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CHAPTER 1

The Environmental War

When nations go to war each side tries to destroy the other side's fighting forces — or, sometimes, just the other nation; that is what war is about.

But there is a third party in every war. It commits no hostile act against either side. Nevertheless, it is attacked by the bombs, missiles and cannon of both. That is the environment. When the war is over one combatant side or the other may claim victory. But the environment always loses.

The Persian Gulf War of 1991 was a totally environmental war. Even the causes which brought it about were environmental, for they began with a struggle over the fossil fuel, oil, which is at the root of so many environmental evils. The Persian Gulf War produced the same crop of environmental disasters as all wars do, as burning cities released their toxins into the air, and destroyed water and sewage systems produced their crops of sickness, and land areas and shorelines were sown with mines, and the debris of great armies littered the battleground. But it also produced a number of environmental disasters that were not usual at all. They came from oil. Most of the world's known reserves of oil lie under the sands of the Persian Gulf. Some of those desert lands are hardly more than a thin skin over underground oceans of petroleum. As defeat approached for Saddam Hussein, he tried to postpone it by using the oil itself as an environmental weapon. He ordered his troops to open the valves so that vast stocks of that oil poured into the sea, and to set all the oil wells and storage tanks of Kuwait afire.

Iraq wasn't the first nation to use environmental weapons against its enemies. Others have done it — even the United States; that is what the American forces did when they sent aircraft to spray plant-killing chemicals like Agent Orange on the farms, rice paddies and forests of Vietnam. If Saddam Hussein's action was morally worse, it is only because it was more pointless. These actions couldn't win the war for him. They couldn't even prevent his total defeat. They could never be more than a brutal act of revenge on his enemies. And in the event, they harmed his own people as well as his enemies ... and a large section of the nearby world.

* * *

The Persian Gulf War is the war oil made. Without oil there would hardly have been any armies on the scene that were capable of fighting it.

By August 2, 1990, when the Iraqi army invaded its little neighbor, Kuwait, the nations of the Gulf already possessed some of the world's most powerfully armed military forces. Those armies were expensive. About a quarter of Iraq's large Gross National Product was routinely spent on arms, and Iraq was not alone. Saudi Arabia spent almost as high a proportion — 20% — of its own, much larger GNP, and the other states of the area were not far behind.

It was oil that armed those countries. The cost of every last machine-gun cartridge and combat boot was paid for out of the money the industrialized nations paid to the nations of the Persian Gulf for their oil. Without oil, they would all be poverty-stricken. Before oil, they had little to sell in the world market but fish and pearls (and even the pearls were a dwindling source of revenue as Japanese cultured pearls took away their buyers). With oil — and with our insatiable appetite for burning the stuff in our cars, homes and industries — they take in the vast flood of foreign currency with which they buy the French Mirage fighters and American AWACs and Soviet T-72 tanks. If we didn't waste such prodigious quantities of energy — to the ecological harm of the world, as well as to ourselves — we wouldn't have to buy their oil. In that case none of them could afford their immense investments in the machineries of killing. It's as simple as that.

Not much else about the Gulf War, its causes and its effects, is very simple, though. The reasons why President George Bush reacted with such rage and forceful action are particularly complex. Though he specifically denied it, they certainly had to do with fears for the loss of American sources of imported oil, but they also had to do with the history of American involvement in the area, especially our complicated, seesawing relations with the neighboring country of Iran.

American involvement with Iran also began with oil. When, decades ago, the prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized Iran's oil industry, the American CIA sent their agent Kim Roosevelt in to arrange his overthrow. The revolt succeeded; the United States restored the Shah to the throne he had been expelled from, and in payment for services rendered the Shah's new government gave a 40% share of Iran's oil to American companies.

Of all America's purchased allies, the Shah of Iran was perhaps the most loyal. He stayed bought. In commerce, Iranian oil continued to enrich American companies; in foreign affairs, Iranian policy supported America without question; in its own territory, Iran granted America military bases and listening stations and missile emplacements all along its long border with the Soviet Union.

The Shah, however, was not a democrat. The oil wealth that flowed into Iran's economy enriched only a tiny fraction of its people — the fraction closest to the Shah. The Shah's regime created no significant middle class, and the bulk of the Iranian population not only remained poor but suffered considerable tyranny. Americans on almost every college campus in the United States during the last years of the Shah's reign became familiar with the spectacle of Iranian students, wearing paper bags over their heads to prevent retaliation against their families back in Iran, protesting the brutality and torture of the Shah's American-trained secret police. The brutality and poverty were real. Their result was revolution, the deposition of the Shah and the delivery of Iran to the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini, not entirely unjustly, blamed the United States for the worst of the Shah's policies. Inflamed by Khomeini's oratory, his Revolutionary Guards sacked the American embassy and took every American diplomat they could catch hostage — the embarrassment that crippled the final years of Jimmy Carter's presidency, and played a large part in the election of Ronald Reagan.

