An essay from the Wupperman Vault. First published in a January 2009 issue of The Seattle Moralizer and reprinted in Todd’s book, Letters from an Old Sell-Out: Unsolicited Advice to the Protesting Youth of Today.
The 2008 elections have given the Democrats control of the White House and Congress and given America the chance to reverse some of the Bush administration’s disastrous policies. Hopefully we will finally see some long-overdue progress on many fronts: developing a rational health-care system, reversing Bush’s rollback on civil liberties, unblocking stem-cell research, and reinvestment sheep cloning technologies and infrastructure.
Most of all I hope we can now affect major change in Iraq. Since the initial invasion, the Bush administration ignored the advice of the US specialists and military experts on the ground in Iraq; they were blind to the op-ed pieces of academics and policy experts, and deaf to the cries of the Iraqi people. Because of the former administrations bumbling arrogance, it will be up to Obama’s team to address the real crisis that has been neglected for far too long in Iraq: that place is an environmental disaster! Green Zone? From the reports I’ve heard, it’s more like diesel-soot and burning infrastructure zone! If you think American highways are clogged with oversized wasteful SUVs, you should see the enormous caravans of Humvees they have on Iraqi highways. Is all that really necessary; what is the US military trying to compensate for with such massive vehicles? And what’s with the constant air-strikes? There’s such a thing as noise pollution too you know.
The good news for Iraq’s environment is that since the US invasion, the Iraqi people themselves have taken the initiative to change their old consumerist lifestyles. For example, did you know that electricity use is down an average of 50% since the occupation or that whole cities and even regions will go without electrical power for indeterminate stretches of time? In fact, when the dust settles, and becomes less radioactive from the depleted uranium shells used by the US and UK forces, Iraqis may turn out to be the greenest people in the entire Middle East. Many are abandoning their old urban lives with all its refrigerators and lights and cars and plumbing for a more sustainable nomadic lifestyle. I’ve read reports that after entering cities, US troops often find that Iraqis have abandoned their homes in droves, opting to leave behind their wasteful consumerist ways along with all their belongings and half-eaten meals on their tables! Now that’s a commitment to reducing your carbon footprint!
It’s time we take a cue from the Iraqi people and liberate them from the dictatorship of environmental degradation. To this end I have joined with other prominent liberal journalists and radio personalities and the Sierra Club to form a Neoconservationist coalition and call on President Barack Obama to “Green the War Machine”. President Obama has stated that we need to be as careful getting into Iraq as we were careless getting in. I fully agree, but since we know that President Bush had his mind made up to invade Iraq throughout the entire run-up to the war, I guess the opposite of that for the withdrawal means that we will not be sure if or when we are actually going to bring troops home or not. So while we decide, we might as well make the US military more environmentally sustainable. After all, one of the conditions placed on the auto industry bailout was that the auto companies had to invest in green technologies, so why not make the Iraq occupation industry do the same?
Green the War Machine
There are many simple things the US military can do for the environment that could be implemented immediately. When digging trenches or burying land mines, it would take only the slightest extra effort for our troops to plant some sunflowers, dianthus, snapdragons, or a nice bed of tiger lilies; they might also try any of the Mediterranean plants such as thyme or lavender for a fun change. Also, bunker busting bombs do a fantastic job of tilling the soil, so why not send some laser guided “Smart-Seeds” into all those craters in places like Mosul, Samarra, or Baghdad?
Beyond these simple first steps, there will need to be a plan for long-term environmental sustainability for our forces. New military contracts should be awarded to produce armored Priuses and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Chevy Volts. Naturally all tanks will have to be converted to bio-diesel.
Converting our Air Force and Navy jets presents a much more difficult challenge. US jets have been patrolling and performing bombing runs over Iraq ever since the 1991 Gulf War. In addition to emitting many more times the levels of greenhouse gasses caused by the fuel in land vehicles, jet fuel causes harmful chemicals to enter the food and water supplies of Iraq. Alarmingly high levels of benzene, a component of jet fuel, have been recorded in the Tigris River. Currently, the US military is researching ways to produce carbon-neutral jet fuels from a mixture of organic matter from mustard plants, algae, waste animal fats, and trail mix. Of course, the development of such a delicious jet fuel is still years away whereas the Air Force has already begun testing the use toxic synthetic liquid coal fuels known as Synfuels.
