Men's Journal

To gauge the environmental impact of the invasion of Iraq, start with how devastated Iraq’s ecology was before the first bombs struck in 2003. Then factor in what the U.S. hasn’t done since.

By Nathaniel Fick

Most interpretations of the Book of Genesis place the Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia’s marshes, near the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now southern Iraq. Celebrated British author Sir Wilfred Thesiger spent much of the 1950s exploring the region. “Memories of that first visit to the Marshes have never left me,” Thesiger writes in his classic, The Marsh Arabs. “Stars reflected in dark water, the croaking of frogs, canoes coming home at evening, peace and continuity, the stillness of a world that never knew an engine.”

That world knew engines in March 2003. Forty thousand marines roared through southeastern Iraq in long columns of Humvees, tanks, and supply trucks. I was with them, leading a marine recon platoon in the vanguard of this blitz from Kuwait to Baghdad. Our mission was to sweep forward of the main invasion force, scouting out routes along the banks of the Euphrates. After crossing the border we drove for two days through empty desert before stopping at dusk near parallel canals, aptly named the Mother of All Battles and Loyalty to the Leader. On the other side, according to my map, lay a vast swamp, the Hawr al Hammar.

Sunrise revealed only alkali-stained, sun-cracked earth stretching away to the horizon. Every drop of water had been drained away. We gratefully thundered ahead across indistinguishable miles of hard ground. Our only sense of progress was when the GPS showed us crossing from one kill box to another, “kill box” being the name military planners call the zones used to coordinate air cover for the invasion force.

“Christ!” my driver yelled over the engine noise. “We’ve turned the Garden of Eden into kill boxes!”

Warfare is an ecological free-for-all. we turfed a fragile desert ecosystem and tossed our garbage from the Humvee windows with abandon. We left behind thousands of tons of ordnance and untold millions of lead bullets. We did a lot more than merely violate the rules of “pack it in, pack it out” and “leave no trace.” Concern for the environment never entered my mind. As a trigger-puller on the ground — despite my Appalachian Mountain Club membership and avid New Hampshire peak-bagging — I was more concerned with survival and victory.

The problems only worsened after the invasion, because, unlike the desert battles of the Gulf War a decade before, Iraq’s insurgency has largely been fought in and around Iraq’s cities. Bombs don’t only kill people; they get water and sewage all mixed together, and they cut power lines. Baghdad and other population centers continue to suffer extended interruptions in electricity, with serious effects on sewage treatment, desalination, and water purification. You don’t have to have suffered giardia on a backpacking trip to appreciate the importance of plentiful, safe drinking water.

The office of the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen Jr., reports that, as of last December, the average Baghdad resident now has four hours of power per day, compared with 16 or more before the invasion. Fewer than a third of the people in Iraq have access to clean water, as opposed to half before the war. Availability of sewage systems has also declined. When I asked an American official working on Iraq reconstruction how this could possibly be, he noted that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is only now hiring an environmental advisor for Iraq. “It’s ironic, or perhaps instructive,” he says, “that this position is being filled three years into the reconstruction process.” (The official could not speak on the record. He is currently serving in Iraq and is not cleared for attribution.)

A 2005 report on Iraq by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), meanwhile, reads, in part, like a catalog of horrors: tons of cyanide strewn across public areas, thousands of gallons of pesticide seeping into the ground, and hundreds of thousands of tons of burning sulfur-mine waste.

What’s immediately clear from the few agencies conducting these surveys is that no one is doing enough. As with so many other errors after Baghdad’s fall — not sealing the borders, not stopping the looting, not incorporating Sunni officials and soldiers into the new polity immediately following liberation — American officials simply did not sufficiently address environmental issues. They suffered a failure of imagination and consequently didn’t provide needed resources to the people on the ground. The effects are wide-ranging, and go far beyond nature conservation.

“I believe Iraq’s environmental problems are as important as the security problems,” says former Iraqi minister of environment Mishkat Al-Moumin, “because the environmental problems are directly related to the health and well-being of the people. If we neglect the environment, then we create problems that can’t be solved. This is the new frontier of human rights.”

