S. hit Iraqi targets with more than 970

radioactive bombs and missiles.

More than 15 years later, the health consequences from this radioactive

bombing campaign are beginning to come into focus. And they are dire.

Iraqi physicians call it " the white death " -leukemia. Since

1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600

percent. The situation was compounded by Iraq's forced isolation and the

sadistic sanctions regime, once described by former U.N. secretary

general Kofi Annan as " a humanitarian crisis " , that made

detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.

Most of the leukemia and cancer victims aren't soldiers. They are

civilians. Depleted uranium is a rather benign sounding name for

uranium-238, the trace elements left behind when the fissionable material

is extracted from uranium-235 for use in nuclear reactors and weapons.

For decades, this waste was a radioactive nuisance, piling up at

plutonium processing plants across the country. By the late 1980s there

was nearly a billion tons of the material.

Then weapons designers at the Pentagon came up with a use for the

tailings. They could be molded into bullets and bombs. The material was

free and there was plenty at hand. Also uranium is a heavy metal, denser

than lead. This makes it perfect for use in armor-penetrating weapons,

designed to destroy tanks, armored-personnel carriers and

bunkers.

When the tank-busting bombs explode, the depleted uranium oxidizes into

microscopic fragments that float through the air like carcinogenic dust,

carried on the desert winds for decades. The lethal bits when inhaled

stick to the fibers of the lungs, and eventually begin to wreck havoc on

the body in the form of tumors, hemorrhages, ravaged immune systems and

leukemias.

It didn't take long for medical teams in the region to detect cancer

clusters near the bomb sites. The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, pummeled by

American bombs in 1996, tripled in five years following the bombings. But

it's not just the Serbs who are ill and dying. NATO and U.N. peacekeepers

in the region are also coming down with cancer.

The Pentagon has shuffled through a variety of rationales and excuses.

First, the Defense Department shrugged off concerns about Depleted

Uranium as wild conspiracy theories by peace activists, environmentalists

and Iraqi propagandists. When the U.S.'s NATO allies demanded that the

U.S. disclose the chemical and metallic properties of its munitions, the

Pentagon refused. Depleted uranium has a half-life of more than 4 billion

years, approximately the age of the Earth. Thousand of acres of land in

the Balkans, Kuwait and southern Iraq have been contaminated

forever.

Speaking of DU and other war-related disasters, former chief U.N. weapons

inspector Hans Blix, prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said the

environmental consequences of the Iraq war could in fact be more ominous

than the issue of war and peace itself. Despite this stark admission, the

U.S. made no public attempts to assess the environmental risks that the

war would inflict.

Blix was right. On the second day of President Bush's invasion of Iraq it

was reported by the New York Times and the BBC that Iraqi forces had set

fire to several of the country's large oil wells. Five days later in the

Rumaila oilfields, six dozen wellheads were set ablaze. The dense black

smoke rose high in the southern sky of Iraq, fanning a clear signal that

the U.S. invasion had again ignited an environmental tragedy. Shortly

after the initial invasion the United Nations Environment Program's

(UNEP) satellite data showed that a significant amount of toxic smoke had

been emitted from burning oils wells. This smoldering oil was laced with

poisonous chemicals such as mercury, sulfur and furans, which can cause

serious damage to human as well as ecosystem health.

According to Friends of the Earth, the fallout from burning oil debris,

like that of the first Gulf War, has created a toxic sea surface that has

affected the health of birds and marine life. One area that has been

greatly impacted is the Sea of Oman, which connects the Arabian Sea to

the Persian Gulf byway of the Strait of Hormuz. This waterway is one of

the most productive marine habitats in the world. In fact the Global

Environment Fund contends that this region " plays a significant role

in sustaining the life cycle of marine turtle populations in the whole

North-Western Indo Pacific region. " Of the world's seven marine

turtles, five are found in the Sea of Oman and four of those five are

listed as " endangered " with the other listed as

" threatened " .

