The human and environmental costs of the Iraq and other wars

The human and environmental costs of war are so far-reaching that a full examination of them would produce countless volumes. Humanitarian disasters, enormous loss of life, far greater numbers maimed or injured, psychological trauma, destruction of essential services, human rights abuses, floods of refugees and crippling economic cost are all a part of war’s legacy. Increasingly, as climatic and other environmental threats loom large, contributions of war and its preparation to environmental destruction must also feature prominently in our examination of the price we pay for a heavily-militarised world.

It is important to emphasise that the ‘environmental’ impacts of war are very much a cost that we humans pay. We have only one planet to provide our food, water, shelter and all our other needs and pleasures. As we destroy it, we destroy our future. In his foreword to The true cost of conflict (Cranna 1994), the Rt Hon Lord Judd of Portsea wrote:

The statistics about modern warfare and its impact on civilians are chilling. Although most wars in the 18th and 19th centuries caused relatively few civilian casualties, in World War I, approximately 14% of the dead were civilians, in World War II approximately 67% and in the 1990s an estimated 90% of deaths in wars were civilians (Levy & Sidel 1997, p. 33). However, not only did the percentage of civilian deaths increase greatly during the last century, but the degree of destruction caused in the process increased. Since World War II, there have been more munitions expended for every enemy soldier killed than previously. Iraq provides a tragic illustration of practically every one of war’s costs. They were all predicted before the current war began in 2003. Some of the effects of this and other wars will be examined in this chapter.

Human security costs

Mortality estimates for the 2003 war in Iraq vary widely. This war, like all wars, was sold to us on morally righteous grounds, so the spin-doctors have worked hard in an effort to present a sanitised picture. However, as discussed in the previous chapter, in October 2006 the eminent medical journal The Lancet published a study (Burnham et al. 2006) from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, which estimated that the number of conflict-related deaths from the start of the war up until July 2006, above and beyond the deaths that would usually have occurred, was 655,000 and 92% of those deaths were due to direct violence. In quick response, and in total ignorance of the way in which such studies are conducted, political leaders in the US, the UK and Australia ridiculed the report. Journalist Richard Horton (2007) reports that, in the UK at least, government ministers had been advised by their own scientists in the Ministry of Defence that the research was accurate and reliable.

A more recent estimate of the Iraqi death toll was made by the US group Just Foreign Policy in August 2007, and that estimate was over 999,000 – practically one million Iraqi deaths due to the invasion and its consequences. According to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (2009), the 35occupying forces have suffered heavy losses also. Over 4,200 US soldiers have been killed (up to February 2009).

Deaths are, of course, only the tip of the iceberg of the humanitarian effects of war. They are far out-numbered by maiming, other physical injuries, and severe psychological disturbances, all of which perpetuate the suffering and drain scarce resources from postwar economies. While physical injuries are the most visible, it is psychological injury that is often more incapacitating, both for civilians and military personnel. Medact, the UK affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, in its 2008 report, Rehabilitation under fire: health care in Iraq 2003–7 (Medact 2008), emphasised the profound impact that mental health problems will have on the country’s future.

For the occupying forces also, rates of psychological trauma are alarming. A study by Milliken, Auchterlonie and Hodge (2007) of more than 88,000 Iraqi war veterans, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found high rates of psychological disorders, alcohol abuse and interpersonal conflict. The psychological impacts of this war on coalition soldiers and their communities are compounded by the fact that the troops were told they were going as liberators. Instead they were attacked by Iraqis as occupiers.

Essential services are generally disrupted in times of war, sometimes by deliberate targeting. Iraq’s health care system suffers grave problems, including destruction of facilities, the exodus of thousands of doctors, university teachers and other workers, the abduction, killing and torture of doctors, and deliberate attacks on hospitals and clinics (Ismael 2006).

