He also said that his government would not allow any American shipments to Yemen, and called on other Arab countries to boycott not only Israeli but also American trade in the region.

The Gaza conflict has several theaters. There is the Israeli war of genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza, which has killed over 18,000 people and wounded tens of thousands, the vast majority of them innocent noncombatants, and destroyed or damaged about half the region’s housing stock along with other essential infrastructure and buildings. It has also left the civilian population without sufficient food or water and exposed to deadly infectious diseases.

Then there is the tense Israeli-Lebanese border, where Israel has bombed from fighter jets and Hezbollah has fired rockets, necessitating the evacuation of some of northern Israel.

There have been Shiite militia attacks on US personnel in Syria and Iraq, with more threatened.

And then there is the really important Red Sea front, where the Houthi government has targeted commercial vessels it says are ferrying goods and supplies to Israel, though it seems also to be hitting just any old merchant ship. The Houthis are Zaydi Shiites and form part of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance to Israeli political dominance in the Levant and the occupation of the Palestinians. The Houthis survived an eight-year war with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, wealthy oil states allied with the United States that either recognize Israel (in the case of the UAE) or are considering it (the Saudis).

Yemen is a rugged country of impenetrable highlands and wildernesses. I’ve been there several times. The winding mountain roads outside Sanaa made me carsick. The Yemenis gave me khat for the nausea.

The country sits athwart the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the 20-mile-wide Bab al-Mandeb or Mandeb Straits through which traffic between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean passes. The UAE and its allies control the southern coast along the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, but the Houthis control some of the Red Sea coast and use their window on the sea to threaten shipping for their geopolitical purposes with drones, including Iran-made KAS-04 unmanned aerial vehicles. The Houthis have hit several container ships and a Norwegian oil tanker.

The Houthi government announced Saturday that it had launched a large number of drones toward the region of Eilat, Israel’s port city on the Gulf of Aqaba just off the Red Sea.

At the same time, the United States Central Command announced that its destroyers in the Red Sea had shot down 14 one-way attack drones.

The British Navy also weighed in, saying that a Sea Viper missile from the HMS Diamond had taken out a Houthi drone that threatened merchant shipping.

CBS News: “Houthis target ships in Red Sea, U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria face daily attacks”

As a result of the ongoing Houthi drone attacks on freighters, some of the world’s biggest and most important shipping corporations have announced that they will avoid the Red Sea and the Suez Canal for now. They are not only fleeing danger but also the dramatically spiking cost of insuring any vessels that ply those waters. The companies include Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), whose MSC PALATIUM III freighter was taken out of commission by a Houthi drone attack on Friday. They also include CMA CGM of France, Maersk of Denmark, and Hapag-Lloyd of Germany, according to the BBC.

Israeli shipping costs have shot up over 250%, and some insurers are refusing to insure their vessels.

The US plan to form a naval task force to escort container ships and protect them from the drones won’t work, because it won’t push down insurance costs. They could try to strike the Houthis, but 8 years of Saudi and UAE bombing of them did no good, so I wouldn’t hold my breath that lashing out would be effective. Moreover, the Biden administration doesn’t want the Gaza conflict to spread throughout the region and further destabilize it.

Some 10 percent of world trade goes through the Suez Canal on 17,000 ships a year. Nowadays, about 12% of the petroleum shipped by tanker goes through the Suez Canal, along with Liquefied Natural Gas shipments. These ships will now have to go around the Cape of Good Hope and skirt the west coast of Africa, adding over 10,000 nautical miles (over 12,000 landlubber miles) and 8 to 10 days to the journey, with all the consequent extra expenses of fuel and provisions. The shipping companies will be hurt by this change, as well as the countries along the Red Sea such as Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel. The detour will contribute to supply chain shortages and cause an increase in the price of imported goods for many countries in Europe.

The New York Times headline said it all: “Middle East War Adds to Surge in International Arms Sales.” The conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and beyond may be causing immense and unconscionable human suffering, but they are also boosting the bottom lines of the world’s arms manufacturers. There was a time when such weapons sales at least sparked talk of “the merchants of death” or of “war profiteers.” Now, however, is distinctly not that time, given the treatment of the industry by the mainstream media and the Washington establishment, as well as the nature of current conflicts. Mind you, the American arms industry already dominates the international market in a staggering fashion, controlling 45% of all such sales globally, a gap only likely to grow more extreme in the rush to further arm allies in Europe and the Middle East in the context of the ongoing wars in those regions.

In his nationally televised address about the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars, President Biden described the American arms industry in remarkably glowing terms, noting that, “just as in World War II, today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.” From a political and messaging perspective, the president cleverly focused on the workers involved in producing such weaponry rather than the giant corporations that profit from arming Israel, Ukraine, and other nations at war. But profit they do and, even more strikingly, much of the revenues that flow to those firms is pocketed as staggering executive salaries and stock buybacks that only boost shareholder earnings further.

