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Recent
Stories
May
16, 2003
Website
of the Day
Iraq and Our
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May
15, 2003
Ayesha
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Clear Channel Fogs the Airwaves
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Has Islam Failed? Not by Western
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My Meeting with Arafat
Steve Perry
The Saudi Arabia Bombing
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12, 2003
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America's Dirty Bombs
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Leopold
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Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/12
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Fooling
Marty Peretz
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10 / 11, 2003
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The Good Terrorists?
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Gancarski
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Sherman
A Letter to My European Friends
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El-Bizri
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Jackson
How Fear Curdles the Soul
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Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/10
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May
9, 2003
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Mahajan
Don't Lift the Sanctions Yet
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Madsen
When Lying Pays Off: Neo-Con Fabricators
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Bombastic Promise Keeping
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8, 2003
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Bush's War Web Log 5/08
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May
7, 2003
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Bush's War Web Log 5/07
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May
6, 2003
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Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/06
May
5, 2003
Gary
Leupp
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Smith
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May
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May
16, 2003
Water Woes
In Iraq, Water
and Oil Do Mix
By LEAH C. WELLS
Conspicuously missing from the ubiquitous
Iraq war critique was the subtle agenda of water rights in the
parched Middle East region. Of all the reasons for invading Iraq,
securing water rights was never mentioned because it implicates
too many countries with volatile connections to Iraq, like Syria,
Jordan, Turkey and Israel. Protest signs read, "No Blood
For Oil," as American corporations salivated in line for
the opportunity to win contracts to rebuild the ravaged infrastructure.
Why did no antiwar protesters carry signs saying, "No War
for Water"? They should have.
The current litany of reasons for invading
or threatening to invade countries pertains to terrorism, nuclear,
biological and chemical weapons, and undemocratic, fundamentalist
regimes. These reasons are particularized and specific, and keep
the world guessing where the United States will launch its next
attack. With an explicit agenda for controlling water in the
Middle East, however, the roadmap for regime change and regional
control would become transparent and predictable.
A land of displaced people and destroyed
ecosystems, the once thriving marshland area of southern Iraq
was home to hundreds of thousands of marsh Arabs who had sustained
a 5,000 year-old culture until the ancient life-giving waters
were drained and dammed by the recently-toppled Saddam Hussein
government as well as by other riparian states. Truly Saddam
created a catastrophic situation by redirecting the water and
razing marsh Arab villages. Yet aside from the apparent ecological
and humanitarian crisis pertaining to the area, why is the project
of rehydrating the marshlands so urgently important for American
interests?
A World Bank webcast in May 2001 quotes
Jean-Louis Sarbib, Vice President of the World Bank's Middle
East and North Africa Region, as saying that the CIA had identified
water as one of the key issues of the 21st century. Water is
a pressing issue in the Middle East which, like the sparse underground
aquifers, stays beneath the surface. With 45 million people in
the Middle East not having access to drinking water and 80 million
not having access to sanitation, Sarbib's commentary is an understatement.
Jeffrey Rothfeder, author of explained
in an article to the Boston Globe in January 2002 that "a
freshwater crisis has already begun that threatens to leave much
of the world dry in the next twenty years. One-third of the world's
population is starved for water. In Israel, extraction has surpassed
replacement by 2.5 billion meters in the last 25 years. There
are 250 million new cases of water-related diseases annually,
chiefly cholera and dysentery, and ten million deaths. What's
more, vital regions are destabilized as contending countries
dispute who controls limited water resources."
Rothfeder, quoting another World Bank
official, former Vice President Ismail Serageldin, reminded readers
that "the next world war will be over water."
Undercurrent of Water Politics
The dialogue about access to clean water
is commonplace in peace talks throughout the Middle East, but
Western diplomats rarely broach the topic. An anonymous U.S.
State Department official quoted in National Geographic said,
"people outside the region tend not to hear about the issue
(of water). It just doesn't make the news." By design, not
by accident, this issue is obscured from Western eyes because
the propaganda machinery from Washington, DC has not allowed
it. Although water is at the top of the list in negotiations
between Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and Iraq,
Only the region's countries, the riparian
states of Syria, Turkey and Iraq themselves have directly conferred
on the issue of sharing the water of the Tigris and Euphrates.
