[You don’t want to be in the Iraq that this country invaded in
what was, in essence, a giant oil grab and helped turn into a land of
overheated rubble, dust, sand, drought, and increasingly over-the-top
temperatures.]
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IRAQ’S CLIMATE CRISIS  
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Juan Cole
July 9, 2023
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ You don’t want to be in the Iraq that this country invaded in
what was, in essence, a giant oil grab and helped turn into a land of
overheated rubble, dust, sand, drought, and increasingly over-the-top
temperatures. _

, iraq by @USArmy is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Flickr

 

It was one of the fabled rivers of history and the Marines needed to
cross it.

In early April 2003, as American forces sought to wrap up their
conquest of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and take strongholds to its
north, the Marine Corps formed “Task Force Tripoli
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It was commanded by General John F. Kelly (who would later serve as
Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff). His force was charged
with capturing the city of Tikrit, the birthplace of dictator Saddam
Hussein. The obvious eastern approach to it was blocked because a
bridge over the Tigris River had been damaged. Since the Marines
assembled the Task Force in northeastern Baghdad, its personnel needed
to cross the treacherous, hard-flowing Tigris twice to advance on
their target. Near Tikrit, while traversing the Swash Bridge, they
came under fire from military remnants of Saddam’s regime.

Still, Tikrit fell on April 15th and, historically speaking, that
double-crossing of the Tigris was a small triumph for American forces.
After all, that wide, deep, swift-flowing waterway had traditionally
posed logistical problems for any military force. It had, in fact,
done so throughout recorded history, proving a daunting barrier for
the militaries of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon and the Achaemenid
Cyrus the Great, for Alexander the Great and Roman Emperor Justinian,
for the Mongols and the Safavid Iranians, for imperial British forces
and finally General John H. Kelly. However, just as Kelly’s stature
was diminished by his later collaboration with America’s only openly
autocratic president, so, too, in this century the Tigris has been
diminished in every sense and all too abruptly. No longer what the
Kurds once called the _Ava Mezin_, “the Great Water,” it is now a
shadow of its former self.

FORDING THE TIGRIS

Thanks at least in part to human-caused climate change, the Tigris and
its companion river, the Euphrates, on which Iraqis still so
desperately depend, have seen alarmingly low water flow in recent
years. As Iraqi posts on social media now regularly observe
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places, if you stand on the banks of those once mighty bodies of
water, you can see through to their riverbeds. You can even, Iraqis
report, ford them on foot in some spots, a previously unheard-of
phenomenon.

Those two rivers no longer pose the military obstacle they used to.
They were once synonymous with Iraq. The very word Mesopotamia, the
premodern way of referring to what we now call Iraq, means “between
rivers” in Greek, a reference, of course, to the Tigris and the
Euphrates. Climate change and the damming of those waters in
neighboring upriver countries are expected to cause
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flow of the Euphrates to decline by 30% and of the Tigris by a
whopping 60% by 2099, which would be a death sentence for many Iraqis.

Twenty years ago, with President George W. Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney, two oil men
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climate-change denialists, in the White House and new petroleum finds
dwindling, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for them
to use the 9/11 horror as an excuse to commit “regime change” in
Baghdad (which had no role in taking down the World Trade Center in
New York and part of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.). They could
thereby, they thought, create a friendly puppet regime and lift the
U.S. and U.N. sanctions then in place on the export of Iraqi
petroleum, imposed as a punishment for dictator Saddam Hussein’s
1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Buy the Book
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There was a deep irony that haunted the decision to invade Iraq to (so
to speak) liberate its oil exports. After all, burning gasoline in
cars causes the earth to heat up, so the very black gold that both
Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush coveted turned out to be a
Pandora’s box of the worst sort. Remember, we now know that, in
Washington’s “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
elsewhere, the U.S. military emitted at least 400 million
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heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And mind you, that
fit into a great tradition. Since the eighteenth century, the U.S. has
put 400 billion
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yes, billion! — metric tons of CO2 into that same atmosphere, or
twice as much as any other country, which means it has a double
responsibility to climate victims like those in Iraq.

