The ecological implications of the Iraq war

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Volumn 16, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 7-17

  Kovel, Joel ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CRIME; ECOLOGICAL IMPACT; SOCIAL IMPACT; VIOLENCE; WAR;

ASIA; EURASIA; IRAQ; MIDDLE EAST;

EID: 33745109110     PISSN: 10455752     EISSN: 15483290     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10455750500375984     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Adapted from a presentation at the World Tribunal on Iraq, in Istanbul, Turkey, on June 26, 2005.
2. An estimate; the true number will never be known. As the U.S. commander in Iraq, General Tommy Franks, said, "we don't do body counts."
3. For "natural disasters," it is the same, all the more so when, as in the unfortunate case of New Orleans, class warfare, racism and environmental/ecological neglect had primed the city of a thousand toxins for incalculable ecodestruction in the wake of a hurricane like Katrina - which was itself aggravated by global warming. Further, the atrocious degree of vulnerability of the city owed a lot to the shunting of human, material and financial resources away from infrastructural repair to the Iraq war.
4. United Nations Environmental Program, "Desk Study on the Environment in Iraq," Switzerland, 2003
5. and Khaled Yacoub Oweis, "Postwar Iraq Paying Heavy Environmental Price," Reuters, June 2, 2005.
6. Which, it should not be forgotten, was scarcely "environmentally friendly." Saddam's most notorious ecological crime, aside from aggression against Kurds and Iranians, lay in his wanton destruction of the Southern Marshes, near Basra, home to half a million Arabs. This ecosystem, once thought hopelessly ruined, has actually been making a comeback in the last two years, thus constituting the only environmental advance of the Invasion.
7. The efforts of neoconservatives to conjure this up with people like Ahmad Chalabi were simply risible.
8. Focus on the Global South and GRAIN, "Iraq's New Patent Law: A Declaration of War Against Farmers," October 2004, online at: www.grain.org/articles/?idb/6.
9. An Abrams tank consumes eight gallons of fuel per mile while in action. Since Bush came to office, the military has won exemptions from parts of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. In mid 2005, administration officials went back to the Congressional trough asking for relief from the Clean Air Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which governs hazardous waste. These exemptions are meant to apply to domestic military bases, 25 million acres of which in the U.S. are home to 131 hazardous waste sites. The Defense Department accounts for more than 10 percent of the country's toppriority Superfund cleanup sites and generated 16.5 million pounds of toxic waste in 2002, according to government estimates. One can only imagine the care with which the U.S. military treats the ecosystems of Iraq, for example, how they "recycle" their wastes. Brad Knickerbocker, "Military Gets Break from Enviromental Rules," Christian Science Monitor, Nov 24, 2003, online at: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1124/p02s02-usmi.html.
10. Chiefly from the San Francisco Chronicle of March 29 and the Los Angeles Times of April 10, as summarized in Doug Lorimer, "Iraq: Making a Killing: The Big Business of War," Green Left WeekHy, online at: http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/625/625p20.htm.
11. For detailed and vivid accounts of the disaster comprised by the electricity-water-sewage nexus, see Dahr Jamail (primary contributor), "Bechtel's Dry Run: Iraqis Suffer Water Crisis," Public Citizen, Spring, 2004, online at: http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/reports/
12. and Christian Parenti, "The Rough Guide to Baghdad," The Nation, July 19, 2004, online at: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?ib/20040719&sb/parenti.
13. For a more recent survey, see UNDP, Iraq Living Condition Survey 2004, Volume II, Analytic Report, April 1, 2005. In June, 2005, Jamail wrote me that "It's safe to say that the water situation is just as bad and probably worse than when I reported on it in January/Feb. 04. In Fallujah now everyone has been instructed to boil their water, and even in parts of Baghdad, particularly Sadr City, there are cholera, hep[atitis]-E, and Typhoid outbreaks. [This information] comes recently from Iraqi doctors I know who are there now."
14. As well as 90 tons in Bosnia and Kosovo, in the wars against Serbia.
15. 236
16. See, for example, Juan Gonzalez, "Poisoned? Shocking Report Reveals Local Troops may be Victims of America's High-tech Weapons," NY Daily News, April 3, 2004
17. "The War's Littlest Victim," NY Daily News, September 29, 2004.
18. Michael Mandell, How America Gets Away with Murder (London: Pluto, 2004) provides an excellent discussion.
19. Alexander issued an edict forbidding his troops to enter the houses of the inhabitants of Babylon, which lies south of Baghdad on the Euphrates. Invading the archeological site that once was the great city 2,334 years later, Americans levelled parts of it to build a landing pad for helicopters and parking areas for heavy vehicles. Prof. John Curtis said that the invaders "caused substantial damage to the Ishtar Gate, one of the most famous monuments from antiquity [...] U.S. military vehicles crushed 2,600-year-old brick pavements, archaeological fragments were scattered across the site, more than 12 trenches were driven into ancient deposits and military earth-moving projects contaminated the site for future generations of scientists [...]" Wikipedia, "Babylon." See also Rory McCarthy and Maev Kennedy, "Babylon Wrecked by War," The Guardian, January 15, 2005.