President Biden also used that speech as an opportunity to tout the benefits of military aid and weapons sales to the U.S. economy:

“We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores, our own stockpiles, with new equipment. Equipment that defends America and is made in America. Patriot missiles for air defense batteries, made in Arizona. Artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas. And so much more.”

In short, the military-industrial complex is riding high, with revenues pouring in and accolades emanating from the top political levels in Washington. But is it, in fact, an arsenal of democracy? Or is it an amoral enterprise, willing to sell to any nation, whether a democracy, an autocracy, or anything in between?

Arming Current Conflicts

The U.S. should certainly provide Ukraine with what it needs to defend itself from Russia’s invasion. Sending arms alone, however, without an accompanying diplomatic strategy is a recipe for an endless, grinding war (and endless profits for those arms makers) that could always escalate into a far more direct and devastating conflict between the U.S., NATO, and Russia. Nevertheless, given the current urgent need to keep supplying Ukraine, the sources of the relevant weapons systems are bound to be corporate giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. No surprise there, but keep in mind that they’re not doing any of this out of charity.

Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes acknowledged as much, however modestly, in an interview with the Harvard Business Review early in the Ukraine War:

“[W]e don’t apologize for making these systems, making these weapons… the fact is eventually we will see some benefit in the business over time. Everything that’s being shipped into Ukraine today, of course, is coming out of stockpiles, either at DoD [the Department of Defense] or from our NATO allies, and that’s all great news. Eventually we’ll have to replenish it and we will see a benefit to the business over the next coming years.”

Hayes made a similar point recently in response to a question from a researcher at Morgan Stanley on a call with Wall Street analysts. The researcher noted that President Biden’s proposed multi-billion-dollar package of military aid for Israel and Ukraine “seems to fit quite nicely with Raytheon’s defense portfolio.” Hayes responded that “across the entire Raytheon portfolio you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking on top of what we think will be an increase in the DoD topline as we continue to replenish these stocks.” Supplying Ukraine alone, he suggested, would yield billions in revenues over the coming few years with profit margins of 10% to 12%.

Beyond such direct profits, there’s a larger issue here: the way this country’s arms lobby is using the war to argue for a variety of favorable actions that go well beyond anything needed to support Ukraine. Those include less restrictive, multi-year contracts; reductions in protections against price gouging; faster approval of foreign sales; and the construction of new weapons plants. And keep in mind that all of this is happening as a soaring Pentagon budget threatens to hit an astonishing $1 trillion within the next few years.

As for arming Israel, including $14 billion in emergency military aid recently proposed by President Biden, the horrific attacks perpetrated by Hamas simply don’t justify the all-out war President Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has launched against more than two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, with so many thousands of lives already lost and untold additional casualties to come. That devastating approach to Gaza in no way fits the category of defending democracy, which means that weapons companies profiting from it will be complicit in the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.

Repression Enabled, Democracy Denied

Over the years, far from being a reliable arsenal of democracy, American arms manufacturers have often helped undermine democracy globally, while enabling ever greater repression and conflict — a fact largely ignored in recent mainstream coverage of the industry. For example, in a 2022 report for the Quincy Institute, I noted that, of the 46 then-active conflicts globally, 34 involved one or more parties armed by the United States. In some cases, American arms supplies were modest, but in many other conflicts such weaponry was central to the military capabilities of one or more of the warring parties.

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Nor do such weapons sales promote democracy over autocracy, a watchword of the Biden administration’s approach to foreign policy. In 2021, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, the U.S. armed 31 nations that Freedom House, a non-profit that tracks global trends in democracy, political freedom, and human rights, designated as “not free.”

The most egregious recent example in which the American arms industry is distinctly culpable when it comes to staggering numbers of civilian deaths would be the Saudi Arabian/United Arab Emirates (UAE)-led coalition’s intervention in Yemen, which began in March 2015 and has yet to truly end. Although the active military part of the conflict is now in relative abeyance, a partial blockade of that country continues to cause needless suffering for millions of Yemenis.  Between bombing, fighting on the ground, and the impact of that blockade, there have been nearly 400,000 casualties. Saudi air strikes, using American-produced planes and weaponry, caused the bulk of civilian deaths from direct military action.

Congress did make unprecedented efforts to block specific arms sales to Saudi Arabia and rein in the American role in the conflict via a War Powers Resolution, only to see legislation vetoed by President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, bombs provided by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin were routinely used to target civilians, destroying residential neighborhoods, factories, hospitals, a wedding, and even a school bus.

