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Cleaning up the mess in
Iraq
By Conn Hallinan
(Posted
with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
When the Bush administration totals up the cost
of the Iraq war, it had best be prepared to tack on
billions more to clean up the toxic residue of how this
country wages war, specifically its widespread use of
cluster weapons and Depleted Uranium (DU). While the
shooting has wound down, the consequences of using these
controversial weapons will be around for a long time to
come, with clusters taking a steady toll on the unwary
and the young, and DU poisoning the air and water.
Cluster munitions, bombs, shells and rockets
that release highly explosive canisters that shred
everything from people to tanks, have been an
environmental nightmare since the war in Southeast Asia.
Of the 90 million cluster munitions dropped on tiny Laos
from 1964 to 1973, 30 percent failed to explode. The
result is a national minefield that has killed and
maimed more than 12,000 people and which continues to
exact an annual toll of 100 to 200 more. In one 20
square kilometer area, the British Mines Advisory Group,
the world's leading bomb clearing organization, recently
found 376,000 unexploded weapons, with the vast majority
of them being cluster munitions. More than 50 million
clusters were used in the 1991 Gulf War. In the two
years following that war, they killed 1,400 Kuwaiti
civilians and as late as last year, 200 cluster weapons
were found there each month.
According to Colin
King, a disposal expert in the first Gulf War and author
of Jane's Explosive Ordinance Disposal Guide, clusters
caused "massive problems" in Kosovo, the Gulf and
Afghanistan and they are "going to cause massive
problems in the Gulf again".
The most notorious
cluster is the Vietnam era "Rockeye", the CBU-99, armed
with MK-118 bomblets which have a failure rate as high
as 30 percent. A United States company hired to clear
cluster weapons from Kuwait found 95,700 unexploded
MK-118 submunitions in one small area. More recent
cluster weapons, like the CBU-103, 104, 105, and AGM-154
A and B, have better track records, but even these can
fail anywhere from 5 to 23 percent of the time. Children
are particularly in danger because some of the canisters
are yellow, like the American emergency food packs.
DU is ubiquitous on any recent American
battlefield. The US used 320 tons of it during the first
Gulf War, and 10 tons of it in Kosovo. Its resistance to
enemy projectiles and its ability to turn hardened armor
into margarine gives the US an enormous advantage over
any opponent who lacks it. It is, however, illegal. In
August of last year, a United Nations sub-committee
found that the use of DU violated seven international
agreements, including the UN Charter and the Geneva
Conventions. Used in 120 mm tank shells and 30 mm cannon
ammunition, DU has an ignition threshold of 1132C,
one-third that of tungsten. It can punch through four
inches of steel, roasting the inside of tanks and
armored vehicles with a 10,000C fireball.
Anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of DU turns into
tiny dust particles, which may travel as far as 40
kilometers. DU is not very radioactive, about the same
as naturally occurring uranium, but if ingested,
according to the U.S. Environmental Policy Institute, it
"has the potential to generate significant medical
consequences". DU has long been a suspect in Gulf War
Syndrome, the melange of physical woes afflicting up to
30 percent of the veterans from the 1991 conflict.
The Department of Defense doesn't consider
low-level radiation a threat, but a recent study by the
Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute may force a
re-evaluation of that conclusion. "People have always
assumed low doses are not much of a problem," Alexandra
Miller of the Institute told The Guardian (British),
"but they can cause more damage than people think."
The study indicates that DU damages bone marrow
chromosomes. The effects of low-level radiation are hard
to track, because many "solid" cancers don't show up for
16 to 24 years. However, Iraqi medical authorities claim
the cancer rate in the Basra area has jumped ten-fold.
The area was saturated with DU during the 1991 war.
Besides being radioactive, DU is also a toxic metal that
can damage kidneys and livers. Another worry are DU
"misses", where the enormous weight and speed of DUs
drive them as deep as 24 inches into the ground.
"A major concern of the potential environmental
effects by intact [DU] penetrators or large penetrator
fragments," notes the World Health Organization, "is the
potential contamination of ground water after
weathering." Cluster bomb and DU cleanup is likely to be
enormously expensive, and who pays for it will be a
major question.
The Bush administration is
depending on Iraqi oil sales to foot most of the bill.
But the figures don't add up. At most, Iraqi oil could
bring in $18 billion a year, barely enough to feed the
60 percent of the population dependent on food handouts.
Nor does this even address rebuilding the country's
infrastructure, ravaged by 12 years of sanctions and the
recent war, a price tag that, according to PFC Energy, a
Washington consulting firm, will probably run in excess
of $300 billion.
Iraq also has a debt burden
that may be as high as $383 billion, and no one seems to
be stepping forward to write it off. In fact, the
Financial Times called Deputy of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz's call for debt cancellation, "mischievous".
As Russian Vice Premier and Finance Minister Alexei
Kudrin pointed out, no one forgave his country's
enormous debts.
Unlike in the Gulf War, where
the allies picked up most the tab, the Bush
administration's "Coalition of the Willing" is flat
broke, and the White House has only allotted $2.4
billion to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian
Assistance. On top of that, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have been hesitant to step
in without United Nations authority.
In part,
the IMF is nervous about getting into the business of
cleaning up after the American military. "I don't see
that for the long-term future you can keep together a
world of peace and prosperity just based on military
might," IMF managing director Horst Kohler told the
Financial Times.
In the end, it will likely be
Iraqi civilians and US occupation troops who will pay
the price for the way we choose to wage war.
Conn Hallinan
is the provost at the University
of California at Santa Cruz and a political analyst for
Foreign Policy in Focus
(Posted with
permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
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