Water — Saddam’s WMD?

An unexpected side benefit of the overthrow of Saddam’s regime might be the restoration of Iraq’s southern marshlands.

But Hussein considered the swamps a haven for Shiite opponents of his regime. So in the mid-1990s, he drained the marshes, broadcast pesticides to kill the fish and wildlife, and attacked the villages of the ma’dan. Today, the once verdant network of reed beds and waterways is mostly a sere and lifeless plain.
“It is just another example of the complete ruthlessness of the regime,” said Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi exile and civil engineer. He is also a leading advocate for restoration of the marshes, and sits on the board of the Iraq Foundation, a nonprofit nongovernmental organization “working for democracy and human rights” in Iraq.
“Everyone is harping about Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction,” said Alwash, “but here he used water as a mass destruction weapon. He used it to destroy a culture that has lasted 5,000 years. And I’m afraid it has made me somewhat cynical that the international community stood by and did nothing while it was happening.”
[…] “By any measure, this was one of the most important wetland systems in the world,” said Scott McCreary, a principal and co-founder of Concur Inc., an East Bay consulting group that specializes in developing consensus solutions to natural resource conflicts. “It was on par with other great mega-deltas such as the Yangtze and the Amazon.”

But this desolated, toxic area is still amenable to recovery.

“First, there is at least 45 billion cubic feet of recoverable water in the Tharthar Depression, a very large lake between the Euphrates and Tigris,” said Alwash. “We can use that immediately to start rehydrating the marshes.”
The canals Hussein used to drain the marshes — The Mother of Battles River, the Loyalty to the Leader Canal/Pipeline [!] and the Third River — can also be diverted to the marsh zone, Alwash said.
“Finally, we can make Turkey a stakeholder in the new Iraq,” said Alwash. “Turkey desperately needs hard capital and Iraq will need new power capacity to rebuild. Iraq can buy power from Turkey’s hydro projects on the Tigris, and use the extra water that will be released downstream for marsh restoration.”
Pursuing these three strategies, Alwash said, “it should be possible to restore from one-half to two-thirds of the original marshes.”

It’s not just about ecology, either. Not only were a lot of people displaced by the marsh draining, but the marsh area served as a major economic engine for the area.

The marshes were “a tremendous economic engine for the country,” said Thomas L. Crisman, a professor of environmental engineering and the director of the Howard T. Odum Center for Wetlands at the University of Florida at Gainesville. “They not only supported the hundreds of thousands of people who lived there, but their fisheries provided much-needed protein to the populations of Basra and other cities.”
While the marshes were a stunning ecological jewel, a repository of rare and endangered animals, Crisman said the key to resurrecting them is to emphasize their economic importance.
“The marshes were a critical component for the fisheries and water quality of the entire Persian Gulf,” Crisman said. “Marshes act as filters and transport systems — on one hand, turning contaminants into organic matter that fish, shrimp and other commercially important species can use, and on the other, dispersing that organic manner into surrounding aquatic systems.”
Otters and the rest of the wildlife, Crisman said, “are incredibly important, but you won’t necessarily be able to sell them to the World Bank. The World Bank does understand robust commercial fisheries, however.”

I’m certainly hoping the US will pitch in with this, Doubtless the international community, great proponents of such fine environmental measures as the Kyoto Treaty, will all band behind a difficult, but doable, effort to restore this ecologically critical area.

(via Andrea)