The future indeed looks bleak for the ecosystems and biodiversity of

Iraq, but the consequences of the U.S. military invasion will not only be

confined to the war stricken country. The Gulf shores, according to

BirdLife's Mike Evans, is " one of the top five sites in the world

for wader birds, and a key refueling area for hundreds of thousands of

migrating water birds. " The U.N. Environment Program claims that 33

wetland areas in Iraq are of vital importance to the survival of various

bird species. These wetlands, the U.N. claims, are also particularly

vulnerable to pollution from munitions fallout as well as oil wells that

have been sabotaged.

Mike Evans also maintains that the current Iraq war could destroy what's

left of the Mesopotamian marshes on the lower Tigris and Euphrates

rivers. Following the war of 1991 Saddam removed dissenters of his regime

who had built homes in the marshes by digging large canals along the two

rivers so that they would have access to their waters. Thousands of

people were displaced. The communities ruined.

The construction of dams upstream on the once roaring Tigris and

Euphrates has dried up more than 90 percent of the marshes and has led to

extinction of several animals. Water buffalo, foxes, waterfowl and boar

have disappeared. " What remains of the fragile marshes, and the

20,000 people who still live off them, will lie right in the path of

forces heading towards Baghdad from the south, " wrote Fred Pearce in

the New Scientist prior to Bush's invasion in 2003. The true effect this

war has had on these wetlands and its inhabitants is still not

known.

The destruction of Iraqi's infrastructure has had substantial public

health implications as well. Bombed out industrial plants and factories

have polluted ground water. The damage to sewage-treatment plants, with

reports that raw sewage formed massive pools of muck in the streets of

Baghdad immediately after Bush's 'Shock and Awe' campaign, is also likely

poisoning rivers as well as human life. Cases of typhoid among Iraqi

citizens have risen tenfold since 1991, largely due to polluted drinking

water.

That number has almost certainly increased more in the past few years

following the ousting of Saddam. In fact during the 1990s, while Iraq was

under sanctions, U.N. officials in Baghdad agreed that the root cause of

child mortality and other health problems was no longer simply lack of

food and medicine but the lack of clean water (freely available in all

parts of the country prior to the first Gulf War) and of electrical

power, which had predictable consequences for hospitals and water-pumping

systems. Of the 21.9 percent of contracts vetoed as of mid-1999 by the

U.N.'s U.S.-dominated sanctions committee, a high proportion were

integral to the efforts to repair the failing water and sewage

systems.

The real cumulative impact of U.S. military action in Iraq, past and

present, won't be known for years, perhaps decades, to come. Stopping

this war now will not only save lives, it will also help to rescue what's

left of Iraq's fragile environment.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like

Green to Me: The Politics of Nature and co-edits CounterPunch.org. Joshua

Frank is the co-editor of Dissident Voice and the author of Left Out! How

Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush. Together they are the editors of

the forthcoming volume titled Red State Rebels, which will be published

by AK Press in March of 2008.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at:

http://www.alternet.org/story///wAt

12:40 PM 11/14/07, you wrote:

The War on Iraq is also a War on

the Environment

By Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, AlterNet

Posted on October 29, 2007, Printed on November 14, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/66449/

The ecological effects of war, like its horrific toll on human life, are

exponential. When the Bush Administration and their Congressional allies

sent our troops in to Iraq to topple Saddam's regime, they not only

ordered these men and women to commit crimes against humanity, they also

commanded them to perpetrate crimes against nature.

The first Gulf War had a horrific effect on the environment, as CNN

reported in 1999, " Iraq was responsible for intentionally releasing

some 11 million barrels of oil into the Arabian Gulf from January to May

1991, oiling more than 800 miles of Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian coastline.

