From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Fri Jan 31 2003 - 16:40:12 MST
This is a great webpage with quite a few articles. Here are two, the first
on water in Iraq: the marshlands drainage
(aka: Saddam's solution to US planes: drain his foes out)
from
http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2003/msg00277.html
http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/business/index.ssf?/cgi
free/getstory_ssf.cgi?f0038_BC_WSJ--Iraq-Marshes&&news&newsflash-financial
* IRAQI EXILE DREAMS OF RESTORING LIFE TO MARSHLANDS
by Bill Spindle
Ann Arbor News, from The Associated Press, 15th January
LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Azzam Alwash pulled out a large satellite image of
southern Iraq on which splotches of reddish-brown dominate the parched
landscape. He pointed to some tiny dots of blue and rivulets of green. They
are all that's left of the great marshes that once lay between the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers.
"I remember all the green, and that wonderful smell of decaying vegetation,"
says Mr. Alwash, whose father, an Iraqi civil engineer, took his young son
on surveys into the swamps. They rode in a long wooden motor boat with a
canopy in the middle, passing communities of reed huts set among waterways
that wound for miles through the grasses. "I want to do it again with my
kids," he says.
That won't be simple for the 44-year-old Iraqi exile. In an act of
destruction environmental groups compare with the devastation of the
rainforests of the Amazon, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein ordered the swamps
drained in the early 1990s, when the area became a refuge for Shiite rebel
groups. The rebels were destroyed. So were the marshes, once home to the
ancient Sumerians and an area some scholars consider to be the inspiration
for the Garden of Eden.
Turning a teeming swamp bigger than Florida's Everglades into a
salt-encrusted wasteland in less than a decade was no small feat.
Environmentalists are still puzzling over exactly how the Iraqi government,
which shrouded the project in secrecy, accomplished it. Bringing back the
wetlands -- once home to a half-million people and a crucial stop for
migratory birds -- will be considerably more difficult.
"There's virtually no water left," says Hassan Partow, a United Nations
researcher who has done a study on the destruction of the marshes. "It's
absolutely phenomenal to see the destruction of an ecosystem of that scale
in just five to six years."
Mr. Alwash has a plan. He concedes that it's a rough plan, based on
decades-old data. He drafted it in his living room along with his geologist
wife, drawing extensively from the intimate memories of the terrain of his
father and other exiles. Even if it has to be heavily revised later, he
says, some blueprint to revive the swamps is needed if the U.S. is going to
lead an invasion to topple Mr. Hussein.
If dams and waterworks upstream are bombed or rendered useless during or
after the U.S. campaign, the whole area could see an even greater ecological
disaster. In case of quick reflooding, the thick layer of salt left over
from evaporated marshes and polluted by toxins in recent years would
contaminate any new water that rushed in. The only solution, he and
environmentalists say, is to methodically flush out the salts.
Mr. Alwash has lobbied Pentagon officials to avoid bombing dams and to drop
leaflets across southern Iraq urging people not to tear down waterworks. He
recently briefed a dozen officials at the U.S. Department of State. Pentagon
officials and exiled southern Iraqi opponents of Mr. Hussein attended a
presentation he gave last month at a major conference of Iraqi dissidents in
London.
Mr. Alwash also argues that if the U.S. decides to lead an invasion and
occupation of Iraq, some early, visible successes in renewing the marshes
could help convince Iraqis of the benefits of working with the invaders.
"This is one way to sell the idea to Iraqis, especially in the south, that
change brings tangible benefits," he says.
In 1978, Mr. Alwash moved to the U.S., abandoning a promising engineering
career in Iraq when he felt pressured to join a student association
affiliated with Mr. Hussein's ruling Ba'ath Party. He thought little about
the marshes as he married a geologist from a small Texas town, set about
raising two daughters and built a successful career as an engineer in
California.
On a family vacation in London in 1994, Mr. Alwash attended a presentation
about the destruction of the Iraqi marshes. Environmental and human-rights
groups were then only beginning to grasp the extent of the damage. Mr.
Alwash, a kayaking buff who would sometimes muse about his childhood
adventures in the Iraqi marshlands while paddling with his wife, Suzanne,
was shocked. "I'd been telling her, `One day, we'll do this in Iraq,' and
there it was in the pictures, dying," he says.