When questioned about whether they feel any responsibility for how their weapons have been used, arms companies generally pose as passive bystanders, arguing that all they’re doing is following policies made in Washington. At the height of the Yemen war, Amnesty International asked firms that were supplying military equipment and services to the Saudi/UAE coalition whether they were ensuring that their weaponry wouldn’t be used for egregious human rights abuses. Lockheed Martin typically offered a robotic response, asserting that “defense exports are regulated by the U.S. government and approved by both the Executive Branch and Congress to ensure that they support U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.” Raytheon simply stated that its sales “of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia have been and remain in compliance with U.S. law.”

How the Arms Industry Shapes Policy

Of course, weapons firms are not merely subject to U.S. laws, but actively seek to shape them, including exerting considerable effort to block legislative efforts to limit arms sales. Raytheon typically put major behind-the-scenes effort into keeping a significant sale of precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia on track. In May 2018, then-CEO Thomas Kennedy even personally visited the office of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to (unsuccessfully) press him to drop a hold on that deal. That firm also cultivated close ties with the Trump administration, including presidential trade adviser Peter Navarro, to ensure its support for continuing sales to the Saudi regime even after the murder of prominent Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.

The list of major human rights abusers that receive U.S.-supplied weaponry is long and includes (but isn’t faintly limited to) Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Turkey, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Such sales can have devastating human consequences. They also support regimes that all too often destabilize their regions and risk embroiling the United States directly in conflicts.

U.S.-supplied arms also far too regularly fall into the hands of Washington’s adversaries. As an example consider the way the UAE transferred small arms and armored vehicles produced by American weapons makers to extremist militias in Yemen, with no apparent consequences, even though such acts clearly violated American arms export laws. Sometimes, recipients of such weaponry even end up fighting each other, as when Turkey used U.S.-supplied F-16s in 2019 to bomb U.S.-backed Syrian forces involved in the fight against Islamic State terrorists.

Such examples underscore the need to scrutinize U.S. arms exports far more carefully. Instead, the arms industry has promoted an increasingly “streamlined” process of approval of such weapons sales, campaigning for numerous measures that would make it even easier to arm foreign regimes regardless of their human-rights records or support for the interests Washington theoretically promotes. These have included an “Export Control Reform Initiative” heavily promoted by the industry during the Obama and Trump administrations that ended up ensuring a further relaxation of scrutiny over firearms exports. It has, in fact, eased the way for sales that, in the future, could put U.S.-produced weaponry in the hands of tyrants, terrorists, and criminal organizations.

Now, the industry is promoting efforts to get weapons out the door ever more quickly through “reforms” to the Foreign Military Sales program in which the Pentagon essentially serves as an arms broker between those weapons corporations and foreign governments.

Reining in the MIC

The impetus to move ever more quickly on arms exports and so further supersize this country’s already staggering weapons manufacturing base will only lead to yet more price gouging by arms corporations. It should be a government imperative to guard against such a future, rather than fuel it. Alleged security concerns, whether in Ukraine, Israel, or elsewhere, shouldn’t stand in the way of vigorous congressional oversight. Even at the height of World War II, a time of daunting challenges to American security, then-Senator Harry Truman established a committee to root out war profiteering.

Yes, your tax dollars are being squandered in the rush to build and sell ever more weaponry abroad. Worse yet, for every arms transfer that serves a legitimate defensive purpose, there is another — not to say others — that fuels conflict and repression, while only increasing the risk that, as the giant weapons corporations and their executives make fortunes, this country will become embroiled in more costly foreign conflicts.

One possible way to at least slow that rush to sell would be to “flip the script” on how Congress reviews weapons exports. Current law requires a veto-proof majority of both houses of Congress to block a questionable sale. That standard — perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn — has never (yes, never!) been met, thanks to the millions of dollars in annual election financial support that the weapons companies offer our congressional representatives. Flipping the script would mean requiring affirmative congressional approval of any major sales to key nations, greatly increasing the chances of stopping dangerous deals before they reach completion.

Praising the U.S. arms industry as the “arsenal of democracy” obscures the numerous ways it undermines our security and wastes our tax dollars. Rather than romanticizing the military-industrial complex, isn’t it time to place it under greater democratic control? After all, so many lives depend on it.

Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung

Via Tomdispatch.com

In a surprise move, Turkey has ended its veto on Sweden joining Nato, thereby removing all the barriers to its membership of the military alliance.

Hungary quickly followed suit and, as a result of the two countries’ support, a consensus was able to be reached at the 2023 Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan agreeing to support Sweden’s bid to join will be touted as one of the key achievements of the summit.

Sweden submitted its formal application for membership in May 2022 alongside Finland, which was admitted into the alliance in April 2023.