CLIMATE BREAKDOWN, IRAQI-STYLE

The United Nations has now declared
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Iraq, the land on which the Bush administration bet the future of our
own country, to be the fifth most vulnerable to climate breakdown
among its 193 member states. Its future, the U.N. warns
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will be one of “soaring temperatures, insufficient and diminishing
rainfall, intensified droughts and water scarcity, frequent sand and
dust storms, and flooding.” Sawa Lake, the “pearl of the south”
in Muthanna governorate, has dried up
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a victim of both the industrial overuse of aquifers and a
climate-driven drought that has reduced precipitation by 30%.

Meanwhile, temperatures in that already hot land are now rising
rapidly. As Adel Al-Attar, an Iraqi adviser to the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on water and habitat, describes it
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“I’ve lived in Basra all my life. As a boy, the summer temperature
never went much beyond 40C (104° F) in summer. Today, it can surpass
50C (122° F).” The climate statistics bear him out. As early as
July 22, 2017, the temperature in Basra reached 54 °C (129.2° F),
among the highest ever recorded in the eastern hemisphere. Iraqi
temperature rise is, in fact, two to seven times higher than
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average rate of global temperature rise and that means greater dryness
of soil, increased evaporation from rivers and reservoirs, decreasing
rainfall, and a distinct loss of biodiversity, not to mention rising
human health threats like heat stroke.

The American war did direct harm to Iraq’s farmers, who make up 18%
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the country’s labor force. And when it was over, they had to deal
with staggering numbers of explosives
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in the countryside, including landmines, unexploded ordnance, and
improvised explosive devices, many of which have since been
dangerously covered by desert sands as a climate-driven drought
worsens. An article in the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences observes that when it comes to military disruptions
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“Displacement, explosions, and movement of heavy equipment increase
dust that then settles on rivers and accumulates in reservoirs.”
Worse yet, between 2014 and 2018 when the guerrillas of the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant, whom the American war helped bring into
existence, took over parts of northern and western Iraq, they blew up
dams and practiced scorched-earth tactics
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did $600 million worth of damage to the country’s hydraulic
infrastructure. Had the U.S. never invaded, there would have been no
ISIL.

DUST AND MORE DUST

As Al-Attar of the ICRC observed, “When there’s not enough rain or
vegetation, the upper layers of earth become less compact, meaning the
chance of dust or sandstorms increases. These weather events
contribute to desertification. Fertile soil is turning into desert.”
And that is part of Iraq’s post-invasion fate, which means ever more
frequent dust- and sandstorms. In mid-June, the Iraqi
government warned
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particularly violent dust and thunderstorms in al-Anbar, Najaf, and
Karbala provinces were uprooting ever more trees and flattening ever
more farms. In late May in Kirkuk, a dust storm sent hundreds
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to the hospital. A year ago, the dust storms came so thick and fast,
week after week, that visibility was often obscured in major cities
and thousands were hospitalized with breathing problems. In the late
twentieth century, there already were, on average, 243 days annually
with high particulate matter in the air. In the past 20 years, that
number has reached 272. Climate scientists predict that it will hit
300 by 2050.

A little over half
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Iraq’s farmed land relies on rain-fed agriculture, mostly in the
north of the country. Iraqi journalist Sanar Hasan describes
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impact of increasing drought and water scarcity in the northern
province of Ninewah, where yields have shrunk considerably. Ninewah
produced 5 million metric tons of wheat in 2020 but only 3.37 million
in 2021 before plummeting by more than 50% to 1.34 million in 2022.
Such declining yields pose a special problem in a world where wheat
has only grown more expensive, thanks in part to the Russian war on
Ukraine. Thousands of Iraqi farming families are being forced off
their lands by water shortages. For example, Hasan quotes
[[link removed]] Yashue
Yohanna, a Christian who worked all his life in agriculture but now
can’t make ends meet, as saying, “When I leave the farm, what do
you expect me to do next? I’m an old man. How will I afford the cost
of living?”