Mr. Alwash began digging into just how the marshes were drained, relying on
Mr. Partow's U.N. environmental study for the basic outline. Starting in
1992, Iraqi engineers worked around the clock for nine months to build what
became known as the Saddam River. Some 350 miles long, it diverts water from
the Euphrates that would otherwise flow into the main al Hammar marsh.
This project was followed by even larger hydroengineering schemes: the
Mother of Battles River in 1994 and the Fidelity to the Leader Canal in
1997. While the Iraqi government has always insisted that the projects were
aimed at reclaiming swampland for farming, various defectors and
environmental and human-rights groups say the scale of the projects leaves
little doubt that their goal was to destroy a huge refuge for Mr. Hussein's
opponents -- what Mr. Alwash calls Iraq's "Sherwood Forest." The mud, thick
reeds and winding waterways made the area impassible for Mr. Hussein's
soldiers and heavy equipment.
Eventually, Mr. Alwash saw a way he thought he could help. Many of the
environmental and human-rights groups were despairing that the marshlands,
now less than 5 percent of their original size, could ever be restored. That
is in part because new upstream dams in Turkey, Iran and Syria have reduced
the headwaters' flow to a fraction of their old volume. But Mr. Alwash knew
from his father's work that Iraqi rice and barley farmers still use
primitive and inefficient irrigation techniques. If those techniques could
be improved to reduce the amount of water diverted to farming, more water
would make it downstream to the marshes.
Mr. Alwash and his wife began poring over dissertations in the libraries at
the University of California, Los Angeles. But crucial data from the period
before the drainage projects were impossible to obtain -- which is where Mr.
Alwash's father came in.
Jawad Alwash grew up in southern Iraq, studied civil engineering in
Alexandria, Egypt, and then worked for decades in the southern marshes,
monitoring hydrological works and settling water disputes along the two
rivers. He retired in 1983 and was living in Baghdad when he and his wife
visited their son in the U.S. They were there when Iraq invaded Kuwait in
1990, and never went home, eventually settling near Washington.
When his son described what had become of the wetlands, the senior Mr.
Alwash began teasing from his memory the flow data of rivers and channels on
satellite photos. He sketched maps for his son and daughter-in-law on scrap
paper, recalling how dams and regulators had been designed to nudge the flow
in one direction or another over the extraordinarily flat terrain. He called
former colleagues living in exile in California to tap their recollections.
One Thanksgiving at the Alwash household consisted of a turkey dinner that
was then cleared away to make room for special, high-resolution satellite
maps that the younger Mr. Alwash had finagled from U.S. government
officials.
Mr. Alwash has used that information to construct a computer model that
simulates various ways to reflood the wetland areas, depending on how much
water makes it downstream from the headwaters to the agricultural zones just
above the marshes.
When Mr. Hussein is no longer in power, Mr. Alwash and Suzanne, who now
spend their time delivering their presentation to any group that will
listen, hope to turn the blueprint and computer models over to Iraqi
engineers. "They know their problems better than anyone," he says. Until
then, he says, "this is the only wetlands-reclamation project to be done
completely by remote control."
* CONFRONTING IRAQ
by Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle, 15th January
Baghdad -- To see Iraq's new elite living the fast life, go to Arasat
Street. Well- dressed diners eat steak and kebabs in glittering restaurants
with colonnaded porticos and marbled fountains, while shiny Land Cruisers
and Corvettes glide to and from towering mansions nearby.
In shops down the block, snakeskin spike heels sell for $70 and a Hugo Boss
overcoat goes for $150 -- many times the average Iraqi salary of $5 to $10
per month. To judge by the sometimes bizarrely written labels, many of the
luxury items may be counterfeit, but who cares?
Certainly not the new elite themselves, who are too busy making fortunes as
smugglers, helping sneak oil out of the country and other goods in --
ranging from cigarettes to weapons -- in defiance of the U.N. sanctions.
"They steal, they cheat. A new class of unethical people are doing very
well," said Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar, a member of Iraq's old business elite, which
has fallen on hard times lately.
Just a few blocks away from Arasat Street's luxury, fellow Iraqis are living
in squalor and desperation.
