Sunday, March 02, 2003

It is all about water

Parallel to the argument that the US is seeking control of Iraq's oil wealth through its campaign to topple Saddam Hussein, a new contention has emerged that Washington might also be eyeing to reshape the region's water system.
The assertion has come from Stephen C. Pelletiere, who served as Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000. In that capacity, says Pelletriere, "I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the (Arabian) Gulf..."
In an opinion/editorial piece written in the New York Times under the title "A war crime or an act of war," Petteriere primarily sought to establish that it was not Iraq but Iran which had used chemical weapons on the people of Halabja on the border between the two countries at the end of the 1980-88 war.
"...The truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja," he wrote. "We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story."
According to the former CIA officer, it was during an Iraqi-Iranian battle that ensued when Iran soought take over of the Darbandikhan lake and dam the border in an area including Halabja that chemical weapons were used. The gas that was used was known to have been used by Iran and not Iraq, he says in contradiction to President George W,Bush's implicit accusation in is recent State of the Union address that Saddam had used chemical weapons against his own people.
Beyond the debate about the use of chemical weapons in Halabja, Pelletriere's article refers to plans about the region's water resources.
"Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East," he says.
"Before the Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish area," says the article. "And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of when they seized Halabja.
"In the 1990s there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the Gulf states, and, by extension, Israel," Pelletriere writes.
The Peace Pipeline project was the brainchild of the late Turkish president Turgut Ozal in the late 80s and early 90s. He proposed that Turkey dam up the Euphrates and sell the water to the region's countries, including Israel.
Turkey on the one hand and downstream Syria and Iraq had been for long locked in disputes over the Euphrates since Turkey slowed down the flow of the river through dams build upstream. In the 90s, it built the Ataturk Dam, which has considerably reduced the flow.
Eighty per cent of Iraq’s water originates outside its borders. Turkey controls most of the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, the twin rivers upon which both Syria and Iraq depend.
While the Peace Pipeline project was welcomed by Israel, which has the highest per capita water consumption in the Middle East, Iraq and Syria objected to it since damming up the Euphrates would have serious consequences on their sections of the river.
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The Peace Pipeline project involved conveying Turkey's waters through Syrian territory or along the Mediterranean to Israel. The Gulf-bound water would pass through Iraq, according to the Turkish plan.
Russia was the main non-Arab opponent of the project since Moscow felt that that the project will have dangerous outcomes and will lead to new fights and Arab-Israeli wars over the water.
Indeed, that assumption is held valid in view of the growing water crisis in the region and a lack of agreement on how the region’s scarce resources should be divided.
In any event, it is elementary that a Turkish water pipeline running through Syrian territory to Israel could be contemplated only in a situation of Arab-Israeli peace -- which seems far too distant at this jucture in history.
But, does the US have any plans to use Iraqi territory for a pipeline to Israel running through Jordan?
While Pelletriere, the former CIA expert, is not clear on this point, he suggests all options could be open.
"We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil," says Pelletriere. "But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East."
"Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the sixth century AD., and was a granary for the region," says Pelletriere.
According to the former espionage official, no progress was made on the Peace Pipeline project because of what he calls Iraqi intransigence.
"With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change," he says.
"Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades — not solely by controlling Iraq's oil, but by controlling its water....."
Indeed, experts have often predicted that the next Middle East war would be over water.
“Many of the wars of this [20th] century were about oil,” World Bank Vice-President Ismail Serageldin observed in the late 90s, “but the wars of the next century will be about water.”
Seen against the obivous "invisible" US objective of removing Iraq as a potential military threat against Israel, it would also seem conceivable that its plan includes opening the door to address its ally's water concerns. With the US in absolute control of Iraq, it would be free to use Iraqi territory to convey water Israel through Jordan, which has signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state and has strong economic and trade links with the US,
Israel has proved it would not hesitate to go to war over water. Its seizure of Syria's Golan Heights in the 1967 war had more to do with its anxiety to take control of the strategic area which is the main source of its water than military strategy; and its persistent refusal to negotiate the return of the Golan to Syria evidences its determination not to give up control of the water source.
The Israeli invasion and 23-year occupation of southern Lebanon was also partly motivated by designs to gain control over Lebanon's water sources and divert them into Israeli territory.
Israel's continued occupation of parts of the West Bank is aimed at retaining control of aquifers in the occupied territory that accounts for nearly one fourth of its water consumption. It has imposed severe controls over Palestinian exploitation of their own water sources.
As such, Pelletriere's assertion that the US would seek to revamp the region's water-sharing arrangements could not be dismissed out of hand.
However, it need not be the case that Iraq would be a conduit to Turkey's water to Israel.
A US control of Iraq would definitely change the region's shape and political perceptions and Washington might eventually be able to "persuade" Syria to make peace with Israel under the new reality of a strong American military presence in neighbouring Iraq.
A Syrian-Israeli peace agreement, by definition if, as and when it is signed, would definitely involve firm accords of water sharing and the world could bet it would be more oriented towards addressing Israel's "water concerns" than those of the Arabs.





Droughts are frequent in the northern parts of Iraq, indicating that the water sources in that part of the country are not dependable.
The Tigris and Euphrates rivers rise in the eastern mountains of Turkey and enter Iraq along its northwestern borders.
After flowing for some 1,200 kilometres tranversing through Iraq, the two rivers converge at Karmat Al, just north of Basra, to form the Shatt Al Arab waterway, which flows some 110 kilometres to enter the Gulf. The middle of the waterway is supposed to be the Iran-Iraq international border.
The Euphrates does not receive any tributaries within Iraq, while the Tigris receives four main tributaries, the Khabour, Great Zab, Little Zab and Diyala, which rise in the mountains of eastern Turkey and northwestern Iran and flow in a southwesterly direction until they meet the Tigris River, according to data provided by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation. A seasonal river, Al Authaim, rising in the highlands of northern Iraq, also flows into the Tigris, and is the only significant tributary arising entirely within Iraq.