Leaving a Mess in Mesopotamia
by Solana Pyne
April 16 - 22, 2003
villagevoice.com
Raw sewage courses through canals and riverbeds.
Toxic clouds from burning oil and smoldering
buildings billow into the air, raining particles on the countryside.
Heavy metals and a stew of chemicals
from bombed industrial plants spill into the soil and pollute drinking-water supplies.
Iraq doesn't look as bad as a smoky Kuwait did in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War,
but Iraq's air, land, and water have
been battered in 2003, and some experts say more Iraqi civilians
will die from post-war environmental
problems than have been killed during the fighting.
Even before the end of the current war, the U.S. had started preparations to rebuild roads and
airports, make water drinkable, and otherwise mitigate immediate public health hazards. But it hasn't
addressed the toxic soup left in the wake of the bombings. The Department of Defense has done no
environmental assessment in Iraq of damage, cleanup requirements, or costs, acknowledged Glen
Flood, a Pentagon spokesman.
Peter Zahler, a conservation biologist who supervised environmental assessment of Afghanistan as
part of the Post-Conflict Assessment Unit of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP),
characterized the U.S. and its allies as "very unprepared" to deal with environmental damage.
Still lurking are such problems as unexploded ordnance-of the 20,000 bombs and missiles dropped in
the first three weeks of this war, those that exploded drilled noxious fragments into the earth, but
those that didn't have turned benign backyards into potential death traps.
"Post-war environmental deaths may exceed direct civilian casualties," said Saul Bloom, executive
director of Arc Ecology, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that has helped foreign governments analyze
the environmental impacts of U.S. military bases.
With scarce knowledge of what pollution remains from the 1991 war, and little data on what has been
hit this time around, the salvage mission may require as much dexterity as the war plan.
"In a short-term war like this one," said Zahler, "the major threats environmentally are mostly
chemical." With fewer than 10 oil wells ignited in Iraq and just a few of those still burning, Zahler
speculates that the major remaining risks are "blown-up plants of any kind, transformers, and oil supply
depots." Among the possible dangers are carcinogenic PCBs leaking from the transformers or ammonia
seeping out of damaged fertilizer plants.
Also threatening, Zahler and other experts said, is depleted uranium, a toxic and radioactive heavy
metal used by U.S. and British forces as munitions to pierce tank armor and as part of the tanks
themselves.
Experts and environmentalists have been clamoring for better appraisals and treatment plans for
environmental damage since the 1991 war, but current plans for cleanup are limited to oil-well fires and
spills, and infrastructure rebuilding. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has
requested proposals from U.S. companies for eight contracts on projects ranging from repairing ports
and airports to running schools. None address remediation of pollution from ordnance and bombed
facilities.
"It's unlikely that they'll go ahead and do any of that cleanup," Bloom said. "What they'll most likely
deal with post-war is a superficial cleanup of unexploded ordnance." Bloom noted the Department of
Defense's historic resistance to dealing with pollution its own bases leave behind in the United States.
"You have created a toxin-rich environment, and this environment is going to cause problems," he said.
"That's why we've spent billions of dollars on cleaning of military bases in the U.S."
The situation in Iraq is complicated by the presence of the depleted uranium. "We've done quite a lot of
work on depleted uranium, and we just can't be sure of its effects for people close to exploding
munitions or for the people who handle it," David Nabarro, executive director of Sustainable
Development and Healthy Environments at the World Health Organization in Geneva, told the Voice.
The Department of Defense has acknowledged the use of depleted uranium but contends that there is
no known link between the use of depleted-uranium weapons and increased risk of serious illness.
Environmentalists and the governments of Iraq and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia claimed that the
use of such anti-tank shells and rockets in the first Gulf War and in NATO's bombing of the Balkans have
led to spikes of up to 12 times the previous rates for cancer and 10 times for birth defects. In the
Balkans, UNEP found that contamination was not high enough to pose a significant health risk, but
recommended precautionary cleanup because uranium had contaminated ground water and could still
be detected in the air and soil years later. Data is incomplete because few studies have been done on
troops and civilians exposed, especially in the moments after weapons hit their target, when depleted
uranium might be inhaled.
In Iraq, humans aren't the only immediate victims. The desert itself may take a century or more to
recover from the damage caused by the rapid push of thousands of tons of military hardware. One
endangered ecosystem in Iraq, however, may actually benefit from the conflict. The USAID announced
plans to help resuscitate the huge Mesopotamian marshlands, an important spawning ground for many
fisheries and home to rare wildlife and the culture of the Marsh Arabs, heirs to the Sumerians and
Babylonians. Saddam Hussein had built a series of giant canals to drain the marshes, thought by some
to be the site of the Garden of Eden. Upstream dams in surrounding countries have exacerbated the
problem. Hussein's project followed old British colonial plans to use the land for agriculture, but his
critics claimed that it was largely a politically motivated plan to hurt the 500,000 Marsh Arabs, some of
whom had joined the post-war uprising against him in 1992.
UN agencies seem most likely to step in to deal with Iraq's environmental problems. The UNEP started a
"desk study" of the environment of Iraq days before the bombing began. If the Security Council issues
a mandate, UNEP's Post-Conflict Assessment Unit would enter Iraq to gauge the damage and
recommend solutions. But that doesn't guarantee that the money will be made available to carry out
those solutions. In the aftermath of past wars, UNEP proposals have been hamstrung by limited
funding. After the war in Kosovo, the UNEP identified four "hot spots" of contamination caused by NATO
bombing and 27 cleanup projects, with an estimated cost of $21 million. It took UNEP nearly two years
to do the analysis and raise money-only $12.5 million so far-before starting the cleanup, said Sriram
Gopal, staff scientist for the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland,
and co-author of a study examining the effects of the NATO bombing of a car factory in Serbia. "If the
spills had been treated right after the bombing," Gopal said, "it would have been relatively simple. But
now the chemicals are in the groundwater and it's much more complex."
Since the first Gulf War, a dozen nations, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey,
along with other countries that helped in the environmental cleanup,
have submitted nearly $80 billion
in claims to the United Nations; most of the claims
haven't yet been paid. In this war, funding hasn't
come through yet for UNEP's initial request of half a million dollars,
part of a UN appeal to its members
for $2.2 billion in emergency assistance to Iraq in the next six months.
During the war to date, USAID
has spent half a billion dollars on aid to Iraq, virtually none of it on environmental issues.
A short attention span may be as limiting as shallow pockets. In 1991, UNEP recommended creation of
an international plan to rehabilitate the environment, a sort of Marshall Plan to deal with the
environmental disaster in the Middle East caused by the first Gulf War. The plan never materialized, and
much of the damage remains. When asked why, Nick Nuttall, UNEP's head of communications, said
there was no particular reason.
"After a war. there's lots of goodwill and good ideas," he said. "And
then the world moves on."
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