The United States cannot dictate water usage as a formal part
of its foreign policy, or even legitimate the crisis surrounding
clean water, in part because of its wholly unsustainable practices,
and in part because a straightforward concession on the issue
of dwindling water supplies would mean an complete overhaul of
global diplomatic relations with a new emphasis on aquatic vulnerability.
Published after the 9-11 terrorist attacks
but prior to the recent war on Iraq, Peaceful Uses of International
Rivers: The Euphrates and Tigris Dispute written by water rights
expert Hilal Elver outlines the hydrohistory of the Fertile Crescent
as well as the present challenges to settling the disputes between
countries vying for water access in the 21st century. She notes
that the "last trilateral meeting of the Turkish, Syrian
and Iraqi technical committee was concluded in Damascus in 1996"
with Iraq still under the United Nations-imposed sanctions regime
which severely hindered international diplomatic relations. With
the United States effectively in control of Iraqi politics and
lobbying for the removal of the sanctions, presumably negotiations
between the three nations will resume with respect to shared
water issues.
According to Thomas Naff, a professor
of Middle East History at Pennsylvania State University, the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers which provide Iraq with nearly 100%
of its water "depend essentially on agreements with Turkey"
where both rivers originate. Turkey disagrees over quotas to
meet Syria and Iraq's minimum requirements for what would be
the natural flow of the water and what would provide their people
with adequate access to those resources, claiming that Syria
and Iraq take more than their allotted amount of water from the
rivers as compared to how much each country contributes to the
rivers' flows.
Thus Turkey began constructing a major
series of dams to control the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates
and flex their regional muscle. The Southeast Anatolia Project
consists of 15 dams, 14 hydroelectric stations and 19 irrigation
projects. Maybe to prove its capacity for controlling Syria's
and Iraq's access to the life-sustaining waters of the two rivers
or maybe just to fill the largest of the Project's dams, Turkey
cut off the water flow for 29 days in 1990. The point of potable
prowess was well taken, and Iraq and Syria effectively tabled
their mutual disagreements and colluded in 1998 to resist the
construction of the Southeast Anatolia Project in Turkey. In
the close quarters of Middle East politics, shared water resources
often make for temperamental bedfellows.
Closely tied to the disputes surrounding
Iraq and Syria's water supply is the proximity to Israel. Syria
faces water difficulties on its southwestern border as well in
the water-rich area of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel
since 1967. The Golan Heights has important water resources that,
according to Professor Emeritus Dan Zaslavsky at Bar-Ilan University,
if handed back over to Syria would mean that Israel loses nearly
one-third of its fresh water.
On May 7, 2003 Secretary of State Colin
Powell met with Bouthaina Shabaan of Syria to reaffirm the United
States' commitment to returning the Golan Heights, occupied by
Israel since 1967, as a key step in the peace process between
Syria and Israel.
Should the U.S. broker a peace plan that
guaranteed the Golan to Syria, Israel would have to find a replacement
source for its lost resources. Stephen Pelletiere, a former CIA
analyst, wrote in the New York Times that Turkey had envisioned
building a Peace Pipeline carrying water that would extend to
the southern Gulf States, and as he sees it, "by extension
to Israel." He continued by saying that "no progress
has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence.
With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change."
The assumptions about pan-Arab unity
seem to dissolve when talking about the scarce commodity of water,
especially when the two of the countries commanding control over
the resources are also recipients of large amounts of financial
and military aid from the United States: Turkey and Israel. This
cosmetic overture to feign regional fairness and non-partiality
toward Israel in returning the Golan Heights to Syria does not
mask the fact that the United States has strategic goals to control
water and oil supplies in the Middle East. The continued destruction
of Palestinian homes and agribusiness by Israeli settlers is
second only to continued U.S. aggression toward Iraqis via sanctions
and wars, inciting and exacerbating global disgust at perceived
American imperialism and anti-Arab, anti-Islamic policies. These
sentiments contribute to the ongoing worldwide terrorist threats,
which in turn propels the United States foreign policy to search
and destroy any would-be terrorists and lending encouragement
for further invasions in "uncooperative" countries
like those listed as the Axis of Evil.
The Dammed Water Problem
While the regional water issues have
been obscured, to some extent the poor condition of water in
Iraq is no new news.
