http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/international/2013/04/03/inside-middle-east-iraq-babylon-e.cnn.html
I am better aware than most that the US went to War with Iraq the second time under some pretty attenuated public reasoning.. trust me... I might have heard some of the guys who trumped the whole thing up, in person and privately, in a different phase of my life, scheming about it, but that aside, and with all due respect to Sean Penn, Saddam was a pretty bad dude, and no friend to the environment...
We sometimes make a very Muslim mistake when we get frustrated with a political situation in our country, and we declare the enemy of our enemy to be our friend... and almost no one likes War, and well, if you are going to win a war, you need to so called 'Win the Peace', but no such luck in this case... However, Rummy, W and the boys, they did know a bit more than the average Tom, Dick, and Mustafah about Iraq, and even as they sharpened their knives and pens to `help Iraq rebuild it´s oil and national infrastructure', in that order, they were aware of one or two little things that they didn´t necessarily think would sell as well as the 'Goebbels perfect' WMD fiasco. You see, in addition to Saddam´s mal-treatment of the Kurds, with Chemical Weapons at times, and the Shiites, and the Iranians.. and, well, the Kuwaitis...and any Environmentalist who remembers the burning wells after the Mother of All Battles, which burned 1.5 billion barrels, perhaps only 17 days use at current rates for the world, but straight into the atmosphere which caused perhaps a sharper than usual high in the saw tooth patterns of world atmospheric Carbon charts, should be as pissed as I was.. (that was pure Saddam), he had also destroyed one of the world's distinct Ecosystems, the Mesopotamian Marshes.
The Mesopotamian Marshes, kind of three distinct basins in south east Iraq, are a place where Iraqi`s used to go when they had trouble with the man... a kind of outlaws paradise, perhaps a Gangsters Paradise, Mess-o-potamia style...and the longer I live, the more I appreciate these little repositories of human wilderness, lawless perhaps, but often with a bit of their own honor. Friends I have familiar with the area from military deployments paint a picture in those early days after liberation of Family feuds settled with heavy machine guns over sleights as simple as Goat theft, endless Internally Displaced Peoples who were happy to support the famed anti American Shittie Cleric Muqtada al Sadr, still not 40 years old today, but the firebrand of Shiite dissatisfaction in the heights of the insurgency when the US was seeming very alone indeed. Think of the people of the marshes as a Middle Eastern Cajun Clan, doin' d'ere t'ing in an Arab Achefalaya. These marshes, which had a population of boat people to rival those of Thailand or the Amazon, numbered at a half million before 1991... were a rich and ancient culture... it´s important to not forget that as Archaeologists find older and older advanced Cultures in places like the Coast of Peru, Hobbit Men in Flores, Indonesia, or older and older stuff in India, the first high civilization still appears to be the Babylonians, again, the Mesopotamians, and as the Cradle of Civilizations' most geographically protected site, these swamps have to be interesting time capsules of time immemorial.
