This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
No, as TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, creator of the must-read Informed Comment website, points out today, 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, but these last weeks, you wouldn't have wanted to be in that blazing hot-box state, Texas, where heat records were being set daily either, or in Chicago or Detroit whose smoking skies were the most polluted on the planet in a country where more than a third of the population, 120 million of us, were living under air quality alerts, or for that matter in parts of Canada where more than 400 fires were still burning wildly (and smoke from some of them had even reached Europe), almost half still fully out of control, weeks after the fire season began and without an end in sight.
And yes, long as that sentence may be, it's still not faintly long enough to take in the new planet on which all of us, environmentalists and Trumpists alike, now find ourselves. In this world, the sort of climate-change denialism practiced by so many of today's "Republicans" should look ever madder, ever more" well, overheated in the worst way. And even if they refuse to notice what's actually happening on this planet of ours, ever more of us do.
With that in mind, consider the crimes described ever so vividly by Cole, climate-change-oriented and otherwise, that the fossil-fuelized American leaders of the era of George W. Bush committed in Iraq and, in the end, here at home as well. Tom
Iraq's Climate Crisis
America's War for Oil and the Great Mesopotamian Dustbowl
By Juan Cole
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." 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 in horror, at certain 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 the 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 and 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.
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 metric tons of 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 -- 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
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