The amount of oil released was categorized as 20 times larger than the

Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and twice as large as the previous world

record oil spill. The cost of cleanup has been estimated at more than

$700 million. "

During the build up to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, Saddam

loyalists promised to light oil fields afire, hoping to expose what they

claimed were the U.S.'s underlying motives for attacking their country:

oil. The U.S. architects of the Iraq war surely knew this was a potential

reality once they entered Baghdad in March of 2003. Hostilities in Kuwait

resulted in the discharge of an estimated 7 million barrels of oil,

culminating in the world's largest oil spill in January of 1991. The

United Nations later calculated that of Kuwait's 1,330 active oil wells,

half had been set ablaze. The pungent fumes and smoke from those dark

billowing flames spread for hundreds of miles and had horrible effects on

human and environmental health. Saddam Hussein was rightly denounced as a

ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti

oil fields.

However, the United States military was also responsible for much of the

environmental devastation of the first Gulf War. In the early 1990s the

U.S. drowned at least 80 crude oil ships to the bottom of the Persian

Gulf, partly to uphold the U.N.'s economic sanctions against Iraq. Vast

crude oil slicks formed, killing an unknown quantity of aquatic life and

sea birds while wrecking havoc on local fishing and tourist

communities.

Months of bombing during the first Gulf War by U.S. and British planes

and cruise missiles also left behind an even more deadly and insidious

legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb fragments laced with

depleted uranium. In all, the U.S. hit Iraqi targets with more than 970

radioactive bombs and missiles.

More than 15 years later, the health consequences from this radioactive

bombing campaign are beginning to come into focus. And they are dire.

Iraqi physicians call it " the white death " -leukemia. Since

1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600

percent. The situation was compounded by Iraq's forced isolation and the

sadistic sanctions regime, once described by former U.N. secretary

general Kofi Annan as " a humanitarian crisis " , that made

detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.

Most of the leukemia and cancer victims aren't soldiers. They are

civilians. Depleted uranium is a rather benign sounding name for

uranium-238, the trace elements left behind when the fissionable material

is extracted from uranium-235 for use in nuclear reactors and weapons.

For decades, this waste was a radioactive nuisance, piling up at

plutonium processing plants across the country. By the late 1980s there

was nearly a billion tons of the material.

Then weapons designers at the Pentagon came up with a use for the

tailings. They could be molded into bullets and bombs. The material was

free and there was plenty at hand. Also uranium is a heavy metal, denser

than lead. This makes it perfect for use in armor-penetrating weapons,

designed to destroy tanks, armored-personnel carriers and bunkers.

When the tank-busting bombs explode, the depleted uranium oxidizes into

microscopic fragments that float through the air like carcinogenic dust,

carried on the desert winds for decades. The lethal bits when inhaled

stick to the fibers of the lungs, and eventually begin to wreck havoc on

the body in the form of tumors, hemorrhages, ravaged immune systems and

leukemias.

It didn't take long for medical teams in the region to detect cancer

clusters near the bomb sites. The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, pummeled by

American bombs in 1996, tripled in five years following the bombings. But

it's not just the Serbs who are ill and dying. NATO and U.N. peacekeepers

in the region are also coming down with cancer.

The Pentagon has shuffled through a variety of rationales and excuses.

First, the Defense Department shrugged off concerns about Depleted

Uranium as wild conspiracy theories by peace activists, environmentalists

and Iraqi propagandists. When the U.S.'s NATO allies demanded that the

U.S. disclose the chemical and metallic properties of its munitions, the

Pentagon refused. Depleted uranium has a half-life of more than 4 billion

years, approximately the age of the Earth. Thousand of acres of land in

the Balkans, Kuwait and southern Iraq have been contaminated

forever.

Speaking of DU and other war-related disasters, former chief U.N. weapons

inspector Hans Blix, prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said the

environmental consequences of the Iraq war could in fact be more ominous

than the issue of war and peace itself. Despite this stark admission, the

U.S. made no public attempts to assess the environmental risks that the

war would inflict.