Youssef Al-Hakak stands in line at a government ration distribution center,
pushing a cart with the rations of wheat, sugar, tea, cooking oil and other
staples that will keep his family alive -- "Inshallah" (God willing), he
says. His salary as a schoolteacher, $4 a month, would barely buy him an
entree on Arasat Street.
It's a tableaux that plays well with those in Washington who are pushing for
regime change in Iraq -- Saddam Hussein's enormous palaces and the feasting
of his cronies, cheek-by-jowl with the downtrodden Iraqi masses who
presumably might welcome liberation by U.S. troops.
But the broader picture is more complex and more dysfunctional than that.
It's more like Karl Marx meets Lewis Carroll, where class divisions are
warped in an Alice in Wonderland funhouse.
A shopkeeper makes more than a heart surgeon, a taxi driver makes more in a
day than a teacher makes in a week, and a smuggler makes more than a
government minister.
"Iraq is a country that had a stable middle class before 1990 and a
significant welfare state," said Christopher Klein-Beekman, program
coordinator for UNICEF's $90 million-per-year Iraq mission.
"Now, all that has been liquidated," he added. "The Western-oriented
professional class has left for the United States and Canada, and the ones
who stayed are driving taxis or just barely staying alive. And the smugglers
are gaining."
While many Western observers blame Hussein and his relatives, who they say
control the smuggling and have diverted other resources for their own ends,
others hold the international sanctions at least partly responsible.
The U.N.-run "oil-for-food" program, put into effect in 1996, mandates that
its $4.9 billion per year in oil revenues be spent on imports and explicitly
prohibits spending any funds for domestically produced products or normal
government expenses. As a result, the Iraqi government claims it has
virtually no money for salaries to pay its clerks, school teachers, doctors,
nurses and civil engineers.
The government's only significant cash revenues are earned from clandestine
oil exports, estimated at $2 billion per year, and from equally clandestine
imports.
No one seems to know exactly who controls this smuggling, or who owns the
gaudy mansions now being constructed in rich Baghdad neighborhoods such as
Arasat, Kerradeh and Mansour. And in a land where speaking ill of Hussein is
a severe crime, few Iraqis care to speculate.
In a report released in September, however, a Washington-based nonprofit
known as the Coalition for International Justice accused Hussein and his
inner circle of skimming billions of dollars through illegal sales of oil,
smuggling and kickbacks on the trade in oil and humanitarian goods.
The coalition, whose focus is monitoring human rights around the world and
lobbying for war crimes tribunals, projected the rake-off at $2.5 billion
for 2002 -- a sum large enough to significantly alleviate the tough
conditions faced by ordinary Iraqis.
Iraq's new rich themselves don't seem to want to describe the source of
their money to foreign visitors. Brief conversations are more enigmatic than
informative.
At one high-fashion boutique, one dyed-blonde, spike-heeled shopper paused
for small talk with a visitor while perusing fake fur coats.
She bemoaned the fact that the Italian and French labels of Iraq's boom
years have been replaced by knockoffs made in China, Egypt and Pakistan.
Her description of herself as a schoolteacher -- a profession that pays
almost nothing -- begged the question: So aren't these goods still too
expensive?
She demurred silently with a smile. Then her husband, sleek in a long black
leather coat, swooped in from across the store and ushered her away.
The Bush administration and Western media reports frequently point at the
president's eldest son, Uday Hussein, who reportedly drives a Rolls-Royce
Corniche, as the personification of the smuggler elite. Uday has been
identified in various reports as a key figure in the illegal importation of
Western cigarettes.
But Baghdad-based diplomats caution that there is little hard information on
the subject and that much of the smuggling revenue may be used by the
government for normal expenses.
Members of the country's old elite, such as Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar, say the
exact identity of the new upstarts is immaterial.
A gaunt, elegant gentleman in his mid-50s, Al-Mukhtar spoke as he was
sitting in the faded glory of the Alwiya Club, Baghdad's leading upper-class
social club since it was founded 70 years ago, when Iraq was ruled by
Britain.
Al-Mukhtar, a medical-products entrepreneur who studied engineering at UC
Berkeley and Marquette University in Milwaukee, says all his bank accounts,
amounting to millions of dollars, have been frozen in Britain since the
sanctions went into effect in 1990.
Now, he lives by borrowing from his brother, a lawyer in London.