The briefing paper ‘Rising to the humanitarian challenge in Iraq’ (Oxfam International 2007) estimated that almost a third of the Iraqi population was in need of emergency aid. It added that the ‘brain drain’ had seen about 40% of Iraq’s teachers, doctors, engineers and other professionals leave the country while unemployment affected over 50% of the remaining population. Moreover, clean water, sanitation and electricity services were drastically reduced, even compared to 2003 levels after over a decade of crippling economic sanctions. 36

Medact’s 2007 report on health care in Iraq since 2003, cited above, drew attention to some of the deliberate policy decisions that increased the scale of the humanitarian disaster in Iraq. The report stated that: 1) health facilities were not protected during or after the invasion and only the ministries of oil and of the interior had military protection; 2) during the attacks on Fallujah in 2004, no humanitarian corridor was provided, as vividly detailed by Donna Mulhearn in chapter ten of this book, and elsewhere checkpoints prevented access to health facilities; 3) the enforced sacking of Ba’ath party members removed many senior health experts; 4) advice from the UN, WHO and other sources with relevant experience in health care was largely ignored particularly by the Pentagon, who had a virtual monopoly on post-invasion reconstruction, including in health care; and, 5) well-functioning systems such as the Oil-for-food distribution network for food and medicines was undermined by the US drive for privatisation in everything.

Perhaps the greatest of humanity’s failures in relation to warfare is the failure to protect children. Children growing up in war zones, where they have witnessed or even taken part in extreme acts of violence, can develop chronic and very disabling psychological disorders. This is particularly so when children are forced into militias. UNICEF (2007) estimates there are 300,000 child soldiers worldwide. Children are also vulnerable to many of war’s deprivations. In particular, disruption of the supply of food and clean water leads to high mortality from outbreaks of infectious illnesses. In the1991 Gulf War, the US destroyed 85–90% of Iraq’s electrical generating capacity in the full knowledge that it would lead to an inability to run water treatment plants, resulting in the spread of infectious illnesses that would kill children in disproportionate numbers (Nagy 2004, p. 139).

In July 2007, UNICEF reported that the plight of Iraqi children was deteriorating (Jordans 2007). This was attributed partly to the fact that the government-funded food rations that had been provided by Saddam Hussein’s regime in response to the economic sanctions were no longer available. Also fear of violence prevented mothers from accessing health care for their children. Fear prevents many Iraqi children from attending school. Oxfam’s 2007 report, cited above, stated that 92% of Iraqi children suffered learning difficulties mostly because of the pervasive 37climate of fear, and that more than 800,000 children had dropped out of school.

Throughout history, women have often been regarded as the property of the victors in war, and subject to rape and capture as sex slaves. Mass rape is also used to humiliate and to destroy social cohesion in the enemy. However, sexual crimes against women have generally received much less attention than other war crimes. The scale of rape in war often remains hidden for many years, an example being the 100,000-200,000 ‘comfort women’, mostly Korean, used by the Japanese in World War II. In the war in Bosnia, many thousands of women were raped, partly in an attempt to cause panic, terror and Muslim retreat from territories claimed by the Serbs.

Even refugee camps do not necessarily provide safe haven for women, as they can also be a centre for sexual exploitation, which is rarely documented or punished. In societies where women and girls are disadvantaged in access to education, crippling military expenditures, even without the outbreak of war, reduce even further their chances of attending school, and thus confine them to a life of illiteracy with all its consequences.

Many who can flee a war-ravaged region do so. In Iraq, the refugee crisis is the biggest in the Middle East for sixty years. Over four million Iraqis – a sixth of the population – have been displaced, either internally or into neighbouring countries, especially Syria and Jordan, placing enormous strain on those countries (Goldenberg 2007; Gavlak 2007). Many of the refugees have limited access to health care in their host country, and three quarters are women and children under twelve, who are economically vulnerable.

However, disrupting a nation’s identity is not only evident in displacement of peoples in wartime. A nation’s identity also derives from its history and cultural records. For this reason, cultural heritage is often destroyed during warfare in an attempt to humiliate and to destroy the sense of uniqueness and pride that binds and strengthens nations and groups, or simply in shameful and chilling ignorance of cultural values. In Iraq, such wanton destruction was nothing short of catastrophic, described by Chalmers Johnson as ‘the smash of civilisations’. In his August 2008 essay of the same title, Johnson refers to: 38

Approximately 15,000 items were stolen from the museum’s showcases, including clay tablets containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions going back to the earliest discoveries of writing itself. These crimes in the region known as ‘the cradle of civilisation’ were not just against the people of Iraq. They represent an irreplaceable loss for the whole of humanity.

