Toledo, Ohio, Sips of Life in Iraq

TOLEDO OH – Ironically, although this city is affixed to the shore of a Great Lake, we’ve given a new meaning to what a “dry” town is. We learned it’s one thing to go without beer; quite another to go without water.

For three days, some 500,000 people in northwest Ohio avoided almost all bodily contact with water coming out of a faucet. No drinking, cooking, dish-washing, teeth-brushing. Boiling made it worse. Bathing was OK except for small children, pets and those with compromised immune systems.

Algae blooms in Lake Erie caused by excessive phosphorus and nitrogen from municipal sewage systems, animal feedlots and intensive farming are not new. For years, thick mats of dying algae have leached microcystin toxin into large portions of the world’s tenth-largest lake, the water source for 11,000,000 people. But literally overnight on August 2, Erie’s health and a long-delayed overhaul of Toledo’s aging water treatment plant became top priority…for now.

We’ve talked about cleaning up Lake Erie for decades and sometimes did something about it. We’ve talked about upgrading the water plant since…well, at least since we invaded Iraq andAfghanistan over 10 years ago. And lest you think our water plant and the two wars are unrelated, consider this: taxpayers here in Lucas County have pissed over 1.6 billion dollars down war’s sandy rat holes – five times what it would cost to provide reliable, safe drinking water to people who now wonder when this will happen again.

Fortunately, truckloads of bottled water soon started streaming into town and onto store shelves emptied by anxious residents. Not always – as in the case of Hurricane Katrina – but often, that’s how emergencies turn out for Americans. “Out there” where help comes from is never far away. Restoring Lake Erie to health is clearly the real issue, but for now a three-day crisis has ebbed.

That’s not the case in Iraq, though. “Out there” is empty. The three decade-long calamity crushing the people of Iraq is everywhere, all the time. It’s the latest in a long line of mega-tragedies the Empire creates and walks away from, but which the rest of the world never forgets.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait with tacit U.S. approval in late 1990, his country was quickly hit with U.N. sanctions viciously administered by U.S. fiat for a dozen years. Within months of that invasion, George Bush the Elder organized Desert Storm, a military assault that drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and the Iraqi people back to the early Industrial Age.

Since sanctions were already in effect before the Desert Storm blitz, Pentagon planners knew how stressed Iraq’s water and sewer systems had become. A detailed report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, issued just days after the blitz began on January 16, 1991, describes the vulnerabilities in Iraq’s ability to provide safe drinking water, concluding that "Full degradation of the water treatment system probably will take at least another six months."

That brief war destroyed 31 water and sewer facilities in Iraq, 20 of them in Baghdad. This, together with a post-war tightening of sanctions, killed up to 500,000 children under the age of five, according to a 1999 UNICEF study – double all the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The sadism and hubris go unbelievably deeper, according to this statement attributed to a Pentagon planner in a November, 2002 Harper’s article by Joy Gordon: "What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions."
I won’t further depress/bore/incite you with the statistics since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. Start with this essential summary by author David Swanson and with little effort you can create your own house of horrors. The point is, our taxes haven’t bought adequate clean water or education or health care, but the death and misery of whomever the Empire decides is in the way.

A word for those moved to outrage and action instead of immobilized cynicism: for decades movements for peace, environmental sustainability and justice have opposed war after war, environmental outrage after outrage and injustice piled atop injustice. Surely we cannot ignore such crimes, but we must shift our thinking from reaction to prevention via a movement for democracy that will abolish rule by corporations.

The best way I know of to do that is with the nationwide, grassroots effort to abolish the doubly bizarre practice of corporations having the same rights as people and allowing pallets of cash to buy our elections. Those folks can be found at MoveToAmend.org. Time and water are running out.

Mike Ferner is a writer and activist from Toledo.

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