The American reconstruction official made the linkage between natural resources and peace even tighter: “Environmental problems tend to disproportionately affect the poor and dispossessed. These are the same people feeding the ranks of the insurgency. The rich can always buy bottled water, but the poor don’t have recourse,” he wrote in an e-mail. “If life expectancy starts to drop, or even if quality of life is diminished due to dysentery, why not take the opportunity of the promised land through martyrdom? The state of the environment is directly linked to the stability of the country.”

On a cold sunday in January, nearly three years after the invasion, I sat in a Harvard Square coffee shop with Al-Moumin. The former law professor and human rights advocate had been appointed minister of environment in June 2004. Two months later a suicide bomber blew up her convoy in Baghdad, killing four of her bodyguards. A group linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the attempt on Al-Moumin’s life and said it would not miss next time. Looking no worse for the experience, she sipped orange juice, and underscored how Iraq was far from pristine when the first U.S. bombs fell.

“The neglect in Iraq didn’t start in 2003; it started in 1921,” when the country was still a British mandate, Al-Moumin said. She listed what she calls modern Iraq’s “four wars”: against Iran in the 1980s, the first Gulf War in 1990–1991, U.N. economic sanctions throughout the 1990s, and the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam. “Each of them has done its harm.”

During the war with Iran, Saddam used chemical weapons and ordered the destruction of millions of Iraq’s life-sustaining palm trees to deny concealment to the invading Iranians. In 1991 the whole world witnessed apocalyptic clouds of smoke as 600 burning oil wells in Kuwait spewed half a million metric tons of pollutants into the atmosphere each day for more than a month. A decade of sanctions did harm great and small. For example, when the chlorine required for water treatment was banned as a potential ingredient in chemical weapons, water purification systems fell into disrepair. Throughout it all, the regime used its income for private palaces instead of public services.

Saddam’s crowning blow against his own country’s environmental heritage was the draining of the marshes. Forty years before their destruction, Thesiger noted that the marshland “afforded a refuge to remnants of defeated people and [had] been a center for lawlessness and rebellion from earliest times.” After the Gulf War, disaffected Shiites rose up against Saddam from the safety of the marshes. He responded by building canals, including the Mother of All Battles and Loyalty to the Leader, to divert the water that fed the marshland. “Everyone talks about the chemical or nuclear weapons of mass destruction,” Al-Moumin said, shaking her head. “But here was water as a mass destruction weapon.” With the marshes desiccated, a 5,000-year-old culture was all but wiped out.

Environmental concerns, particularly when they’re inimical to the ruling powers, don’t get much press in the Middle East. Even climate change is widely seen as little more than a Western conspiracy to deprive the region’s petro states of their income. “The theme of the Hussein government,” Al-Moumin explained, “was that the environment was at the bottom. They only wanted to build military factories and then dump the waste in the rivers.”

Iraq’s infrastructure deteriorated under the burden of irresponsible governance, near-continuous war, and increasing deprivation of international aid. The U.N. Human Development Index is a composite measure of such factors as poverty, literacy, and life expectancy. Taken together, these variables are meant to approximate the nebulous concept of “well-being.” In 1990 Iraq ranked 54th out of 130 countries. By 1992 it had slid to 106th of 174. In 2001 Iraq was 117th of 174, on a par with places like Myanmar and Zimbabwe. And then the U.S. attacked.

When uninitiated Americans — like me — think of environmental protections, we imagine glamorous tasks such as setting aside parkland or protecting endangered species. As a cabinet minister, Al-Moumin had to focus instead on solutions as gritty as the problems themselves: developing regulatory procedures and creating a professional civil service.

First on her list of Iraq’s most dire environmental needs is a relevant code of law. There’s currently no effective system to regulate even basic functions, such as wastewater. The maximum penalty for dumping toxic waste in the Tigris is $68.50. Iraq’s second priority, she says, ought to be raising the new Ministry of Environment to professional specs. When Al-Moumin took over, there were no phones, no Internet access, no office chairs. “My employees,” she says, “were asking what the word environment means.”

Even those concerned with the environmental impact of the war in Iraq might be focusing on the wrong things. For example, depleted uranium, or DU, is often mentioned as a serious environmental hazard of modern war (and a suspected cause of Gulf War syndrome).