Sweden, though not a formal member, has had a very close relationship with Nato for almost 30 years, since joining the alliance’s Partnership for Peace programme in 1994. It has contributed to Nato missions. And as a member of the European Union and contributor to the bloc’s common security and defence policy, it has also worked closely with the vast majority of European Nato allies.

In pursuing Nato membership, both Sweden and Finland have dramatically shifted their traditional policy of military non-alignment. A critical driver of this move was, clearly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It is also more evidence that Russian president Vladimir Putin has failed to achieve two of his own strategic objectives: weakening solidarity in the alliance and preventing further Nato enlargement towards Russia’s borders.

Finland and Sweden’s accession is of significant operational importance to how Nato defends allied territory against Russian aggression. Integrating these two nations on its north flank (the Atlantic and European Arctic) will help to solidify plans for defending its Ukraine-adjacent centre (from the Baltic Sea to the Alps). This will ensure that Russia has to contend with powerful and interoperable military forces across its entire western border.

Why Turkey lifted its veto

For a few years now, Turkey’s relationship with Nato has been nuanced and strained. Turkey’s objections to Sweden’s accession were ostensibly connected to its concerns over Sweden’s policy towards the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

Turkey has accused Sweden of hosting Kurdish militants. Nato has acknowledged this as a legitimate security concern and Sweden has made concessions as part of its journey towards Nato.

Image by DANIEL DIAZ from Pixabay

The main material driver of the agreement, however, may always have been a carrot being dangled by the US. American president Joe Biden now appears to be moving forward with plans to transfer F-16 fighter jets to Turkey – a deal that appears to have been unlocked by Erdoğan’s changed stance on Sweden. But it is often the case that a host of surrounding deals and suggestions of deals can help facilitate movement at Nato. Everyone, including Turkey, now seems able to sell the developments as a win to their constituents back home.

The ‘Nordic round’

Sweden’s accession means all Nordic nations are now part of Nato. As well as being significant in operational and military terms, this enlargement has major political, strategic and defence planning implications. Although Finland and Sweden have been “virtual allies” for years, their formal accession means some changes in practice.

Strategically, the two are now free to work seamlessly with the rest of the Nato allies to plan for collective defence. Integrating strategic plans is extremely valuable, particularly considering Finland’s massive border with Russia and Sweden’s possession of critical terrain like the Baltic Sea island of Gotland. This will increase strategic interoperability and coordination.

Nato allies also open their defence planning books to one another in unprecedented ways. Finland and Sweden will now undergo bilateral (with Nato’s international secretariat) and multilateral (with all allies) examinations as part of the Nato defence planning process. They will also contribute to the strategic decisions that undergird that process.

Their defence investments will also be scrutinised (and they will scrutinise the spending of other allies). Initial analysis suggests that while Finland and Sweden have lagged behind their Nordic neighbours’ increases in defence investment since 2014. Finland’s investment in defence leapt significantly leading up to and following its accession to Nato. While we may not know for months if the same is true of Sweden, we may expect similar increases on its part. Alliance norms and peer pressure are powerful.

The expansion of Nato to include Sweden is a major step for all these reasons. But while anyone watching the Vilnius summit will naturally now be asking whether the shift changes the situation for Ukraine’s membership aspirations, an answer is unlikely to be on the near horizon. Any final decision on Ukraine being offered a membership action plan for the time being is a bridge too far, especially in the current context of an ongoing war with an outcome that, as yet, is unpredictable.

Simon J Smith, Associate Professor of Security and International Relations, Staffordshire University and Jordan Becker, Director, SOSH Research Lab Assistant Professor of International Affairs, United States Military Academy West Point

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In early April 2003, as American forces sought to wrap up their conquest of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and take strongholds to its north, the Marine Corps formed “Task Force Tripoli.” It was commanded by General John F. Kelly (who would later serve as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff). His force was charged with capturing the city of Tikrit, the birthplace of dictator Saddam Hussein. The obvious eastern approach to it was blocked because a bridge over the Tigris River had been damaged. Since the Marines assembled the Task Force in northeastern Baghdad, its personnel needed to cross the treacherous, hard-flowing Tigris twice to advance on their target. Near Tikrit, while traversing the Swash Bridge, they came under fire from military remnants of Saddam’s regime.

Still, Tikrit fell on April 15th and, historically speaking, that double-crossing of the Tigris was a small triumph for American forces. After all, that wide, deep, swift-flowing waterway had traditionally posed logistical problems for any military force. It had, in fact, done so throughout recorded history, proving a daunting barrier for the militaries of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon and the Achaemenid Cyrus the Great, for Alexander the Great and Roman Emperor Justinian, for the Mongols and the Safavid Iranians, for imperial British forces and finally General John H. Kelly. However, just as Kelly’s stature was diminished by his later collaboration with America’s only openly autocratic president, so, too, in this century the Tigris has been diminished in every sense and all too abruptly. No longer what the Kurds once called the Ava Mezin, “the Great Water,” it is now a shadow of its former self.

