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Title: U.S. struggles to restore drinking water to Iraqis (70% of Iraqis w/o clean water)
Source:
McClatchy Newspapers
URL Source: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/21753.html
Published: Nov 19, 2007
Author: Bobby Caina Calvan | McClatchy Newspaper
Post Date: 2007-11-19 10:30:24 by robin
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Keywords: None
Views: 120
Comments: 5
AL-SADIYAH, Iraq -- The water tankers arrive twice a week in this parched village surrounded by fallow fields stretching into the horizon. The town's wells still pump out a flow, but few villagers dare drink from it unless in desperation. At the gate of Kayria Fayhan's home, 250 gallons of the trucked-in cargo fill a metal tank for cooking and drinking, sometimes for washing up if itching from the groundwater becomes unbearable. Even the "clean" water from the tanker is a gamble on some weeks. "They say the water is clean, but sometimes the water is green," Fayhan said. "Sometimes, there's rust floating in it." Despite the fact that Iraq and U.S. officials have made water projects among their top priorities, the percentage of Iraqis without access to decent water supplies has risen from 50 percent to 70 percent since the start of the U.S.-led war, according to an analysis by Oxfam International last summer. The portion of Iraqis lacking decent sanitation was even worse -- 80 percent. Now, though, some U.S. officials think they're about to make progress. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, using more than $1 billion in reconstruction funds, is building massive water treatment plants in urban areas, including one in the slums of Baghdad's Sadr City. Construction crews over the last three years, working there under heavy guard, have constructed a treatment plant that will produce an additional 25 million gallons of drinking water daily, enough for nearly 200,000 people. Miles of new water lines are also being installed, allowing 2 million of Sadr City's residents to tap directly into the new plant and existing water supplies. In Nasiriyah, a $277 million water treatment facility is to be handed over to Iraqis in December. It is billed as the largest facility of its kind in Iraq and is designed to provide clean drinking water for an estimated half-million people in southern Iraq. As many as 1,500 water treatment and sewage projects have been completed, with 150 more in progress, according to the corps of engineers. The aim is to deliver an additional 290 million gallons of water daily to the Iraqi population, and nearly three-fourths of that goal has been achieved, according to the corps. "From my travels, I think it's really getting better," said U.S. Navy Capt. Tom Brovarone, who is on assignment in Iraq for the corps. Oxfam officials remain cautious. "It's a bit premature to see how these projects will impact the situation," said Manal Omar, a regional program manager for Oxfam in the Middle East, who questioned whether the security situation will allow the new projects to take hold. Electricity, which is needed to power pumps, continues to be unreliable in many parts of Iraq, causing some taps to go dry because pumping stations and water treatment plants can't operate. In many parts of Iraq, residents without water must rely on costly bottled water or go searching for a tap to fill plastic cans. Even in Baghdad, especially in its poorest areas, it is not unusual to see women dragging the heavy cans or children splashing water-filled buckets through dusty streets. When a U.S. Army platoon arrived last week in al-Sadiyah with two flatbeds heaped with boxes and boxes of bottled water, villagers rushed to grab their share, all the while complaining that it was not enough. "On that hierarchy of needs, water rises to the top," said Maj. Joe Sowers, a spokesman for Forward Operating Base Hammer, a U.S. military installation east of Baghdad, where water-bearing platoons fan out for humanitarian missions in outlying villages. "We can live without electricity, but we cannot live without water," said Fayhan, the woman from al-Sadiyah. While water itself is not in short supply -- the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which run the length of the country, have abundant flows -- much of it is not drinkable because of pollution and high salinity. "A bad taste, a very bad taste," said Hasan Dawood, a sheik from al-Zatia, describing the water that comes from the tainted town wells. "I can't give a better description... It's like drinking tea without sugar. It's very bad." In al-Sadiyah, a community of about 100 families, the water coming out of taps looks clean enough, but it coats the palate with a thin, slick brine that sometimes smells sour. Villagers can't say what's in it, but they know what it can leave in the stomach -- that unsettling feeling some U.S. soldiers refer to as "Saddam's revenge." A recent outbreak of cholera across Iraq has killed at least 14 people and infected 3,300 others with an intestinal ailment spread by dirty water. Some families with vehicles buy bottled water while in Baghdad. Others wait for the water tanker to deliver free supplies. Bottled water from the U.S. military is too infrequent to be relied upon. "We go from village to village, when we can," said Capt. Pat Moffett. "We give them water to drink, but we also have to give them water to farm, so they can work." Villagers confirm the need for full irrigation canals to sprout new crops of watermelon, cucumbers, tomatoes, wheat and rice, which in many areas haven't been farmed in several seasons.