Professor Thomas Nagy of George Washington
University unloaded a massive compilation of U.S. Government
documents from 1990-1991 that showed in no uncertain terms the
malevolent intent to target sites of vital civilian importance
in the first Gulf War. In an expose entitled "The Secret
Behind the Sanctions" Nagy cites macabre foreknowledge of
the effects of bombing water purification and sewage treatment
facilities which provide clean water to the Iraqi people. Moreover,
these documents detail how the economic sanctions, imposed when
Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, would crescendo the effects
of the bombings by banning items like water chlorinators and
spare parts to rebuild the obliterated infrastructure, claiming
that they could serve "dual use" purposes in making
weapons of mass destruction.
The result has been pandemic waterborne
illnesses that have targeted the most vulnerable people in Iraqi
society the children. The United Nations estimates that 5,000
children under age 5 have died every month as a result of preventable
illnesses such as cholera and dysentery. Because electrical facilities
were also targeted in the first Gulf War, vaccinations needing
refrigeration (which requires electricity or functioning generators)
spoiled, and several generations of children in Iraq have not
been inoculated for illnesses which had been completely controlled
under the socialist, secular Iraqi government which once provided
its citizens with comprehensive, free medical care.
It is safe to address topics like waterways
contaminated by sewage in Iraq because most of the dialogue on
impure water centers on the immorality of targeting civilian
infrastructure. It is dangerous to talk about the scarcity of
water in the region because less dialogue covers the most pressing
issue: regional instability intensifying as a result of growing
population rates and diminishing water supplies. The United States
is testing the waters of hydropolitics by starting to acknowledge
the shortage of water in the marshlands of Iraq. Missing from
the critique of U.S. foreign policy in the region is a dialogue
on regional and global sustainability, to the advantage of American
interests.
In justifying the recent invasion, we
heard history about Saddam gassing his own people, the Kurds,
developing and hiding weapons of mass destruction, displacing
the marsh Arabs and ruining their land, and leading a torturous
repressive regime that deprived Iraqi people from democracy and
self-governance and led them to the deplorable conditions they
now live in.
The U.S. Department of State lists an
interview with Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi-born engineer and environmental
activist, who explained that the Iraqi government diverted water
by building canals and dams for many reasons. One was to catch
soldiers fleeing the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980's, and another
was to punish the Shi'a people who, doing as the United States
had told them to do at the end of the first Gulf War, led an
uprising against the central Iraqi government and were abandoned
by the U.S. military and forcefully put down by Saddam's military.
Alwash describes three different systems
that Saddam's regime used for redirecting the water away from
the marshlands, claiming that even in the early 1990's when dams
in Turkey and Syria were built to harness hydroelectric energy
and retain water for their countries' usage, the marshlands of
Iraq were vibrant and thriving. He maintains that it was exclusively
the malicious dehydration campaign led by Saddam which ruined
the marshlands and displaced or killed between 100,000 and 500,000
Marsh Arabs, draining 60% of the marshes between 1990-1994.
Interestingly enough, draining the marshlands
between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers what the United Nations
Environmental Programme (UNEP) calls "one of the world's
greatest environmental disasters" was done under the auspices
of the sanctions and the watchful eye of the southern No-Fly-Zone,
patrolled by Great Britain, the United States and, for some time,
France. The No-Fly-Zones were established in 1992 to protect
the Kurdish people in the north and the Shi'a people in the south
from Saddam's regime. These minority groups have received targeted
repression and mistreatment, and the No-Fly-Zones were supposed
to inhibit Saddam's power to further oppress them.
"We watched it happen," said
Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne at a forum on the marshlands
at the Brookings Institution on May 7. "We had the power,
the knowledge and the responsibility and we did nothing."
Undoubtedly, the long arms of Baghdad were able to reach to the
southern marshlands despite the sanctions and the No-Fly-Zones,
and wreak havoc on the indigenous people as well as the landscape.
For the past twelve years while Iraqis
were unable to import pencils because they contained graphite,
blood bags because they contained anti-coagulants and cleaning
supplies, because the Sanctions Committee 661 asserted that some
parts could be used in making weapons of mass destruction, the
government of Iraq was able to bring in materials and massive
equipment to construct dams which rerouted the marshland waters
and wrought misery on the Madan.