Fording the Tigris

Thanks at least in part to human-caused climate change, the Tigris and its companion river, the Euphrates, on which Iraqis still so desperately depend, have seen alarmingly low water flow in recent years. As Iraqi posts on social media now regularly observe in horror, at certain places, if you stand on the banks of those once mighty bodies of water, you can see through to their riverbeds. You can even, Iraqis report, ford them on foot in some spots, a previously unheard-of phenomenon.

Those two rivers no longer pose the military obstacle they used to. They were once synonymous with Iraq. The very word Mesopotamia, the premodern way of referring to what we now call Iraq, means “between rivers” in Greek, a reference, of course, to the Tigris and the Euphrates. Climate change and the damming of those waters in neighboring upriver countries are expected to cause the flow of the Euphrates to decline by 30% and of the Tigris by a whopping 60% by 2099, which would be a death sentence for many Iraqis.

Twenty years ago, with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, two oil men and climate-change denialists, in the White House and new petroleum finds dwindling, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for them to use the 9/11 horror as an excuse to commit “regime change” in Baghdad (which had no role in taking down the World Trade Center in New York and part of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.). They could thereby, they thought, create a friendly puppet regime and lift the U.S. and U.N. sanctions then in place on the export of Iraqi petroleum, imposed as a punishment for dictator Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

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There was a deep irony that haunted the decision to invade Iraq to (so to speak) liberate its oil exports. After all, burning gasoline in cars causes the earth to heat up, so the very black gold that both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush coveted turned out to be a Pandora’s box of the worst sort. Remember, we now know that, in Washington’s “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the U.S. military emitted at least 400 million metric tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And mind you, that fit into a great tradition. Since the eighteenth century, the U.S. has put 400 billion — yes, billion! — metric tons of CO2 into that same atmosphere, or twice as much as any other country, which means it has a double responsibility to climate victims like those in Iraq.

Climate Breakdown, Iraqi-Style

The United Nations has now declared oil-rich Iraq, the land on which the Bush administration bet the future of our own country, to be the fifth most vulnerable to climate breakdown among its 193 member states. Its future, the U.N. warns, will be one of “soaring temperatures, insufficient and diminishing rainfall, intensified droughts and water scarcity, frequent sand and dust storms, and flooding.” Sawa Lake, the “pearl of the south” in Muthanna governorate, has dried up, a victim of both the industrial overuse of aquifers and a climate-driven drought that has reduced precipitation by 30%.

Meanwhile, temperatures in that already hot land are now rising rapidly. As Adel Al-Attar, an Iraqi adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on water and habitat, describes it, “I’ve lived in Basra all my life. As a boy, the summer temperature never went much beyond 40C (104° F) in summer. Today, it can surpass 50C (122° F).” The climate statistics bear him out. As early as July 22, 2017, the temperature in Basra reached 54 °C (129.2° F), among the highest ever recorded in the eastern hemisphere. The rate of Iraqi temperature rise is, in fact, two to seven times higher than the average rate of global temperature rise and that means greater dryness of soil, increased evaporation from rivers and reservoirs, decreasing rainfall, and a distinct loss of biodiversity, not to mention rising human health threats like heat stroke.

The American war did direct harm to Iraq’s farmers, who make up 18% of the country’s labor force. And when it was over, they had to deal with staggering numbers of explosives left in the countryside, including landmines, unexploded ordnance, and improvised explosive devices, many of which have since been dangerously covered by desert sands as a climate-driven drought worsens. An article in the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences observes that when it comes to military disruptions of waterways, “Displacement, explosions, and movement of heavy equipment increase dust that then settles on rivers and accumulates in reservoirs.” Worse yet, between 2014 and 2018 when the guerrillas of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, whom the American war helped bring into existence, took over parts of northern and western Iraq, they blew up dams and practiced scorched-earth tactics that did $600 million worth of damage to the country’s hydraulic infrastructure. Had the U.S. never invaded, there would have been no ISIL.

Dust and More Dust

As Al-Attar of the ICRC observed, “When there’s not enough rain or vegetation, the upper layers of earth become less compact, meaning the chance of dust or sandstorms increases. These weather events contribute to desertification. Fertile soil is turning into desert.” And that is part of Iraq’s post-invasion fate, which means ever more frequent dust- and sandstorms. In mid-June, the Iraqi government warned that particularly violent dust and thunderstorms in al-Anbar, Najaf, and Karbala provinces were uprooting ever more trees and flattening ever more farms. In late May in Kirkuk, a dust storm sent hundreds of Iraqis to the hospital. A year ago, the dust storms came so thick and fast, week after week, that visibility was often obscured in major cities and thousands were hospitalized with breathing problems. In the late twentieth century, there already were, on average, 243 days annually with high particulate matter in the air. In the past 20 years, that number has reached 272. Climate scientists predict that it will hit 300 by 2050.