Economic and environmental costs

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI 2008), global military expenditures for 2007 reached US$1.339 trillion as mentioned in the previous chapter. The economic cost of the war in Iraq has been estimated by Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, and Linda Bilmes from Harvard University, at $3 trillion. This estimate takes into account the cost of providing health care and other services to the veterans over coming decades. By comparison, the World Bank (2004) estimates that the amount of additional foreign aid needed per year to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 is $40–60 billion. The MDGs would provide the eradication of extreme hunger and poverty, universal primary education, a reduction of child mortality, the empowerment of women, environmental sustainability and other essential goals. Quite apart from the need to achieve the MDGs for their own sake, erasing the sources of so much human misery and despair would do far more to reduce the threat of terrorism than any amount of military spending.

Wars do not occur in an ecological vacuum. Whether on land, at sea, or in the air, the footprint of war and its preparation is heavy. The final frontier, space, is also being militarised, including through US missile defence systems, with largely unknown environmental consequences. War-related damage to our natural environment occurs in a large number 39of ways. Destruction of wildlife habitats is the most obvious, but most of war’s environmental costs are hidden.

The movement of tens or hundreds of thousands of troops, especially to distant shores, with all their fighting equipment and means of survival, including medical and other essential infrastructure, is an extremely fuel-intensive undertaking. And that’s even before the fighting starts. Modern fighting machines burn fuel at rates that make most civilian usage pale by comparison. Two examples illustrate the point. The Worldwatch Institute estimated in 1991 that a B-52 bomber flying for one hour uses 13,671 litres of fuel (Renner 1991). The current model Abrams tank in service in Iraq moves less than one mile for every gallon of fuel used – that means more than 235 litres per 100 kilometres (Turse 2008). The US military is the biggest purchaser of oil in the world, using a total of approximately 350,000 barrels (fifty-five million litres) of fuel each day (Karbuz 2008; Hobbs 2008). Michael Klare (2007), Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, Massachusetts, states that the US uses more oil annually for combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and the whole South West Asian region than the whole of the nation of Bangladesh with its 150 million people.1

A study ordered by the Pentagon and released in 2007 stated that the military in Iraq and Afghanistan are using sixteen times more fuel per soldier than in World War II, more than half of all cargo transported is fuel (Bender 2007). In Australia, the Department of Defence (establishments plus operations) uses approximately 65% of total Australian Government energy usage (Australian Greenhouse Office 2007). Fossil fuel supplies are not only depleted by the machinery of war, but they may also be deliberately targeted. In 1991, Saddam Hussein’s forces unleashed an ecological disaster by igniting 600 oil wells across Kuwait as they retreated, and spilling four million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf (Lash 2002). There was massive damage to hundreds of kilometres of coastline, including mudflats, marine life, migratory and local birds, coral reefs, mangroves and sea-grass beds. Soot, gases and chemicals spread as far as the Himalayas. The heavy reliance of the world’s militaries on oil, and their significant contributions to its disappearance, complete a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction.

40Military exercises and wars themselves leave behind an array of toxic chemicals, unexploded ordnance and environmental time-bombs. Heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), acids, alkalis and explosives pollute many thousands of former military sites around the world, with impacts on human and environmental health. Subic Bay in the Philippines is one example, where tons of waste were dumped in the bay when the US Navy had a base there. In 2007, thousands of tons of dumped World War II munitions were fished up by trawlers in the Baltic, which was a dumping ground for Hitler’s armies. They include chemical weapons which were developed by Hitler’s scientists but never used. As the casings rust, phosgene and mustard gas are leaching into the food chain, rendering many former fishing spots unusable (Hall 2007).