What the Neocons knew, cads though they no doubt were, but much of the world was unaware of, was that Saddam´s lust for power definitely overwhelmed his love of Anthropology and Archaeology, cute innocent smile though he might have had, and in order to route out his bandit problem, this particular Sherrif decided to do what he was good at by the late 90's, big horrible acts of supression, and drain the marshes to dry out this problem... Even if he was destroying an ancient way of life and one of the worlds ecological treasures, with a host of endemic wildlife and countless other positive qualities, Saddam was sick of Shiite insurgents, allied with Iran, as Saddam was a Sunni by birth and when convenient to proclaim the faith. The Shiites were definitely not happy with him after his crushing of their insurrection after the Desert Storm, with the sad pulling up of Bush 41 in his commitment to aid insurrections against Saddam in the days, months and years after that war, and lawlessness challenging his authority from what was a bit like the American Swamp foxes lair, the American Revolutionary War Hero Francis Marion, Hollywood-ized ever so grossly deliciously, in the Mel Gibson 'Rambo meets The Revolution' action flic The Patriot, but a real person despite Mel larger than life depiction indeed, who operated out of the swampy pine forests between Charleston and Georgetown, South Carolina. If the Brits could have drained that swamp then, they just might have, but this time, as they came in and occupied this portion of Iraq in the wake of the Coalition of Freedom-ism´s 2003 invasion, they were the overseers, along with the Coalition Provisional Authority and a host of other Governmental Agencies, of the Marshland's slow but steady re-hydration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iraq/2005/05/iraq-050505-usia01.htm
But it wasn´t the British or the Americans or anyone else who got the ball rolling to refill the 90% of the Marshlands that had been drained by huge public works projects that Saddam commissioned, mostly in the form of three huge drainage ditches, one absurdly called the Mother of all Battles Ditch (didn't they loose that fight?), with an additional absurd Loyalty to the Leader pipeline hauling water to Basrah, bypassing the marshes, that left these areas high and dry for 10 or more years prior to what I will call the re-invasion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draining_of_the_Mesopotamian_Marshes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iraq_marshes_1994.jpg
As the Second Coalition's forces advanced in 2003, the Marsh Arabs celebrated what legitimately was a liberation for them not by toppling a statue, but by tearing out the dykes that held the flow from the slightly uphill Tigris, supposedlywitin hours of liberation, allowing it to begin washing downhill through the ancient marshes in an almost flat shallow flow reminiscent of the Everglades, into the Euphrates, with shovels and whatever they could get their hands on. Whatever feelings one might have about this or any war, it´s had not to find that act of defiance pretty profound. This was an act not much written about in all the confused coverage of those final days of the invasion, but maybe the singular most beautiful event I have heard of in the whole conflict. They were at work within hours of the Withdrawl of Iraqi troops.. it took about 70 years for a similar event to take place in the Florida Everglades last spring through the convolutions of our democracy.
By 2006, the marshes were considered to be 40% filled, but there were problems with the water, due to the salinity of the soil that had been left dry for those 12 years of intense draining, and impacted from draining projects going back to the 1950´s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4lBT1YiEw8
Then came a drought that peaked in 2009, which did create some, umm.. shrinkage problems:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mideaststrategy/5888843020/in/photostream
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/4/47/Freshwater_Losses_In_The_Middle_East.ogg/Freshwater_Losses_In_The_Middle_East.ogg.360p.webm
The best explanation of the whole story I have found, heck, you could just skip reading me and watch this, was done by CBS's 60 Minutes in 2011, also complete with an American journalist sitting uncomfortably homo-erotically close to the guy he has to interview over days in boats, but smartly done to explain the situation in general as of 2 years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhQhtOgXBvo
another somewhat more sumptuous look from some English Documentary makers, also depicting Dr. Alwash.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypyzr8-sUt0
So it appears that Dr. Azzam Alwash has become the point man for the battle for the Mesopotamian Marshes (which, by the way, means 'between the rivers'):
http://www.rivernetwork.org/content/azzam-alwash
Just a few days ago he won what appears to be a prestigeous environmental prize caleld the Goldman Prize:
http://ecowatch.com/2013/iraq-waterkeeper-receives-goldman-environmental-prize/
Man, He's got some cute daughters.
http://www.goldmanprize.org/
Even the New York Times found it newsworthy
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/world/middleeast/restoring-iraqs-garden-of-eden.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Dang it, I´ve been working on this blog post for a month, an they step on my toes just as I am going to publish!