A little over half of Iraq’s farmed land relies on rain-fed agriculture, mostly in the north of the country. Iraqi journalist Sanar Hasan describes the impact of increasing drought and water scarcity in the northern province of Ninewah, where yields have shrunk considerably. Ninewah produced 5 million metric tons of wheat in 2020 but only 3.37 million in 2021 before plummeting by more than 50% to 1.34 million in 2022. Such declining yields pose a special problem in a world where wheat has only grown more expensive, thanks in part to the Russian war on Ukraine. Thousands of Iraqi farming families are being forced off their lands by water shortages. For example, Hasan quotes Yashue Yohanna, a Christian who worked all his life in agriculture but now can’t make ends meet, as saying, “When I leave the farm, what do you expect me to do next? I’m an old man. How will I afford the cost of living?”

Worse yet, southern Iraq’s marshlands are turning into classic dust bowls. The Environment Director of Maysan Governorate in southern Iraq recently announced that its al-Awda Marsh was 100% dried up.

The marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have been storied for thousands of years. The world’s oldest epic, the Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh, is set there as it describes a hero journeying to an enchanted garden of the gods in search of immortality. (Echoes of that epic can be found in the biblical story of the garden of Eden.)

Our addiction to fossil fuels, however, has contributed significantly to the blighting of that very source of life and legend. It was there that marsh dwellers once hauled in a majority of the fish eaten by Iraqis, but the remaining wetlands are now experiencing increasingly high rates of evaporation. The Shatt al-Arab, created where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together into the Persian Gulf, has seen its water pressure drop, allowing an influx of salt water that has already destroyed 60,000 acres of farmland and some 30,000 trees.

Many of Iraq’s date palms have also died owing to war, neglect, soil salinization, and climate change. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iraq provided three-quarters of the world’s dates. Now, its date industry is tiny and on life support, while Marsh Arabs and southern farming families have been forced from their lands into cities where they have few of the skills needed to make a living. Journalist Ahmed Saeed and his colleagues at Reuters quote Hasan Moussa, a former fisherman who now drives a taxi, as saying, “The drought ended our future. We have no hope, other than for a [government] job, which would be enough. Other work doesn’t fulfill our needs.”

Water as Women’s Work

Although it was mostly men who planned out Iraq’s ruinous wars of the past half-century and set their sights on burning as much petroleum, coal, and natural gas as possible for profit and power, Iraq’s women have borne the brunt of the climate crisis. Few of them are in the formal job market, though many do work on farms. Because they are at home, they have often been given responsibility for providing water. Because of the present drought conditions, many women already spend at least three hours a day trying to get water from reservoirs and bring it home. Water foraging is becoming so difficult and time-consuming that some girls are dropping out of secondary school to focus on it.

At home, women are dependent on tap water, which is often contaminated. Men who work outside the home often gain access to water purified for Iraqi industry and its cities. As farms fail owing to drought, men are emigrating to those very cities for work, often leaving the women of the household in rural villages scrambling to raise enough food in arid circumstances to feed themselves and their children.

Last fall, the International Organization for Migration at the United Nations estimated that 62,000 Iraqis living in the center and the south of the country had been displaced from their homes by drought over the previous four years and anticipated that many more would follow. Just as people from Oklahoma fled to California in droves during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, so now Iraqis are facing the prospect of dealing with their own dustbowl. It is, however, unlikely to be a mere episode like the American one. Instead, it looms as the long-term fate of their country.

If, instead of invading Iraq, the American government had swung into action in the spring of 2003 to cut carbon dioxide output, as one of our foremost climate scientists, Michael Mann, was suggesting at the time, the emission of hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 might have been avoided. Humanity would have had an extra two decades to make the transition to a zero-carbon world. In the end, after all, the stakes are as high for Americans as they are for Iraqis.

If humanity doesn’t reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, we are likely to outrun our “carbon budget,” the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2, and the climate will undoubtedly go chaotic. What has already happened in Iraq, not to speak of the dire climate impacts that have recently left Canada constantly aflame, U.S. cities smoking, and Texans broiling in a record fashion would then seem like child’s play.

At that point, in short, we would have invaded ourselves.

Copyright 2023 Juan Cole

Via Tomdispatch.com

Most of us understand the need to cut carbon emissions. But a huge share of our tax dollars are funding the most carbon-intensive institution on the planet.