The result was that, in the eyes of the American government, Iran changed overnight from close ally to hated foe. And the result of that was that when, a decade ago, Saddam Hussein massed his army and invaded Iran, the United States did not interfere by word or act. There was no talk of the wickedness of unprovoked aggression then. Indeed, when at last the United States did take action, it was on the wicked aggressor's side.

Curiously, the precipitating incident was the attack on an American naval vessel by one of the wicked aggressor's own planes. An Iraqi aircraft fired a missile at the U.S.S. Stark, severely damaging the ship and killing 47 American sailors. The response of the Reagan administration was twofold. Overtly, it dispatched additional American warships to the Gulf. Covertly, it began passing on to the Iraqis satellite information on the disposition of Iranian troops, warning of buildups that threatened surprise attacks (and saving Iraq at least one or two damaging defeats); winking at the export to Iraq of some high-tech computer and other militarily useful devices which had previously been denied them; and helping Iraq's economy by providing it with food from America's farms — making Iraq the second most favored nation in the world, after only Mexico, as the recipient of such largesse.

As a result, it appears that President Ronald Reagan, and President George Bush after him, concluded that they had bought themselves another ally in Saddam Hussein. Certainly they did their best to protect his government, even against the Congress of the United States. Right up to the very eve of Saddam Hussein's invasion of the tiny (but oil-soaked) country of Kuwait, the Bush administration was sending its arm-twisters to Capitol Hill to try to prevent any vote in Congress to impose sanctions on Iraq for its human-rights violations. Just days before the invasion, America's ambassador, April Glaspie, specifically notified Saddam Hussein in a face-to-face conversation that the United States took no position on his territorial disputes with Kuwait. Presidential administrations speak often of the "signals" they send to other nations; in this case, the signal could only have been read as "go."

Why then did George Bush respond so quickly and violently with outright war?

It was not because the nation compelled him to it. The public-opinion polls showed that a large majority of Americans wanted restraint. In testimony before Congress, nearly every important American involved in foreign policy counseled the same. Perhaps a majority of his own administration advised going slow — yet Bush plunged ahead. His emissaries covered the globe, buying up new allies — $14 billion in forgiven debts to Egypt, a billion to Syria, $9 billion's worth of arms to Turkey, $4 billion to the USSR (but Saudi Arabian money, this time), even $115 million and a cordial Washington reception for the quickly forgiven (for the Tiananmen Square deaths) People's Republic of China. The Bush administration even did its best to demand that the governments of Japan and Germany, forbidden (by measures the victorious United States had originally imposed on their defeated governments after World War II) ever to send their troops against foreign nations, now break their own laws and join in the fighting war against Iraq — unsuccessfully as far as troops were concerned, but securing cash contributions to the cause at least. And when all the United Nations resolutions had been passed and a quarter of a million American troops were lining the Saudi border and the embargo was beginning to take effect, George Bush sent another quarter-million troops to the area, declared sanctions weren't working and began the air war that reduced Iraq to Third World status before the ground forces invaded.

Why?

The only answer lies in the psychological makeup of George Bush. He had tasted the joys of the conqueror a year earlier, when American forces invaded Panama and put a new government in place; he remembered the "wimp" label that had been placed on him; he felt personally betrayed by a client who had committed an unauthorized aggression; all of these were undoubtedly factors in his decision.

Beyond that, there was one other element in the makeup of George Bush. He was, after all, a Texas oilman. And not just in Texas; his concerns included the oil of the Persian Gulf. Kuwait's very first offshore oil well had been drilled by Bush's company; even during the war, his eldest son's company was exploring for oil elsewhere in the Gulf. Whatever else motivated President Bush, oil drenched all his acts.

* * *

And oil, finally, was the weapon that Saddam Hussein used to strike back at his enemies when his own defeat was inescapable. He flooded the Gulf with oil runoff; he set Kuwait's oil wells on fire.

It was the pouring of crude oil into the Persian Gulf that did the worst long-term environmental damage. How long that long term will turn out to be is still a question; the Gulf is vulnerable in many ways.

The Persian Gulf is a shallow body of water with wide mudflats and beaches on its shores. Along much of the Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian shoreline the distance between low- and high-tide marks is often a mile, sometimes as much as six miles. These crucial miles are where the grassy salt marshesand other "wetlands" are found, the places where most sea life begins. Great stretches of these intertidal wetlands are already heavily damaged by the demands of the oil industry — dredged to create loading facilities for tankers or filled to make room for oil storage tanks — but the biologically active areas which remain are important to the life of the whole Gulf.