Inundated by Foreign Interests
One of the many claims of barbarism on
the part of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime is displacing
hundreds of thousands of Madan, or Marsh Arabs, and draining
the legendary swamps where millennia-old culture had been practiced
and preserved. In post-war Iraq, the United States has assumed
the responsibility of restoring these marshlands. The United
States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been
a vocal proponent of bringing water to the arid landscape, addressing
the humanitarian needs of the remaining Marsh Arabs, and fixing
the ecological crisis which, according to the UNEP, has vanished
about 90% of the 20,000 square kilometers of Iraq's marshlands.
While addressing the marshland concerns
attempts to smooth over twelve-year-old political rifts between
the American administrators now governing Iraq and the displaced
Madan people, it seems somewhat odd that such a relatively isolated
minority of the Iraqi population would receive such attention
and consideration so immediately after the war, especially since
the Madan are Shi'a, a population that has largely rejected the
occupying American forces and has rejoiced at the return of Islamic
leaders from exile to Iraq.
And yet, American interests are moving
forward swiftly.
Bechtel, an American firm with a controversial
history of water privatization, who won the largest contract
from USAID to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, is set to be a major
player in the process with a contract worth $680 million. Bechtel's
history speaks for itself.
Blue Gold, a book exposing global control
of water by private corporations, listed Bechtel in the second
tier of ten powerful companies who profit from water privatization.
According to Corpwatch, two years ago current USAID administrator
Andrew Natsios was working for Bechtel as the chairman of the
Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, a massive transportation project
in Boston whose cost has inflated exponentially in the billions
of dollars. While providing political disclaimers on its website
as a result of investigative reporting centering on the close
relationship between government and private business, Bechtel
certainly will benefit from its positioning as the sole contractor
for municipal water and sanitation services as well as irrigation
systems in Iraq.
Vandana Shiva also implicates Bechtel
in attempting to control not only the process of rebuilding Iraq's
infrastructure, but also control over the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers themselves. Bechtel has been embroiled in a lawsuit with
Bolivia for their plan to privatize the water there, which would
drastically rise the cost of clean water for the poorest people
in the country. To control the water in the Middle East, Bechtel
and its fiscal sponsors, the United States government, would
have to pursue both Syria and Turkey, either militarily or diplomatically.
Syria has already felt pressure from the United States over issues
of harboring Iraqi exiles on the U.S.'s "most wanted"
list, as well as over issues of terrorism and weapons of mass
destruction.
It is not stretch of the imagination
that a company like Bechtel with a history of privatization would
have its sights set on water in the Middle East, starting with
their lucrative deal in Iraq. However, the United States is not
positioned to enter a new phase of global geopolitics where water,
a limited vital resource that every human needs, is the hottest
commodity and where American corporations like Bechtel have not
already capitalized on the opportunity to obtain exclusive vending
rights.
Devoting attention to restoring the marshes
clearly serves U.S. businesses and corporations who have control
over which areas of the marshes get restored, and which ones
get tapped for their rich oil resources. Control of the marshlands
by the U.S.-led interim government and by the American corporations
who have won reconstruction contracts is crucial in deciding
where new oil speculation will take place. If only a percentage
25% according to experts on a Brookings Institution panel on
marshland reconstruction can be restored, then it would behoove
those working on issues of oil and water not to rehydrate areas
where such oil speculation will likely take place.
Water is vital to the production of oil
as well; one barrel of water is required to produce one barrel
of oil. Bechtel and Halliburton, who received a U.S. Army contract
to rebuild the damaged oil industry which will likely reach $600
million, are the two most strategically-positioned corporations
to control both the water and oil industries in Iraq.
Yet this ruse of generous reconstruction
and concern seems both an unlikely and peculiar response after
a less-than-philanthropic U.S.-led invasion of the sovereign
nation of Iraq. Supporters and opponents of the war alike could
hardly miss its transparency. Whether the reasoning was because
of oil, liberating the Iraqi people, ferreting out weapons of
mass destruction or exerting regional influence, few pretenses
were made to distance the war profiteers from the battlefield
in the war's wake.
