The Force of Water

The subtext of war in the Middle East (to which I will add Iran-adjacent Afghanistan) vacillated somewhere among ancient religious and ethnic animosities, a 19th and early 20th century European proclivity to colonize and in more recent years, oil. Then came the double whammy of explosive population growth and climate change. You can speak of those in the region seeking power – the monarchs of the Arabian Peninsula, the extremist Muslim cleric-politicians, war lords and tribal chiefs and out-and-out dictators – as the real cause, but they are either guided by or have taken advantage of any form of nature’s disruptions and religious/ethnic instability to consolidate their power… even as that power is threatened by those very same factors.

This entire region is and will become increasingly volatile for the foreseeable future. Our foreign policy decisions – Biden’s immediate concern with when and if to pull the few remaining US troops out of Afghanistan, for example – are unlikely to bring stability to a region that has become a roiling and constant global powder keg. And yes, Israel’s signal to the Biden administration that it is willing to compromise – a little bit by beginning to supply a dribble of COVID vaccines to Hama’s controlled Gaza – will save a few lives. 

But there are so many fuses lit in a region with so many human beings with little or nothing left to lose. Folks who perceive their backs pushed to the wall, who have lost everything or feel that they are about to lose everything. The most dangerous people on earth. Desperate victims. Their rhetoric, their expressions of fear and angst, aren’t so different from our own populist right-wing domestic terrorists… except those in the cacophony of the Middle East really have lost everything. And still, with food impairment, desertification and murderous conflict, amplified by the pandemic, the population in the region continues to rise… and migrate.

“The pressure of such growth underscores an existential threat to the region as governments already on the brink contend with a future in which they can no longer support some of the world’s fastest-growing populations.

“Water scarcity, climate change and erratic weather systems are likely to further imperil stability across the Middle East. No fewer than 12 countries in the region make the list of the world’s most water-stressed nations; already-scorching summer temperatures are expected to rise twice as fast as the average global warming, according to the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. The World Bank predicts the Middle East will become the most economically damaged place on Earth due to climate-related water scarcity.” Nabih Bulos and Marcus Yam, writing for the February 21st Los Angeles Times.

When the mostly Sunni farmers in western Iraq watched a never-ending drought turn their once productive farms into desert dust, they petitioned the Shiite dominated government in Baghdad for vital aid. The memory of a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein who led a 20% Sunni minority to run roughshod over the 60% Shiite majority, was still fresh in the minds of the PM Nouri Al-Maliki and his Shiite flock. Shiites believe only a supreme cleric can interpret the Quran; Sunnis believe that each Muslim must read the Quran, preferably in the original classical Arabic, and take it at face value. Think of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, Catholics against Protestants, as a Western example. Oh, did I mention that the United States imposed a simple majority rule government on Iraq, one that quickly disenfranchised the Sunni minority. Needless to say, that Shiite led government in Baghdad turned their back on those desperate Sunni farmers.

A similar pattern repeated itself in Syria, this time with a tiny (10% of the population) Alawite-Shiite dictator in power, Bashar al-Assad, running roughshod over his 80% majority Sunni population with a lot of help from Russia and a clear alliance with Shiites in Iran (95% Shiite and home to a theocracy run by those supreme Quranic interpreters) and majority Shiite Iraq. The lack of water, dust bowl farms, were heavily concentrated in that area adjacent to the Iraqi farmers. 

Angry Sunni farmers, having lost everything that mattered (well over a million were displaced by perpetual drought), abandoned by their respective Shiite governments, were ripe pickings for al Qaeda… and ISIS, which promised so much more. The rest, as they say, is history. But there is a lesson for policymakers: CLIMATE CHANGE IS FAR AND AWAY THE BIGGEST THREAT TO THIS PLANET, PEACE, STABILITY AND LIFE.

The conflict that defined the region in the longest military conflict the United States has ever experienced is quite literally the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The mass exodus to Lebanon, Turkey and then north into Europe represented a geopolitical shift with far reaching consequences. European nations faced serious moral issues in dealing with so many immigrants. Lebanon added 20% to its population very quickly and literally collapsed. The story of water in Lebanon is simply part of a mega-trend for human survival. 

Bulos and Yam continue: “Lebanon stores only 6% of fresh water in reservoirs, far below the regional average. That’s perhaps a good thing, because most natural water sources are bacterially contaminated, a result of some 400 million cubic yards of wastewater dumped into its aquifers or the Mediterranean with little or no treatment, according to the government’s Capital Investment Program. (A study by the American University of Beirut found fecal coliform bacteria in 80% of tap water.)

“Creaking water infrastructure — leakage in pipes averages 48% nationally, according to one estimate — means most people drill illegal wells, with 20,000 such boreholes in Greater Beirut alone. That over-exploitation means that what comes out of faucets in coast-side neighborhoods like Beirut’s Hamra is brackish, when it comes at all... Little wonder then that most are forced to pay to truck water in for washing or prohibitively expensive bottled water for drinking.

“The Bisri dam [proposed to cut through a picturesque valley with ancient Roman/Ottoman ruins] was supposed to solve all that. It was proposed in 1953 by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation; the World Bank approved an updated version of the plans in 2014 as part of the Water Supply Augmentation Project. It gave a $474-million loan to finance the project — the bank’s largest-ever investment in Lebanon, with a total cost of $617 million.” 

But Lebanon is a land of endemic corruption. Hands are always out. The only reason the Beirut harbor blew up is because there was no financial incentive to clean out a hulking explosive mass left from and abandoned Russian ship. Uncollected garbage plagued 11 miles of a highway for months. 

“Described in a U.S. Embassy cable published by WikiLeaks as ‘the epitome of patronage,’ [Council for Development and Reconstruction, or CDR, an uber-state agency that issues the bulk of Lebanon’s public tenders], critics say, disburses funding for public projects to enrich Lebanon’s sectarian leaders. A recent analysis by the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies found that two-thirds of the council’s contracts were granted to 10 politically connected companies.” Bulos and Yam. And indeed, the fix was in. The standard contractors were summoned.

In Bisri, environmental activists, pledged to preserve that pristine valley, laced with corrupt government officials are duking it out with desperate Beirut residents who cannot trust their own water supply. Valley protestors enlisted archaeologists to champion preservation. Thousands of such protestors stormed against preliminary efforts to begin clearance of the proposed construction site. Even as the necessary land was acquired. Eventually, the government stopped the project.

“But the dam project remains on the government’s books; it needs a parliamentary decision to rescind it, meaning it could be revived if funding can be found. It seemed as if it was heading that way. This month, CDR issued a tender for $80 million to continue work on a water-conveying tunnel meant to link up to the proposed Bisri reservoir… 

“In the meantime, the World Bank predicts the project’s cancellation means no reliable access to clean water for more than 1.6 million people living in Beirut and its environs, including 460,000 people who live on less than $4 a day. Despite the furor around the Bisri dam, the bank insists it remains the best option. But Amani and other activists keep their vigil. They have a community of people tilling what is now public land, living off its bounty as their forebears had for hundreds of years, she said.” Across this horrifically impaired region, with corruption lurking behind every corner, activists and government officials facing off… often with money and guns… the solutions are elusive just as the problems accelerate.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while climate change is the big story, it’s the aggregation of little stories that define the solutions and the unanticipated problems.