Alliyah Lusuegro

Alliyah Lusuegro is the Outreach Coordinator for the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Via Otherwords.org

(The Conversation) – Sudan’s Central Reserve Police (CRP) recently announced it would be deploying officers to the streets of Khartoum to “secure public and private property”. That may sound puzzling in the context of the current violence: what are the police doing in the middle of this?

The answer is simple. The CRP are not “police” in any civilian sense – they are one of several paramilitary groups in Sudan, and they are intervening on the side of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF).

This helps explain recent events in Sudan, where history has entangled military force and state power, and has produced multiple armed groups which are now vying for control of the state.

That history began with the Turco-Egyptian conquest by the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, in 1820. By consolidating territory over several decades, this created what became Sudan: a colony built by armed force.

At the end of the 19th century, it came under effective British control. While colonial states always tended to be violent, Sudan was particularly fierce in imposing central control on a large and diverse population. The state was always uniformed and armed.

And when Sudan – then the largest territory in Africa – became independent in 1956, the new country inherited that militarised and centralised nature. Soldiers have always seen themselves as the proper guarantors of its sovereignty. They played a central role in the attempts to impose central authority which led to protracted civil war, beginning in the south in the 1960s and spreading to the west and east from the 1980s.

Mostly ruled by soldiers

Sudan has been mostly ruled by soldiers since 1956: in 1958, 1969 and 1989, military coups overthrew shortlived civilian governments. When popular unrest threatened military rulers – as happened in 1964, 1985 and 2019 – their regimes were toppled only because some of the soldiers changed sides and turned on the incumbents. Every time, soldiers continued to wield much power. Even in revolution, Sudan has never tamed its army.

That process looks cyclical: soldiers kept defying the authority of civilian politicians. But there was a long-term trend of change. Soldiers who seized power by force learned from experience. The greatest threat to them lay among their own rank and file, who might turn against them. So, particularly under the long rule of Omar el-Bashir, who seized power in 1989, they fostered the emergence of alternative armed forces.

Alongside the SAF, new paramilitaries were created like the CRP. The long-running wars with rebels encouraged that process – Sudan’s rulers recruited militia who would fight insurgents on the cheap, but who could also support them against insubordinate soldiers. Those militias came from the peripheries of Sudan – in some ways, they had much in common with the rebel armed groups against whom they fought, some of whom occasionally switched sides.

Even after the secession of South Sudan in 2011, Sudan had multiple armed forces. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – the SAF’s main antagonist in the current violence – grew out of a local militia in Darfur to become the largest, most dangerous product of that process.

All these armed groups shared the belief that control of the state was rightfully theirs, and the ultimate prize. It was not simply that the state paid, armed and fed soldiers – though that was always important, and especially so when a brief boom from oil revenues swelled state resources in the first decade of the 21st century.

Money talks – so do guns

Control of the state allowed soldiers to establish themselves as entrepreneurs – in anything from manufacturing and banking to gold mining – and to reward their friends and supporters. Much of Sudan’s economy came under the control of soldiers not as a single, coherent group, but as actual or potential rivals, each anxiously watching the others.

In the end, this increasingly messy and splintered array of armed groups could not save Bashir. When popular anger against his rule seemed unstoppable in 2019, both the SAF and RSF turned against him and Bashir was pushed out of office. The effective leaders of the SAF and RSF, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (aka Hemedti) established themselves as the faces of military power.

But by that time, there were too many armed groups for any stable transition to be agreed. The SAF and RSF circled around each other for months, each hoping the move to civilian rule could be manipulated to preserve their own position while disadvantaging the other. The two briefly cooperated in removing the civilian parts of the transitional government in the coup of October 2021, but their rivalry only grew more intense.

Across Sudan, armed militias and rebel groups (some large, some not) staked their claims to inclusion in a new government, and threatened violence if they were denied. The SAF and RSF both treated these local pretenders as potential allies in their rivalry. In the end, it was (ironically) pressure to agree the terms of a new transition to civilian rule that finally precipitated open conflict between the SAF and RSF. Both knew that civilian rule was a threat, and each tried to deflect its impact on to the other.

That history – which has left soldiers at the centre of power while dividing them into opposing factions – explains why the current violence is so messy and intractable. There are multiple actors beyond the SAF and RSF, from paramilitary police in Khartoum to rival militias in Darfur. For the leaders of these armed factions, control of the state is an existential matter: they need it to keep their followers loyal.

Yet the resources of the state are not sufficient to support them all – and any civilian government would want to turn those resources to other uses. So, even if Sudan’s untamed soldiers could be reconciled, it is hard to see how they would be brought under civilian control.