DU is a byproduct of the enrichment process by which uranium ore is turned into nuclear fuel. Its density — DU is almost twice as heavy as lead — makes it useful as a penetrator in projectiles designed to pierce armor. Some Iraqi doctors claim that DU contributed to a dramatic rise in childhood cancer rates and birth defects, but due to the current state of Iraq, their claims are nearly impossible to verify. The Defense Department reports that 320 tons of DU were used during the Gulf War, and experts guess that three times that amount has been fired in Iraq since 2003. If DU is a problem, then it seems poised to get worse.

UNEP, however, tells a different story. Founded in 1972 and based in Nairobi, the environmental arm of the United Nations launched a comprehensive investigation in response to claims of DU poisoning in the Balkans, where NATO aircraft used the penetrators to destroy Serb armor in the 1990s. Seven years after the end of hostilities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, they could only conclude that, given proper containment, “the levels of DU contamination are not a cause for alarm.”

Proper containment is the operative phrase. In Iraq, where civilians are in desperate need of raw materials, uncontrolled looting of contaminated military waste has already resulted in numerous public health crises. The most highly publicized account of this occurred in the chaotic days following the regime’s collapse at the Tuwaitha nuclear facility near Baghdad. Here people dumped uranium on the ground in order to use the storage barrels for food and water, resulting later in epidemics of nosebleeds, skin problems, and breathing difficulties. Some Iraqis even bathed in the pools of radioactive wastewater. The 2005 UNEP report on Iraq makes clear that Tuwaitha is but one example of many. Most of these “hot spots” suffered from the usual trifecta of neglect, war damage, and looting.

Pressing as the toxic and radioactive waste is, the greatest environmental scar in Iraq remains the marshes Saddam Hussein had drained. Their 7,700 square miles were the largest marshlands ecosystem in the Middle East, home to an ancient ethnic group and to vanishing species including the smooth-coated otter, the Dalmatian pelican, jungle cats, and the sacred ibis. The marshes were Iraq’s single greatest repository of biodiversity, and a vital flyway for migratory birds.

Otters and birds are important, but they can be a hard sell in a place as trouble-ridden as Iraq. The case for restoration, therefore, is being pinned on economics and the human population. Restoring the marshes could reinvigorate the fisheries and make an aquaculture economy viable again — language the World Bank understands. As recently as the early 1990s, these fisheries supplied 60 percent of fish consumed in Iraq.

“What we can do here,” says the reconstruction official, “is entice the Marsh Arabs to return to their traditional homes and lifestyles instead of rotting in the fetid slums and squatter camps around Basra and Baghdad.” In Iraq, however, nothing is easy. Even projects with apparently universal appeal face compromises. The marshes hold massive oil reserves, which Iraq will likely tap to promote economic growth.

Providing potable water is also essential. The object of this massive undertaking isn’t only to get water to people now, but also to enable Iraqis to provide these services themselves going forward. According to the official, “We need to teach the plant operators how to establish a budget. From there we need to teach the national finance ministry how important it is to prioritize public services.”

As a fuller picture of the war’s effect on Iraq’s environment emerges, it appears American sins of omission compounded Saddam Hussein’s sins of commission. Spread across a violent country twice the size of Idaho, the damage begins to look staggering, even insurmountable. Al-Moumin doesn’t seem deterred. “The environment in Iraq is not about the luxury life,” she says. “It’s about basic needs.”

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How to Help Iraq’s Eco-Warriors

Protecting Iraq’s natural resources — including safe drinking water — requires international support. Here are three agencies making a difference.

USAID
The United States Agency for International Development provides training to Iraqi professionals on issues such as environmental health monitoring and the design of clean, efficient irrigation systems. The government agency has also helped construct a number of sewage treatment plants (usaid.gov).

NATURE IRAQ
This NGO is spearheading the “Eden Again” project, which was launched in 2001 as a response to the destruction of the Mesopotamian marshes. Working closely with Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources, Nature Iraq is developing plans to restore the area’s unique natural and cultural ecology (edenagain.org).

AMAR APPEAL
Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees (AMAR) Appeal is a British-based NGO that works with the Iraqi government and the United Nations to build primary health-care centers for marsh-dwelling Iraqis. So far AMAR Appeal has set up eight medical clinics in southern Iraq (amarappeal.com).

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This article originally appeared in the May 2006 issue of Men’s Journal.

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