When the war kicked off, and everyone tried to find a way to contribute no matter how strongly they might have disagreed with the War it´s self, the Italian Government took on the task of trying to restore the Iraqi environment, and the Marshlands become a major focus. Nature Iraq was started,
http://www.natureiraqfoundation.org/index.html
they actually got a new web page recently:
http://www.natureiraq.org/
slick!
kind of the Sierra Club of the newly, umm.. liberated nation, and under this umbrella the New Eden project was created:
http://www.iraqfoundation.org/edenagain/linksgovernment.html
and Water Keepers Iraq
http://www.natureiraqfoundation.org/waterkeepers-iraq.html
http://www.iraqwaterkeeper.org/index.html
They are spreading out and doing all the things you would want an organization in any peaceful country to do: safety training, rafting, water sampling, educational trips.. but this all leaves me a bit unsettled due to, well, a kind of Teutonic need for complete restoration. I want to see the number 100% next to the marshlands descriptions, and right now, I can't seem to find anyone who posts the land area restored, and no one seems to be even dreaming about it anymore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IraqMarshesAnnotated.jpg
The Hawizeh Marshes, the eastern ones along the Iranian Border, the ones that were the last man standing and the repository of the marshes genetic diversity after Saddam's mad plumbing project look fine, healthy in satellite photos, and the ones to the west, the Hammal Marshes, seem to be bouncing back fine if only partially, but the central marshes happen to be where the oil exploration is, and they have, whether due to circumstances or intentions, filled up the least, no one seems to ahve ruptured the Glory River as Saddam named the massive mile wide drainage ditch that drained the Central Marsh, although it no doubt is holding onto a bit of genetic diversity, and now we have next problem on the list: Turkish Dams
http://www.treehugger.com/energy-policy/turkey-vows-to-build-controversial-dam-despite-iraqi-complaints-loss-of-european-support.html
There are flow gages along the river I am learning now from this USGS report,
http://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/540/pdf/ds540.pdf
and people have done the work to understand the basin and write about it in English:
http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/basins/euphrates-tigris/index.stm
unfortunately, the links for the three promising tables on this page all lead to the same chart that just shows how Iraq only controls 43% of the Territory of the Tigris-Euphrates River Basin, but 93% of Iraq´s area is drained by them, leaving Turkey and Syria to block the vital head water areas for their irrigation and Hydroelectric needs and wants, and nothing seems to let me get to the raw data that would tell me if the situation is improving day by day or not, although maybe I need to take some Arabic lessons first.
http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/basins/euphrates-tigris/figure03.pdf#fig3
But this entry is about hope, and maybe this is a lesson for me... Dr. Alwash seems to be smiling with the progress made, and he just retired from running Nature Iraq so he can go full time on the lecture circuit and leave the on the ground (in the marsh!?) work to a new generation of nature technocrats, everyone claiming that in one way or another, the Marshes are about about 50% filled. So maybe this glass is half full, maybe despite the challenges of weather, dam building, tribal warfare, oil exploration, and whatever else might harm the marshes, getting to where they are at, after one of the most heinous acts of wanton environmental destruction in the world, four wars (Desert Storm, the 2003 Coalition Invasion, and the less known battle between Saddam and the Badr Brigades after Desert Storm, and the anti-coalition insurrection that many Shitties fought in these very marshes with the help of Al Queda and Iran until the final withdraw of the US in December of 2011 [I can't help but notice that in typical CNN style, they are talking about themselves when the last American Vehicle momentously rolled out of Iraq.. yeesh!]) and millions of personal stories of loss, thirst, starvation, displacement, fratricide and violence, cultural upheaval, perceived invaders and economic woes, maybe this is hope incarnate, just perhaps not gift wrapped with a final report the way so many first world stories come. or Maybe it is yet to come, from some still being created Iraqi Department of Interior, some young person still in school today might talk of restored marsh otters and fish species 40 years from now like the man putting the nail in the box holding the holy grail in the last scenes of Indiana Jones, never quite totally realizing what it took to get there, but in a way they are glad he doesn't...
and one more thing.. according to South Park, even Saddam made it to heaven:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/152292/goodbye-forever-saddam
she's not tepid, just holding her cards close to the life vest.
ReplyDeletei usually do too, when floating with iraqis.
Nice blog thhanks for posting
ReplyDelete