All these wetlands, along with the shallows just offshore, are highly fertile. Like similar regions all around the world, they produce large quantities of algae and other organisms on which birds, fish, crustaceans and marine mammals feed. Higher in the food chain, people live on the results of this productivity; the fisheries of the Persian Gulf produce about 150,000 tons of edible shrimp, bivalves and finfish each year. And, of course, the algae of the Persian Gulf are continually performing the essential life-support task that all plants all over the world are constantly doing for us: they take carbon dioxide out of the air and replace it with the oxygen we need to breathe.

When the spilled Persian Gulf oil hits one of these broad, flat beaches it stays. As the tide comes in, it brings the oil with it; when it retreats, the oil stays behind. There are ways of cleaning oiled beaches. They are not very successful; two years after the much smaller Exxon Valdez spill there is still oil under the surface of most of the polluted areas. (Exactly how serious the remaining Exxon Valdez pollution is has not been made public, even two years after the disaster. Much of the data gathered by investigators has been impounded for use as evidence in the large number of ongoing lawsuits, some of which may continue for years to come.) Along many of the Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian beaches the situation is far worse than in Alaska, since the Gulf beaches have been sown with mines to deter enemy landings; the cleanup workers don't have only the problems of any such task, they must also face the risk of having a foot blown off in the process.

Oil pollution is nothing new to the Persian Gulf. An earlier great oil slick was released during the Iran-Iraq war; attempts were made to deal with it, but what ultimately happened was that it simply disappeared. (Experts think the remains of the oil simply absorbed enough water to be heavy enough to sink, and now foul the bottom of the Gulf at some unknown location.) Smaller spills happen all the time. On average, one reportable spill happens every month, year in and year out; a majority of the Saudi beaches are chronically afflicted with oil residues. But the two great spills of the 1991 Gulf War are by far the worst. At least half a million barrels of oil, perhaps five times that, formed a miles-long slick that slowly drifted across the Gulf, killing as it went. No one has counted the numbers of turtles, cormorants, dugongs, shellfish, dolphins, finfish and other living creatures that have been killed directly by the oil, or those that will die of starvation because of the loss of their food supplies.

Oil floats longer in the Persian Gulf than in most seas because of the Gulf's high salinity, in some places nearly twice the world average. Still, sooner or later the waters of the Persian Gulf will clean themselves — if they are allowed to; if new oil spills don't perpetuate the pollution. But that time will be years in coming, and meanwhile the ecology of the whole area has suffered a serious blow.

* * *

On the other hand, it is Kuwait's five hundred flaming oil wells that did the most immediate damage to human beings.

This was the biggest sustained fire the world has ever seen, somewhere around five million barrels of crude oil burning every day. When a single well goes up in flame it's a terrifying spectacle; the people who make a business of putting out oil-well fires are highly trained specialists, and their lives are at risk. Five hundred such fires burning at once is something new in the world. Just quenching the flames is not enough; if another well is afire nearby, it may reignite the one just controlled. Nor is that the worst. As with all post-battle attempts at cleanup, the work of trying to put out burning Kuwait is made far more dangerous because the Iraqi troops often mined the area around each well; in addition to which, some of the explosive charges are known not to have gone off, and their presence at the wellheads is a continuing threat.

So snuffing out the flame — say, by setting off explosives nearby — may not do the job. Extinguishing it by depriving it of the oxygen it needs to burn — by erecting a collar around the wellhead and filling the collar with nitrogen or carbon dioxide — is difficult at best, here doubly so because of the risk of mines. For some of the burning wells, the only solution may be to drill another well alongside the burning one, right into the shaft of the well on fire, and filling the relief well with cement or heavy liquids to shut off the flow of oil to the surface — a task that may require a month or more of hard, expensive work for each well.

And there are five hundred of them.

As they burn their millions of barrels each day, they produce immense clouds of sooty smoke. The smoke shades the earth below — temperatures have been measured almost twenty degrees colder under the smoke pall — and the soot gets in people's lungs, settles on farmlands and contaminates them and falls on the waters of the Gulf, adding to the pollution from the oil spills. Because Kuwaiti oil is "sour" — heavily laced with sulfur — the fallout is a particularly poisonous form of acid rain, and when the rain falls it is sometimes black and oily. (Some observers say that it looks like the rains that were reported to fall near Hiroshima after the Japanese city was atom-bombed in World War II.) People in Kuwait City reported "darkness at noon" from the smoke pall; visibility at the airports hampered takeoffs and landings; American troops wore masks to filter out the worst of the soot, and so did local residents. The harm to respiratory systems, particularly of children, is unknown but undoubtedly severe.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Our Angry Earth"
by .
Copyright © 1991 Asimov Holdings, LLC and Gateway, LLC.
Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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