In Vietnam, dioxin from the approximately eighty million litres of Agent Orange that were sprayed over the environment between 1962 and 1971 takes a very heavy toll still and probably will for generations to come. The Vietnamese Government estimates that 500,000 children have been born with birth defects caused by Agent Orange, although research to confirm this is lacking (Laurance 2006). The US Government has evaded both the necessary research and compensation for the victims. Large areas of the country remain contaminated. Landmines, cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance present major problems also for communities trying to recover from war, making a mockery of the word ‘ceasefire’. Tens of millions of landmines in dozens of countries render large areas of land uninhabitable, and maim and kill civilians long after hostilities have ceased. After the 2006 Israeli attacks on Lebanon, over a million unexploded cluster bombs remained. Their removal is slow, painstaking and dangerous.

A particularly iniquitous and toxic legacy of war that poses an ever-increasing threat to Pacific Island countries is the slowly corroding World War II shipwrecks, mostly Japanese and US, and numbering over 1000, on the ocean floor (Christie 2002). In Truk Lagoon in the Federated States of Micronesia, 200,000 tonnes of warship were sunk in an area just over sixty kilometres across. In 2001, up to 91,000 litres of fuel from the oil tanker USS Mississinewa, which sunk in 1944, spilled into Ulithi Lagoon in Micronesia, preventing the islanders from fishing for 41their food. The South Pacific Regional Environment Program (SPREP), which is attempting to avert further and even more disastrous oil leaks, faces major obstacles in engaging the flag state nations in the clean-up, in part because the wrecks are regarded as war graves. The economic cost also is formidable. SPREP has thus far catalogued fifty oil tankers among the wrecks. Closer to Australia, the oil tanker USS Neosho was sunk in 1942 during the Battle of the Coral Sea, and lies just 200 nautical miles off the Great Barrier Reef.

Depleted uranium (DU) is a by-product of the uranium enrichment process. (It is ‘depleted’ of the more fissile uranium, U-235, that is used in nuclear reactors.) It has both chemical toxicity and low-level radioactivity, and a half-life (time taken for half the radioactivity to decay) of 4.5 billion years. Where DU is used therefore, low-level radioactivity will remain indefinitely. DU is favoured in weaponry because of its density and armour-piercing ability. Being a waste product, it is also plentiful and cheap. It ignites on penetration (for example, of a tank) and the particles which form can carry tens of kilometres in the wind. DU has been used extensively in some recent wars, in Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia and almost certainly Afghanistan. In Iraq in 1991, approximately 300 tons were used by US forces. UN statistics show a seven-fold increase in cancer in southern Iraq, where DU was used most heavily, since 1991. As with Agent Orange in Vietnam, studies to demonstrate (or disprove) the alleged link have not yet been carried out. The use of DU was condemned by the UN Human Rights Subcommittee in 1996.

War’s environmental impact is not simply of theoretical interest for Australia. Beginning in 2001, Australia has hosted the biennial Talisman Sabre (TS) joint US-Australia military exercises, held primarily at the Shoalwater Bay Military Training Area in Queensland, adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef. TS 2007 involved 26,100 troops, with exercises (including live fire) being conducted on land, at sea and in the air. Tanks and other heavy equipment traversed the landscape. TS 2009 was on a similar scale. Nuclear powered vessels are involved, with the attendant risks of accident and leakage of radioactive waste. (In February 2009, British and French nuclear submarines collided deep in the Atlantic Ocean.) 42

The marine environment is also threatened by the use of sonar. In 2007, the International Whaling Commission warned Australia that sonar used in the exercises could seriously injure or kill whales. In the same year, the US Navy claimed an exemption from the Marine Mammal Protection Act, resulting in the right to conduct whatever tests it chose for the following two years (The Canberra Times 2008). Shoalwater Bay is the very same region where Minister for the Environment Peter Garrett rejected, on environmental grounds, a 2008 proposal for a rail line and coal port. The Minister found the proposal to be “clearly unacceptable” under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. He referred to “the internationally recognised Shoalwater and Corio Bay Ramsar wetlands and the high wilderness value of Shoalwater which is acknowledged in its Commonwealth Heritage listing”, and said that “the impacts would destroy the ecological integrity of the area” (Garrett 2008). The Defence Department justified its environmental credentials in October 2008, when appearing before a Senate inquiry reviewing the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The department claimed that it should be exempt from environmental protection laws, stating that the laws caused delays, and that it wanted a fast-track process (Beeby 2008).

