Features » March 28, 2003

Eco-lateral Damage

Like the first Gulf War, this one is sure to be an environmental disaster

By Ross Mirkarimi

We felt a sense of impending catastrophe, difficult to define at first, as we crossed the Jordanian border into Iraq and sped toward Baghdad. As we drove down the desert highway, the fault lines of a military conflagration started to reveal the pockmarks of the war’s chaos. We arrived. My focus turned to an ancient nation, once advanced, now engulfed in the onslaught of the war’s aftermath.

Baghdad, the barometer for the western media, stood resolute but seriously wounded. I knew that a return to normalcy there, the center of Saddam Hussein’s realm, was key to his remaining in power. Yet outside the city, any impressions of efficiency were merely delusions. That was 1991.

Shortly after the Gulf War, I was part of a nonpartisan public health and scientific team organized by Harvard University and others to chronicle the impact of the war and U.N. sanctions on the Iraqi civilian infrastructure. The International Study Team, the first to detail the comprehensive damage to Iraq’s populace and environment, established the baseline data that are still used today by non-governmental organizations in assessing infant mortality, economic instability, ecological damage and environmentally borne diseases. The team’s findings were reported worldwide. The study was scientific. The toll was horrific.

The data spoke volumes: “Surgical” strikes lacked precision, and the aftermath of combat claimed much more than the reported collateral damage to innocent bystanders and their support systems. The United Nations was supposed to convene a special session in November 1991 to receive our report. But under Security Council protocol, any permanent member nation was allowed to reject such a hearing. The United States requested that the hearing not take place. Despite fanfare abroad, our study team’s findings were relegated to the fringe here at home.

Instantly, academics and scientists became activists. I was on the road for more than two years, speaking about the need to lift economic sanctions against Iraq’s civilians and to implement an honorable peace so that future war with Iraq would be staved off. Unfortunately, U.S. diplomacy misjudged Saddam’s tyrannical resilience after extricating Iraq from Kuwait. Saddam would not let Washington dictate a political outcome following the war, and a new script for a future war was put forward by Republican Party architects.

A cold war with Iraq emerged, but the impacts of the 1991 war and ensuing U.N. sanctions endured far beyond the battlefield, blurring the distinction between combatants and victims who have had no say over its course. Surpassing 800,000 in 2002, far more Iraqi civilians, especially children, have died from the lingering consequences of the first Gulf War than died during the war itself.

As the public health crisis has raged on, relief organizations like UNICEF and Oxfam have been forced to pirouette around the political red tape of U.N. sanctions. In triage mode, the environmental health impacts that have engulfed Iraq have been treated in terms of its symptoms rather than as a complex pattern. A bombed-out paint factory, the altered chemistry of a river, a defoliated tree grove and a shattered economy have combined to foster disease, genetic mutations and slow, torturous deaths.

Once a modern nation, Iraq is now a country of waterborne diseases induced by improper sanitation and deficient supplies of potable water; imperiled flora and fauna due to uncontrolled pollution and habitat displacement; contaminated ecosystems peppered by depleted uranium bullets; soil and agricultural erosion caused by reduced photosynthesis and poor irrigation; and depleted livestock due to disease and the interruption of food chains.

To force Saddam out of Iraq, President Bush, like his father before him, is willing to risk untold catastrophe as an acceptable price of victory. As the war unfolds, sanitized and conflicting reports on the escalating damage to Iraq’s civilian infrastructure and environment remain murky at best. Since U.S. and British forces have secured a majority of Iraq’s oil fields, the dramatic images of raging fires and oil-soaked birds seem less likely to be replayed. While visually less ferocious, the insidious effects of destroying Iraq’s electrical infrastructure and serpentine water-delivery system are having a profound impact in plunging Iraq into a deeper humanitarian crisis.

The United Nations and U.S. government are rushing cargo ships of humanitarian relief to the southern Iraqi port city of Umm Qasr and Basra, but the international community has yet to fathom the magnitude of what it will take to rehabilitate the immense toll of Iraq’s ecological health catastrophe, which has lingered for nearly a generation. Environmental health organizations from around the globe are banding together in opposition to this war and to the energy polices that drove us toward it.

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• Reader Comments

  These are horrible environmmental consequences that should have been addressed by the leaders of their nation.  Iraq had the means to lead a productive and healthy country, though the government chose to ignore the problems it created.  The government of Iraq chose to weaken, torture, threaten, and lie to its citizens on a level that Americans cannot imagine. 

  If the US government had taken the initiative when they first challenged Saddam then this never would have reached its current proportions.  Ask yourself, which government would you rather live under:  that which can be openly criticized in the US… OR… the governments of Algeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Colombia, Venezuela, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Palestine, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Angola, Liberia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Burma, Laos, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, or Somolia?  Lets be honest now, these may all be interesting countries, but which government would you choose? 

  The US has its problems and makes mistakes, but we all have to work hard to improve what we can.  Don’t give up on a system that has worked toward many positive goals in favor of untested pipe dreams. 

  Posted by ROCKTIME on Mar 29, 2003 at 5:01 PM

  Ross Mirkarimi writes that the war on Iraq is driven by energy policies. No doubt, the quest for oil is a major factor. But whether that oil is for energy is questionable. Energy has a variety of possible sources: the sun, the wind, ocean currents, biomass, the atom, coal and maybe some I’m not thinking of at the moment. But except for the atom, those items can’t support something else: a war machine. Furthermore, Iraq is not the only target of the war that Bush and his inner circle are waging. What we are seeing is a massive, blatant grab of wealth and power—in which most members of Congress and many in the federal judiciary are complicit—whose real aim is the destruction of the U.S. Constitution.

  Posted by Gino Rembetes on Mar 29, 2003 at 11:42 PM

  I’ve heard Ross Mirkarimi speak about this issue over the radio. He makes a compelling argument at how the eco-science of a war’s aftermath is another vital tool for dissuading future wars. 

  The more information we get, the more effective we are in building our case against this madness—beyond the rhetoric that seems trite at times.  Thanks for the piece.

  Posted by J.C. on Mar 31, 2003 at 8:58 AM

  Mr. Mirkarimi,
  Good points.  But, you didn’t mention that this war is good for business.  U.S. business.  Someone has to attend to the war’s aftermaths and since the crisis du jour is Iraq, the United States is poised to topple a dictator and plant a new shopping mall.

  Bad luck for the other hardship nation-cases, who still struggle, media-free, from their humanitarian crises.  As long as the United Nations keeps getting its knees whacked, any notion in rectifying the environmental and human consequences of war, is an expensive lesson in false-hope. 

  Is that the U.S. I see taking its other foot out of the U.N.? 

  Posted by Alexa. F. on Apr 1, 2003 at 4:48 AM

  I just came across this story and wish I had seen it before. Apparently, very little information on this subject is out in the mainstream.  For me this piece raises larger questions and that is how do we deal with all the catastrophic military impacts on the planet…how indeed?

  Posted by Will Z. on Apr 16, 2003 at 10:16 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 8 posts.

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