Dolphins: Iran's weapon against the US?
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The Pentagon, which has in the past tried to place its naval operations above
US laws, has suffered a court reversal that is bound to have repercussions well
beyond the California coast and impact the US Navy's global operations.
A federal judge in Los Angeles has imposed rigid limits on the navy's use of
mid-frequency sonar off the coast of southern California. The sonar is
suspected of causing disruption to whale and dolphin navigation systems.
The ruling, in response to a case brought by environmentalists, bans sonar
within 12 nautical miles of the California coast,
increases the navy's "shut down" zone for sonar use near marine mammals, and
mandates the navy monitor for marine mammals one hour prior to sonar exercises
as well as during them.
The court's finding, with "near certainty" that US naval sonic "mitigation
schemes" are "grossly inadequate to protect marine mammals from debilitating
levels of sonar exposure", has direct bearing on the navy's operations in the
Persian Gulf, which include active sonar training "under actual conditions".
The navy's surface ships and submarines stationed in the Persian Gulf use sonar
to detect Iran's Russian-made diesel submarines. And given the mass stranding
of several species of whales following US naval exercises in, among other
places, the Bahamas, the Canary Islands, Hawaii, North Carolina, Japan, Spain,
Taiwan, and the US Virgin Islands, these operations could be called challenged.
The judge said in her ruling she wanted to balance "competing interests of
national security and fleet readiness" with environmental protection. A US Navy
spokesman said the navy is considering its options, adding that the order did
not strike "the right balance between national security and environmental
concerns".
Recently, the US Navy went on record in support of the use of "all US
environmental laws worldwide", but this was before the California decision.
President George W Bush, scheduled to visit the Middle East soon, will now be
saddled with environmental concerns as well as all the other matters on the US
agenda.
Despite the US's heavy energy dependence on the Persian Gulf and the extensive
use of this waterway by US naval ships, there is no US initiative to help
mitigate the growing ecological problems affecting the gulf's biodiversity and
marine mammals' eco-systems.
Certainly, indigenous states shoulder the main responsibility and are to blame
for not taking adequate action to offset pollution, but their retarded
environmentalism does not absolve the US of its specific contribution to the
ecological crisis.
The US Navy's use of high intensity, mid-frequency sonar is probably behind the
alarming rate of self-stranding dolphins and whales on Iran's beaches. The
Persian Gulf is the habitat of 40 different types of dolphins and the largest
living mammal, the blue whale, and both species are endangered by US sonar
activities. These activities, per the US court ruling, "cause irreparable harm"
to marine mammals. Many more mammals may have died in deeper waters and, in the
absence of any systematic study and data, we may be witnessing only the tip of
the iceberg with beached mammals.
The California court dismissed the navy's defense, for example, that it uses
some 30 "mitigation measures" and operates in tandem with US environmental and
animal protection laws. In fact, the court relied on the US Navy's own
environmental assessment reports: for example, that the sonar activities off
the coast of California scheduled between February 2007 and January 2009 will
result in approximately 170,000 cases of "B Level mammal harassment exposure"
and this will include "approximately 8,000 exposures powerful enough to cause a
temporary threshold shift in the affected mammals' sense of hearing and an
additional 466 instances of permanent injury to beaked and ziphiid whales".
Following comprehensive studies of such events, the International Whaling
Commission's Scientific Committee recently concluded that "the weight of
accumulated evidence now associates mid-frequency military sonar with atypical
beaked whale mass strandings. This evidence is very convincing and appears
overwhelming." Similarly, a study sponsored by the US Navy's own Office of
Naval Research concluded that "the evidence of sonar causation is, in our
opinion, completely convincing". Yet, in a bizarre twist, in court the US Navy
distanced itself from its own findings, finding "methodological faults" with
them.
From the prism of international (environmental) law, US naval activities that
harm the national resources of Iran and other Persian Gulf countries are prime
for litigation in national and international courts. This is not to mention the
pollution caused by the shipping noise as well as "military solid wastes"
connected to explosives, munition fragments and other toxic material dumped
into the Persian Gulf each time the US Navy holds a maneuver.
Clearly, the Persian Gulf needs an integrated ecosystem management approach,
one requiring environmental cooperation among all the littoral states as well
as with relevant international institutions. Iran's President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad recently unveiled a cooperative plan for the Persian Gulf that
prioritizes environment, and it would be a pity for Arab states of the Gulf
Cooperation Council to ignore it. [1]
But the US has a special role to play. At a minimum, it can train Persian Gulf
fishermen whose nets are partly responsible for the death of marine mammals, on
how to install noisemakers ("pingers") to deter cetaceans from fishnets. In
some cases, such as harbor porpoises in the Gulf of Maine, the use of pingers
has significantly reduced the number of mammals becoming entangled.
Finally, the marine risks posed by the US Navy's sonar activities in the
Persian Gulf, justified in the name of "containing Iran" first and foremost,
also focus attention on the connection between ecological and security issues.
This is all the more reason for the US and Iran to de-escalate their tensions
over Tehran's nuclear program and pursue alternative methods of dealing with
each other in a volatile region that is increasingly becoming an environmental
powder keg.
Note
1. Iran's environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been spurred
into action as a result of the mass strandings of dolphins, yet most of these
NGOs are focused on the Caspian Sea, Tehran and other regions, to the neglect
of the Persian Gulf, nor have they made much success in networking with other
NGOs in the region. For more on this see the author's
The environmental movement in Iran: Perspectives from the below and above,
Middle East Journal, 2003.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of
"Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping
Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author
of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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