Nuclear costs

Nuclear weapons demand particular attention. They represent mankind’s ultimate means of self-destruction and our ultimate confrontation with the natural environment. The purpose of these weapons is wholesale destruction on a massive scale. No other single human creation has such potential for harm either in the short term or over geological timeframes. The weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were approximately fifteen and twenty-one kilotons respectively (a kiloton being 1,000 tons of TNT equivalent). The two cities were destroyed and, by the end of 1945, over 200,000 people had died as a result of these two weapons. Nuclear weapons built since then have been up to many megatons (million tons of TNT equivalent). The largest US and Soviet nuclear tests were, respectively, a fifteen megaton test (codenamed Bravo) in 1954, and a fifty megaton test in 1961 (Norris & Kristensen 2003, p. 72). 43

In 1996, the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest legal authority, delivered its landmark ruling on the general illegality of these weapons, stating: “[t]he destructive power of nuclear weapons cannot be contained in either space or time. They have the potential to destroy all civilisation and the entire ecosystem of the planet.” Even the existence of these terrifying weapons is a situation beyond humanity’s capacity to manage. Human error and miscalculation guarantee that eventually they will be used. Human fear guarantees that they will be used as political tools. And equity dictates that as long as some nations keep them, other nations will claim the right to do so. Fear of the existence of nuclear weapons helped boost support for the invasion of Iraq, and plays a similar role in creating an aggressive posture towards Iran. In other words, the weapons themselves are incompatible with peace. Despite no nuclear weapon having been detonated in warfare since 1945, the development of these weapons since then has caused permanent and severe human and environmental damage.

Approximately 1,900 nuclear tests have been conducted, of which just over 500 were in the atmosphere, underwater or in space and the remaining 1,400 were underground. Radioisotopes produced by nuclear tests, such as carbon-14, caesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239 (half-lives 5,730 years, 30 years, 28 years and 24,400 years respectively), pose risks to current and future generations by ingestion, inhalation and external radiation. Test sites around the world remain contaminated, including the Maralinga site in South Australia.

In 1991, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IPPNW & IEER) published Radioactive heaven and earth: the health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing in, on and above the earth. This study estimated that the radiation exposure from fallout delivered to the world’s population until the year 2000 would cause 430,000 cancer deaths, and that exposure to long-lived carbon-14 (integrated over infinity) would result in a total of 2.4 million human cancer deaths. The study concluded that “[m]any aspects of nuclear weapons testing have been characterised by a disregard, sometimes wilful, of public health and environment”. In the US, in 1997, the National Cancer Institute revealed that atmospheric tests at the Nevada site resulted in significant 44contamination of the nation’s milk supply with iodine-131, with estimates of 11,000 to 212,000 excess thyroid cancers as a result (Simon, Bouville & Land 2006).

Evidence has accumulated of major health, safety and environmental problems at nuclear weapons complexes around the world. This is most apparent in the two nations that are responsible for approximately 96% of the world’s nuclear weapons, the USA and Russia. In the US, the task of dealing with the toxic and radioactive legacy of 50 years of nuclear weapons production is said to be the most technologically challenging and costly public works project ever conceived. The US Department of Energy has estimated that minimal remediation of the nuclear weapons complex will cost $230 billion over seventy-five years. Even at this level of expenditure, many sites and buildings will remain out-of-bounds for human access for the foreseeable future (Kimball 1997).

At Hanford, the former plutonium production complex in Washington State, approximately 800 billion litres of low-level liquid radioactive waste were discharged directly into the soil over a fifty-year period. Groundwater at Hanford has been heavily contaminated with radioactive and toxic substances. High-level radioactive waste at Hanford is stored in 177 underground tanks, seventy of which have leaked (Makhijani et al. 1995, p. 28).