The actions of agencies like USAID, which
has pledged more than a billion dollars to facilitate rebuilding
infrastructure in Iraq which the U.S. military and policymakers
had a large hand in destroying, are far from altruistic. The
problem of the Marsh Arabs was not invented overnight at the
end of the recent war, but rather has developed in plain view
of the whole world via satellite images and documented in-country
reports of displacement and abuse. Moreover, the marshlands are
not Iraq's sole antiquity. Museums, regions and sites of archaeological
importance were destroyed, bombed and looted not only during
this last war, but also continuously since the first Gulf War.
Will we be paying to rebuild those as well?
According to Peter Galbraith, a professor
at the Naval War College, three weeks of ransacking post-war
Baghdad left nearly every ministry in shambles, including the
Irrigation Ministry, except for the Oil Ministry that was guarded
by U.S. troops. The people of Iraq are becoming rapidly disenchanted
with a prolonged U.S. presence in their country as their former
disempowerment under Saddam is translated into present disempowerment
under the Americans.
According to those working closely with
the project to rehydrate the marshlands, in the newly "liberated"
Iraq the silenced voices of the oppressed peoples can now be
heard and addressed, the stories of destruction can be told and
the much-needed healing of humans and terrain can take place.
Whether this will actually happen is another story. At the Brookings
Institution forum on the marshlands, no native Iraqis were represented,
and the larger question arising in the post-war reconstruction
of Iraq is what tangible legitimacy is given to voicing the will
of the people by putting representative Iraqis in power.
Water, Water Everywhere and Not a Drop
to Drink
Perhaps the issue of water is left unspoken
on the global level because the transnational corporations supported
by powerful Western governments contribute largely to water pollution
and privatization and do not want to draw attention to this fact
lest they be forced to clean up their acts and sacrifice profits.
Certainly higher standards and levels of accountability would
be imposed on industries relying on expendable water resources
if the true shortage of water were openly acknowledged.
Perhaps it is because the leaders, politicians
and diplomats who negotiate issues like this do not want to cause
mass hysteria in the region, or in the United States or Western
world, by directly addressing the problem of diminishing water
supplies. Instead they prefer to keep it their little secret,
hidden from public view and accountability, prolonging the inevitable
panic and hording that will ensue when people's needs will outweigh
the planet's capacity for providing potable water.
Perhaps water issues in Iraq and in the
Middle East in general do not make the news so as not to legitimize
the environmental movement's claims that water is a precious
and ever-diminishing resource that requires drastic reprioritizing
on a personal, national and global level. Sustainable practices
of water conservation are given cursory attention worldwide and
are not yet being implemented on a credible, meaningful scale.
Population growth expectations for the
Middle East provide a staggering predicament. According to Michael
Klare, author of Resource Wars, the regional population was near
500 million in 1998, and that figure is expected to double by
the year 2050. There will be no peace in the Middle East without
addressing issues of sustainability and access to water. The
microcosm of war in the Middle East is a staggering prediction
of a potential widespread global crisis if countries do not learn
to conserve and cooperate.
Or perhaps it is because resources are
not allocated fairly in the region, and acknowledging massive
humanitarian crises means that the whistle-blowers are accountable
to fixing the problem. Israelis and Palestinians already compete
for limited water resources, with Palestine getting short shrift
and less water. As noted in Resource Wars, Jewish settlers already
get five to eight times more water per capita than Palestinians.
Addressing problems of war, famine, the
environment, human rights, democracy and sustainability has traditionally
been compartmentalized work with little overlap and interdependent
relevance. The situation of the marsh Arabs integrates the urgency
of ending wars, providing for humanitarian crises and looking
ahead into the future at the necessity of sharing natural resources
equitably. In the near future, wars may be fought not over intangible
ideologies like communism, terrorism or religion, but rather
fought overtly about access to clean water. It will soon be much
more difficult for governments to euphemize about their intent
to wage war.
The policy of rehydrating the marshlands
of Iraq is significant in that it marks American interests' recognition
of water scarcity in the Middle East. It also means that following
the blue lines on the map charts a precarious course toward war
or peace, depending on the management of water resources.
Leah C. Wells serves as the Peace Education
Coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).
She has visited Iraq three times with Nobel Peace Prize-nominated
organization Voices in the Wilderness (www.vitw.org) and may
be contacted at education@napf.org.
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