Worse yet, southern Iraq’s marshlands are turning into classic dust
bowls. The Environment Director of Maysan Governorate in southern Iraq
recently announced
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its al-Awda Marsh was 100% dried up.

The marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have
been storied for thousands of years. The world’s oldest epic, the
Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh, is set there as it describes a hero
journeying to an enchanted garden of the gods in search of
immortality. (Echoes of that epic can be found in the biblical story
of the garden of Eden.)

Our addiction to fossil fuels, however, has contributed significantly
to the blighting of that very source of life and legend. It was there
that marsh dwellers once hauled in a majority of the fish eaten by
Iraqis, but the remaining wetlands are now experiencing increasingly
high rates of evaporation. The Shatt al-Arab, created where the Tigris
and Euphrates flow together into the Persian Gulf, has seen its water
pressure drop, allowing an influx of salt water
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has already destroyed 60,000 acres of farmland and some 30,000 trees.

Many of Iraq’s date palms
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also died owing to war, neglect, soil salinization, and climate
change. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iraq provided three-quarters of the
world’s dates. Now, its date industry is tiny and on life support,
while Marsh Arabs and southern farming families have been forced from
their lands into cities where they have few of the skills needed to
make a living. Journalist Ahmed Saeed and his colleagues at Reuters
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Hasan Moussa, a former fisherman who now drives a taxi, as saying,
“The drought ended our future. We have no hope, other than for a
[government] job, which would be enough. Other work doesn’t fulfill
our needs.”

WATER AS WOMEN’S WORK

Although it was mostly men who planned out Iraq’s ruinous wars of
the past half-century and set their sights on burning as much
petroleum, coal, and natural gas as possible for profit and power,
Iraq’s women have borne the brunt of the climate crisis. Few of them
are in the formal job market, though many do work on farms. Because
they are at home, they have often been given responsibility for
providing water. Because of the present drought conditions, many women
already spend
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least three hours a day trying to get water from reservoirs and bring
it home. Water foraging is becoming so difficult and time-consuming
that some girls are dropping out of secondary school to focus on it.

At home, women are dependent on tap water, which is often
contaminated. Men who work outside the home often gain access to water
purified for Iraqi industry and its cities. As farms fail owing to
drought, men are emigrating to those very cities for work, often
leaving the women of the household in rural villages scrambling to
raise enough food in arid circumstances to feed themselves and their
children.

Last fall, the International Organization for Migration at the United
Nations estimated
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62,000 Iraqis living in the center and the south of the country had
been displaced from their homes by drought over the previous four
years and anticipated that many more would follow. Just as people from
Oklahoma fled to California in droves during the Dust Bowl of the
1930s, so now Iraqis are facing the prospect of dealing with their own
dustbowl. It is, however, unlikely to be a mere episode like the
American one. Instead, it looms as the long-term fate of their
country.

If, instead of invading Iraq, the American government had swung into
action in the spring of 2003 to cut carbon dioxide output, as one of
our foremost climate scientists, Michael Mann, was suggesting
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the time, the emission of hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 might
have been avoided. Humanity would have had an extra two decades to
make the transition to a zero-carbon world. In the end, after all, the
stakes are as high for Americans as they are for Iraqis.

If humanity doesn’t reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, we are
likely to outrun our “carbon budget
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the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2, and the climate will undoubtedly
go chaotic. What has already happened in Iraq, not to speak of the
dire climate impacts
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have recently left Canada constantly aflame, U.S. cities smoking, and
Texans broiling in a record fashion would then seem like child’s
play.

At that point, in short, we would have invaded ourselves.

Copyright 2023 Juan Cole

_JUAN COLE, a TomDispatch regular
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is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the
University of Michigan. He is the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian
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Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires
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His latest book is Peace Movements in Islam
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His award-winning blog is Informed Comment
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Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and of Democracy
for the Arab World Now (DAWN)._

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Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
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The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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