Blix was right. On the second day of President Bush's invasion of Iraq it

was reported by the New York Times and the BBC that Iraqi forces had set

fire to several of the country's large oil wells. Five days later in the

Rumaila oilfields, six dozen wellheads were set ablaze. The dense black

smoke rose high in the southern sky of Iraq, fanning a clear signal that

the U.S. invasion had again ignited an environmental tragedy. Shortly

after the initial invasion the United Nations Environment Program's

(UNEP) satellite data showed that a significant amount of toxic smoke had

been emitted from burning oils wells. This smoldering oil was laced with

poisonous chemicals such as mercury, sulfur and furans, which can cause

serious damage to human as well as ecosystem health.

According to Friends of the Earth, the fallout from burning oil debris,

like that of the first Gulf War, has created a toxic sea surface that has

affected the health of birds and marine life. One area that has been

greatly impacted is the Sea of Oman, which connects the Arabian Sea to

the Persian Gulf byway of the Strait of Hormuz. This waterway is one of

the most productive marine habitats in the world. In fact the Global

Environment Fund contends that this region " plays a significant role

in sustaining the life cycle of marine turtle populations in the whole

North-Western Indo Pacific region. " Of the world's seven marine

turtles, five are found in the Sea of Oman and four of those five are

listed as " endangered " with the other listed as

" threatened " .

The future indeed looks bleak for the ecosystems and biodiversity of

Iraq, but the consequences of the U.S. military invasion will not only be

confined to the war stricken country. The Gulf shores, according to

BirdLife's Mike Evans, is " one of the top five sites in the world

for wader birds, and a key refueling area for hundreds of thousands of

migrating water birds. " The U.N. Environment Program claims that 33

wetland areas in Iraq are of vital importance to the survival of various

bird species. These wetlands, the U.N. claims, are also particularly

vulnerable to pollution from munitions fallout as well as oil wells that

have been sabotaged.

Mike Evans also maintains that the current Iraq war could destroy what's

left of the Mesopotamian marshes on the lower Tigris and Euphrates

rivers. Following the war of 1991 Saddam removed dissenters of his regime

who had built homes in the marshes by digging large canals along the two

rivers so that they would have access to their waters. Thousands of

people were displaced. The communities ruined.

The construction of dams upstream on the once roaring Tigris and

Euphrates has dried up more than 90 percent of the marshes and has led to

extinction of several animals. Water buffalo, foxes, waterfowl and boar

have disappeared. " What remains of the fragile marshes, and the

20,000 people who still live off them, will lie right in the path of

forces heading towards Baghdad from the south, " wrote Fred Pearce in

the New Scientist prior to Bush's invasion in 2003. The true effect this

war has had on these wetlands and its inhabitants is still not

known.

The destruction of Iraqi's infrastructure has had substantial public

health implications as well. Bombed out industrial plants and factories

have polluted ground water. The damage to sewage-treatment plants, with

reports that raw sewage formed massive pools of muck in the streets of

Baghdad immediately after Bush's 'Shock and Awe' campaign, is also likely

poisoning rivers as well as human life. Cases of typhoid among Iraqi

citizens have risen tenfold since 1991, largely due to polluted drinking

water.

That number has almost certainly increased more in the past few years

following the ousting of Saddam. In fact during the 1990s, while Iraq was

under sanctions, U.N. officials in Baghdad agreed that the root cause of

child mortality and other health problems was no longer simply lack of

food and medicine but the lack of clean water (freely available in all

parts of the country prior to the first Gulf War) and of electrical

power, which had predictable consequences for hospitals and water-pumping

systems. Of the 21.9 percent of contracts vetoed as of mid-1999 by the

U.N.'s U.S.-dominated sanctions committee, a high proportion were

integral to the efforts to repair the failing water and sewage

systems.

The real cumulative impact of U.S. military action in Iraq, past and

present, won't be known for years, perhaps decades, to come. Stopping

this war now will not only save lives, it will also help to rescue what's

left of Iraq's fragile environment.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like

Green to Me: The Politics of Nature and co-edits CounterPunch.org. Joshua

Frank is the co-editor of Dissident Voice and the author of Left Out! How

Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush. Together they are the editors of

the forthcoming volume titled Red State Rebels, which will be published

by AK Press in March of 2008.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at:

http://www.alternet.org/story/

 

 

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