Poster Comment: related, from 2003: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0516-07.htm Closely tied to the disputes surrounding Iraq and Syria’s water supply is the proximity to Israel. Syria faces water difficulties on its southwestern border as well in the water-rich area of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. The Golan Heights has important water resources that, according to Professor Emeritus Dan Zaslavsky at Bar-Ilan University, if handed back over to Syria would mean that Israel loses nearly one-third of its fresh water . On May 7, 2003 Secretary of State Colin Powell met with Bouthaina Shabaan of Syria to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to returning the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967, as a key step in the peace process between Syria and Israel. Should the U.S. broker a peace plan that guaranteed the Golan to Syria, Israel would have to find a replacement source for its lost resources. Stephen Pelletiere, a former CIA analyst, wrote in the New York Times that Turkey had envisioned building a Peace Pipeline carrying water that would extend to the southern Gulf States, and as he sees it, “by extension to Israel.” He continued by saying that “no progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.” Also related; U.S. accused of ignoring crisis for 4.5 million displaced Iraqis
posted 5 days ago by Alan Chapman
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#1. To: robin (#0)
I don't know why I'm not getting Youtube stuff to post in an embedded form as I'm doing the same way I always have, but here is a link to a you tube showing American soldiers taunting kids with water. Kids desparate because they have no clean tap water of any kind.
The embed was there for me.
Ron Paul for President - Join a Ron Paul Meetup group today!
That is beyond pathetic.
Pathetic indeed...never mind that the US government is borrowing all of these billions of dollars from yet-to-be born Americans to pay for this...the real tragedy is that it was the US military that is, in large part, responsible for the lack of potable water in Iraq. All those years of sanctions in the 1990's...one of the tactics the US military used was to bomb Iraq's electric plants so that Saddam would not be able to treat the water. The result was epidemics of cholera and typhoid resulting in the estimated deaths of 500,000 Iraqis. And for what? How again was it in the average American's interest to destablize Saddam? And we wonder how someone like Bin Laden is able to recruit young Muslims to terrorize Americans? Oh yeah...its because we're so good and free...and the level of our goodness is inversely proportional to their evilness war crimes bump
#2. To: lodwick (#1)
#3. To: Ferret Mike (#2)
#4. To: Ferret Mike, robin, all (#2)
#5. To: lodwick (#4)
The bombing campaign targeted Iraq’s electrical power system, thereby destroying the country’s ability to operate its water-treatment plants. One Pentagon official who helped plan the bombing campaign observed,
People say, “You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.” Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.
Col. John Warden III, deputy director of strategy for the Air Force, observed,
Saddam Hussein cannot restore his own electricity. He needs help. If there are political objectives that the UN coalition has, it can say, “Saddam, when you agree to do these things, we will allow people to come in and fix your electricity.” It gives us long-term leverage.
Another Air Force planner observed,
We wanted to let people know, “Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.”
The Post explained the Pentagon’s rationale for punishing the Iraqi people:
Among the justifications offered now, particularly by the Air Force in recent briefings, is that Iraqi civilians were not blameless for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. “The definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear,” said a senior Air Force officer, noting that many Iraqis supported the invasion of Kuwait. “They do live there, and ultimately the people have some control over what goes on in their country.”
A Harvard School of Public Health team visited Iraq in the months after the war and found epidemic levels of typhoid and cholera as well as pervasive acute malnutrition. The Post noted,
In an estimate not substantively disputed by the Pentagon, the [Harvard] team projected that “at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects” of the bombing.
The U.S. military understood the havoc the 1991 bombing unleashed. A 1995 article entitled “The Enemy as a System” by John Warden, published in the Air Force’s Airpower Journal, discussed the benefits of bombing “dual-use targets” and noted,
A key example of such dual-use targeting was the destruction of Iraqi electrical power facilities in Desert Storm.... [Destruction] of these facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.
The article concluded that the U.S. Air Force has a “vested interest in attacking dual-use targets” that undermine “civilian morale.”
In 1995, a team of doctors (including a representative of the Harvard School of Public Health) visited Iraq under the auspices of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization to examine the nutritional status and mortality rates of young children in Baghdad. They concluded that the sanctions had resulted in the deaths of 567,000 children in the previous five years. (Most subsequent studies implicitly concluded that this study sharply overestimated the mortality toll in the first years of the sanctions.)
CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl relied on this estimate in 1996 when she asked U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright,
We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Albright answered,
I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.
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