"My daughter, who is a fifth-year medical student, wants makeup and clothes,
" he says. "She needs money. I used to be able to please her just with a
chocolate bar, but no longer. My son is in his fourth year in medical
school. He needs money too."
Why doesn't he become a smuggler himself? "I can't work under the sanctions.
I work only with reputable companies," Al-Mukhtar replies, haughtily.
As for the poor, the Iraqi government has tried to keep them under wraps.
After a spate of foreign media reports about life in Baghdad's slums, the
Information Ministry "minders" who watch over foreign reporters have barred
them from visiting Saddam City, the sprawling shantytown on the city's
eastern outskirts that is home to about 2 million people. All other Baghdad
slums are also off-limits.
But the poor -- or newly poor -- are easy enough to find. Bedraggled street
children, mothers clutching dirty-faced babies and widows in black hejabs,
or cloaks, are common sights, even though panhandling is illegal. At the
city's markets, small children are often seen scampering amid garbage piles
looking for scraps of food or salvageable items.
Some of the most poignant scenes occur at the book fair that takes place
every Friday on a closed-off street in old downtown Baghdad. Spread out on
sheets are entire family libraries.
"This is our life, but I have no choice but to sell it," said Jawad Al-
Naimi, a government employee who was sadly watching customers pore through
his collection of history books, leather-bound philosophy treatises and
English- language novels -- including two by Agatha Christie.
"It is our life," he said again, slowly.
Abdul Al-Baghdadi, a director of the Federation of Iraqi Chambers of
Commerce, said private citizens have suffered the most over the past several
years.
"The consequences of the sanctions are heavier on the people than on the
government," said Al-Baghdadi, who owns several companies that import
clothing, shoes and food. "In every country, after every war, there are
people who profit. Some people here do the same."
Even some top government cadres feel the personal fallout.
"Just yesterday, my last friend left Iraq," said Nermin Al-Mufti, a
political columnist for the El Thawra newspaper, which is run by the ruling
Ba'ath Party, and an editor of several government publications.
"For the past 12 years, the daily aggression of the situation has caused a
blackness that has isolated educated Iraqis," she said. "Either they die, or
they leave the country, or they withdraw into themselves.
"Our value scale has been turned upside down. Being elegantly dressed is the
most important thing, because tomorrow doesn't exist -- you may die, who
knows?"
Al-Mufti then described her daily battles to obtain the medicine she needs
for a heart problem.
"I can't hate the smugglers. The pill I put under my tongue every day,
nitroglycerin, is forbidden under the U.N. sanctions," she said, noting that
the drug is also a common explosive with potential military use. "These
smugglers have prolonged my life."
Some observers say the sanctions have strengthened Hussein's regime. By
weakening the private sector and impoverishing the professional class, about
65 percent of the population depends on government rations to survive.
Even in candid conversations with no government officials nearby to snoop,
some Iraqis blame the Americans more than the regime.
"One of my friends, one of Iraq's most prominent pathologists, very well
respected and very wealthy -- he used to be wealthy, anyway -- was recently
forced to start selling his furniture and rugs and family heirlooms," Al-
Mukhtar said, shifting upright in his worn, leather Alwiya Club chair and
stabbing the air with a lit cigarette.
"He only makes his government pension, worth a couple dollars a month, plus
whatever he earns at his private clinic. This wasn't caused by Saddam
Hussein.
"So now I curse the Americans for what has happened to my friend and me, and
I wait for the invasion. And I will curse them again when they come."
Towards Ascension
Avatar Polymorph
34 After Armstrong
----- Original Message -----
From: "Damien Sullivan" <phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 01, 2003 4:15 AM
Subject: Iraq, Kurds, gas, water
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html?pagewanted=print&posit
ion=top
>
> Says the "Saddam used chemical weapons on his own Kurds" thing is not
entirely
> accurate. The village was gassed during a battle between Iraq and Iran,
and
> it's not even clear who did the gassing. The weapon was one the Iranians
are
> known to have used, not the Iraqis. So that evidence for his being
willing to
> use WMDs may fall down.
>
> Also says Iraq has the most extensive river system in the region. If we
> controlled Iraq we'd control the water, giving us a lot of power in the
> region.
>
> -xx- Damien X-)
>
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