In Russia, the situation is probably worse than in the US. Vast quantities of radioactive waste, including nuclear reactors, from Soviet and Russian nuclear-powered ships and submarines were dumped into the Pacific and Arctic Oceans. The vast Mayak complex in the eastern Ural Mountains (also called Chelyabinsk-65, or Kyshtym) is the largest of the former Soviet Union’s three plutonium production centres. The highly contaminated site lies on a region of interconnecting lakes, marshes and waterways at the headwaters of the Techa River. Between 1948 and 1956 radioactive waste from the Mayak nuclear complex was poured straight into the river, the source of drinking water for many villages. Cesium, strontium and other liquid radioactive waste that had been dumped was detected in the Arctic Ocean nearly 1,000 miles away. The waste discharge point at Lake Karachay in the Ural Mountains remains so radioactive that a person standing there would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than one hour (Makhijani, Hu & Yih 1995, p. 2). 45

Recent studies have reminded us of the reality of ‘nuclear winter’ scenarios put forward in the 1980s. It is estimated that the use of just 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons in urban areas, for example in a war between India and Pakistan where each side used fifty weapons, could cause severe global climatic consequences (Robock et al. 2006). Fires ignited would release copious amounts of light-absorbing smoke and debris into the upper atmosphere, causing persistent surface cooling even a decade later. In such a scenario, there would be decreases in growing seasons in many of the most important grain producing parts of the world, resulting in severe reductions in food production. It is not the solution we need for global warming. A scenario of this magnitude could lead to a total global death toll of one billion people from starvation alone, major epidemics of infectious disease, and immense potential for further war and civil conflict (Helfand 2007).

Not a single country, anywhere, has in place a satisfactory long-term solution to the problem of nuclear waste. Unless a solution is developed, all future generations of humans will inherit this problem. In the US alone, the burden includes approximately 15,000 tons of high level waste from nuclear weapons production (MacFarlane 2006). All the current storage sites are intended as temporary sites, but there is nowhere else for the waste to go. The proposed Yucca Mountain site has experienced prolonged delays, despite many billions of dollars of research. In February 2009, President Obama essentially eliminated further funding for the site.

Where to from here?

War is not a solution to any of humanity’s pressing problems. Whether our main agenda is addressing climate change, salvaging the natural environment, eradicating poverty, upholding human rights, or securing our cities from terrorist attack, war must be de-legitimised and opposed. It has proven itself counter-productive to all these tasks. Even preparations for war place an unsustainable burden on our human, environmental, technological and economic resources. Simply put, war is a costly distraction for humanity.

Campaigns for climate change action, environmental remediation, social justice and human rights should recognise the negative impact of 46war and its preparation on achieving these goals. The peace movement has natural allies in all these spheres.

According to the Defence Department’s own 2008 policy discussion paper, Australia faces no threat of attack by another country (Department of Defence 2008, p. 28). Yet Australia is spending $62 million per day on our military forces and on weapons systems that consume vast quantities of fossil fuel, threaten our neighbours and perpetuate futile wars. At the same time, many sectors of our society suffer chronic shortages of funds. Resources for housing, health care, education, environmental rescue efforts, and a host of other critical needs are found wanting, while Australian governments proudly announce increasing military expenditures.

In the region and globally, the needs are even more pressing and yet Australia still fails to meet the modest UN target of 0.7% GDP as overseas development aid. Globally, military budgets represent a theft from the poor of their basic means of survival. Australia’s bloated military spending also represents lost opportunities to promote good relations in our region and beyond, and ultimately undermines our security.

For the world’s most destructive weapons, nuclear weapons, abolition is long overdue. ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, was initiated in Australia and is gathering speed globally. Its goal is a Nuclear Weapons Convention to ban these instruments of terror. The website www.icanw.org invites the participation of all Australians.

The dignity of humankind is trampled mercilessly by wars that feed on lies and are conducted with brutality. While brutality towards our fellow humans has always been in the nature of warfare, our technological prowess now extends that brutality to our natural environment. As we allow military juggernauts to destroy and pollute the land, sea and air that give us life, we destroy our only means of surviving as a species. It is not simply a matter of human dignity, although that is also essential. Opposing the war machine is now a matter of human survival. 47