The Greening of Iraq
By: Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, March 11, 2003
MARCH 17, ST. PATRICK'S DAY, IS THE "DROP DEAD" DAY for Saddam Hussein to surrender his weapons of mass destruction, as originally proposed by the United States, Spain and Great Britain. This date might be extended slightly, but it is strikingly appropriate.
Legend credits St. Patrick, who went to his heavenly reward on this date during the late 5th Century A.D., with driving the snakes out of Ireland. This year it may become the historic date on which the snakes, or at least all venom-like weapons, are driven out of Iraq.
Green is the color of St. Patrick and his adopted Emerald Isle. Green is also the color of the Prophet Mohammad, through whom Islam's message began. This is why green is found on the flags of more than 25 predominantly Muslim nations. Iraq's flag includes three green stars and the recently added green Arabic words evoked five times daily from every active minaret in Islam, Allahu Akbar, "God is Great."
Islam, which like the other two great Western religions was born in the deserts of the Middle East, envisions paradise as an oasis of abundant water and greenery.
Look at satellite imagery of the region today, however, and the brightest oasis of green you will see is Israel, whose people planted forests and made the desert bloom.
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein has largely destroyed the fabled fertility of the fabled Fertile Crescent, the cradle of human history between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. This was the birthplace in Ur of the Chaldees of Abraham, the founding father in whom Jews, Christians, and Arabs all claim their heritage.
Amid recent United Nations debates, a boat plied the waters nearby with a sign that said "GREENPEACE. No War. When is the United States going to disarm?" Why, I found myself thinking, is this Leftist mock-environmental organization supporting the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein, who has done so much to threaten and destroy Earth's environment and to betray the Prophet Mohammad's symbolic green on Iraq's own flag?
In the United States, environmental zealots have demanded the protection of vaguely-defined "wetlands," including tire tracks filled for two weeks each year with rain water that they label "vernal pools."
So where are these watermelon environmentalists when it comes to Saddam Hussein, who since 1991 has deliberately and systematically destroyed 90 percent of Iraq's ancient wetlands? As Vicki Silverman describes them, these lost Iraqi marshlands between the two rivers were a "millenniums-old ecosystem where water reeds grew twenty feet high, and grains, grasses, fish, buffalo and migratory birds lived in harmony with 500,000 native Marsh Dwellers."
This scorched-earth policy of draining these wetlands by Saddam Hussein began after the first Gulf War to deny this huge environmental haven and hiding place to rebels against his government. Today almost its entire ancient population of "marsh Arabs" have been forced out.
Just as United Nations weapons inspectors were driven out of Iraq by violence and threats, so too did Saddam Hussein starting in 1991 bar environmental researchers and humanitarian aid workers from the marsh regions.
Working with satellite imagery and other information, however, the United Nations Environmental Program has estimated Hussein's sadistic damage to Mother Earth. The U.N. study, reports Charles Recknagel, "calls the loss of the wetlands an ecological catastrophe comparable to the deforestation of the Amazon and the shrinking of the Aral Sea."
The megalomaniac who caused this ecological catastrophe comparable to the deforestation of the Amazon is Saddam Hussein, the dictator Greenpeace wants to keep in power. But as James K. Glassman reminded us again this week, Greenpeace is far more red than green in its real political agenda.
Were it a genuine environmental organization, writes Glassman, "One would think that Greenpeace would be leading the first armored column into Baghdad to bring history's number-one eco-criminal to justice." Instead, it and other Leftist environmental groups are working to prevent Hussein's removal.
During the last Gulf War, Hussein set ablaze 613 Kuwaiti oil wells, sending a plume of smoke pollution around the planet. Hussein flooded a large part of the Persian Gulf with raw oil, devastating fish and bird habitats there.
In any new Gulf War, warns the March 17 issue of Newsweek Magazine, Hussein might ignite his own Gotterdammerung, exploding and setting afire 1,500 Iraqi oil wells, flooding the lands and antiquities from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf, and unleashing a devil's brew of chemical and biological weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, plants and animals.
We can strike fast and try to prevent yet more eco-horror by this butcher of Baghdad. But given his past and his ambitions, it makes no sense to leave Saddam Hussein in power in the vain hope that he will become a good environmental citizen.
Those who are red-white-and-blue (the stars and stripes kind, not those under France's tricolor flag derived from ours) already understand this. Those who salute the green flags of Islam and environmentalism also need to join in ousting Saddam Hussein, for the sake of Father Abraham and Mother Earth. Only with Saddam's burial can we begin the re-greening of the once-fertile crescent of Iraq.
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