So until bombing operations can be powered by granola bars and Tofutti Cuties, we will have to find an alternative to our traditional air-power methods of shocking and awing. One such alternative could be burying massive bombs all over Iraq that would be wired to central command centers for remote detonation. Instead of burning huge quantities of jet fuel and destroying the environment to drop a bomb on a city, we could simply push a button and explode a bomb that’s already somewhere in the city. There would be none of the guess work of “smart bombs” and no accidental hospital demolitions by “precision guided missiles” because we’d already know exactly which hospitals we buried the bombs under. As an unintended bonus, that extra bomb burying means potentially lots of new flower beds all over Iraq.
Reduce, Recycle, Rebuild Iraq
Once we have committed ourselves to an environmentally responsible military machine, we can begin the process of rebuilding Iraq as a model green state. Some people want to say that the Iraqi occupation has failed while others further argue that the Iraq should be governed by Iraqis themselves without US interference. While I fully believe that we never should have invaded Iraq in the first place, now that we are there it would be irresponsible to leave. We will certainly reduce our forces in Iraq as President Obama detailed during the 2008 election, but we cannot afford to completely throw away this occupation after all the resources we’ve put into it: we need to recycle the Iraqi occupation. How typically American and wasteful it would be to occupy a country and then throw that occupation away simply because it got a little old or didn’t fit right. You know we’d just go right out and start an entirely new occupation the next day.
So as much as I personally detest this war, the only environmentally responsible thing to do is continue this occupation indefinitely no matter how unpopular it is with Iraqis, US soldiers or citizens. This is what politicians mean when they talk about shared sacrifice during war-time: people like me have to sacrifice our hatred of war; Iraqis have to sacrifice national self-determination and rights to their natural resources. Speaking of Iraq’s natural resources, oil is not the only resource that can be stripped from that country and given-away to American corporations. Again, we need to think about long-term sustainability and we are rapidly approaching peak oil, after which oil production will begin to decline rapidly. Yet the US military in all its wisdom has invested millions of dollars and tons of resources to build permanent bases and the world’s largest US embassy in Iraq. Unless we find things other than oil to trade blood for, this war will end up as a total waste. One idea that has been floated in Neoconservationist circles is filling Iraq’s deserts and grasslands with solar power plants and wind turbines. This would not only provide a cleaner alternative for energy than oil, but they don’t pollute as much as oil wells when they are set on fire by Iraqi saboteurs angry about the brutal occupation of their country.
3. Green Iraq is the model for the world (pre-emptive greening). We cannot wait for other countries to become polluter nations.
The first President Bush and President Clinton conceived of our military forces as the world’s cop: patrolling the global beat to prevent conflicts between nations and to beat up Haitians or Panamanians for no particular reason. President Bush expanded on this idea and saw the military as the world’s dirty cop that not only roughs up nations it doesn’t like the look of but also plants baggies of WMDs on those nations. Sometimes it invades other countries and then claims that in the dark it thought that aluminum tubes looked like nuclear weapons. Well, change has come and it’s time that we find a new role for our military forces. Neoconservationsists believe that the might of the US military can be used for humanitarian reasons and to help all the peoples of the world by protecting our environment. Let’s not be seen as the world’s global cop, but instead as a neighbor to other countries: a neighbor who maybe nags other nations about not leaving their sprinklers on too long in a drought; a neighbor who insists, maybe a little too forcefully at times, that other nations install solar panels or energy saving windows; a neighbor who, on occasion, breaks into the homes of others and forces them, at gunpoint, to separate their glass and plastic recycling.
Countries all over the world from Brazil to China are attempting to industrialize in order to become economic powers like the United States. Often these countries are doing so to the severe detriment of the environment. The US should use its power to ensure that development is green and sustainable.
President Bush claimed that the invasion and occupation of Iraq were an attempt to plant the seeds of democracy in the Middle East; the question now is who will plant the seeds of plants in Iraq? The heart of Iraq is known historically as the Fertile Crescent, but after a generation of wars, first Iran and then the US (and then the US), compounded by Saddam Hussein’s disastrous pro-erosion policy, Iraq’s fields have been rendered as arid and lifeless as a GOP fundraising party. Apparently, war is harmful to shrubs and other living things.