Justin Willis, Professor of History, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The power struggle in Sudan exacerbates the dire humanitarian situation

Written byEgyptian Chronicles

The Sudanese capital Khortoum is witnessing intense fighting. Screenshot from a video by AlHadath. Fair use.

This story, was originally by Egyptian Chronicles, a personal blog since 2004. An edited version is republished here with permission.

( Globalvoices.org) – The ongoing conflict between Sudan’s Armed Forces, led by Abdel Fattah Burhan -an army general who is the de facto ruler of Sudan- and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a group of militias under the command of former warlord General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as “Hemedti,” has entered its second week.

During the civil war in Sudan’s western region that began in 2003, Burhan and Hemedi worked together to counter insurgency against Darfuri rebels. However, Burhan was a career soldier, while Hamedti was an ambitious militia leader whose power grew significantly with the support of the Sudan’s then-military ruler, Omar al-Bashir. Al-Bashir set these two men against each other, with the hope that no single armed group would have enough power to depose him. Little did he know that they would end up doing precisely that.

Now, the ambitions of these two military men ambitions have clashed, bringing chaos to Sudan and its people. The ongoing conflict highlights the power struggle between these two infamous generals, and the impact it has on Sudanese civilians caught in the middle. 

Refugees Flee, Foreign Nationals Evacuated as Sudan Violence Escalates

Evacuation of foreign nationals from Sudan. The screenshot was captured from a video by the BBC on YouTube. 25 April 2023. Fair use.

Several countries have begun evacuating their citizens from Sudan with the help of neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It appears that saving foreign nationals is a top priority, while the citizens of Sudan are not the priority for anyone, especially not for Abdel Fattah Burhan, and Mohamed Hamdan Dalago. People in Sudan fear that, as expatriates depart Sudan, the situation could deteriorate, resulting in more bloodshed.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese are fleeing to neighboring countries to escape the violence and chaos that has claimed more than 459 lives so far and left more than 4,000 wounded in the past week and a half, according to UN reports. However, the actual death toll is expected to be much higher.

Satellite imagery captures destruction in Sudan as clashes continue between army and RSF. Screenshot taken from a video by The Independent on YouTube. 17 April 2023. Fair use.

Refugees are heading to both Port Sudan or Wadi Halfa to cross the border into Egypt, as well as west towards Chad.

Satellite imagery shows the aftermath of the intense fighting and the long queues of cars, trucks, and buses on highways leading to the border crossings.

The three-day-ceasefire between the RSF and the Sudanese army, imposed by the US from midnight on April 25, is fragile, with violations from both sides.

 

The Egyptian government’s response to the Sudan crisis

Thousands of Sudanese refugees are heading to neighboring countries. Screenshot from a video by AlJazeera English on youtube. 26 April 2023. Fair use.

Egypt has eased visa requirements so that women, children, and the elderly over 50 years old can enter Egypt without a visa. As of the publishing of this article, 10,000 people have crossed into Egypt through the Arqeen border crossing. Thousands more are waiting at the Arqeen border crossing, where the Egyptian Red Crescent has established a relief centre.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is scaling up efforts to assist people seeking safety in countries neighboring Sudan, where the fighting looks set to trigger further displacement both within and outside the country. However, more relief efforts are urgently needed, especially during an economic crisis. 

It’s worth noting that, in 2004, Egypt and Sudan signed the Four Freedoms Agreement that permits citizens of both countries to move, live, work, and own property without restrictions. However, despite being signed and ratified, the agreement has not been fully implemented, particularly regarding freedom of movement, due to national security concerns from both nations.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry called for Egyptian citizens residing outside Khartoum to head to either the city of Wadi Halfa in Northern Sudan or Port Sudan in Eastern Sudan to be evacuated on Sunday, April 23. Over the past 48 hours, over 1,000 Egyptians have returned aboard military planes. The ministry also urged Egyptian citizens in Khartoum to remain safe until they receive instructions from the Egyptian Embassy, given the volatile situation.

Refugees at Arqeen Crossing. Screenshot from a video by ON. 27 April 2023. Fair use.

Egyptian and Sudanese armed forces are working together to initiate these evacuation operations. Sudan has provided Egypt with information on safe corridors leading to designated evacuation sites. News reports indicate that the Sudanese army is escorting convoys of Egyptians to the border crossings between the two countries for their evacuation.

So far, two Egyptian citizens in Khartoum have been reported dead, including Mohamed El-Gharawy, an administrative assistant working at the Egyptian Embassy in Khartoum, who was killed while in his car on his way to the embassy on Monday. The Sudanese Army has accused the RSF of being responsible for the attack, while the RSF has claimed it will cooperate with the Egyptian authorities to identify the culprit.

Intense street fighting creates a dangerous environment for civilians, hindering their ability to move safely. Screenshot taken from a video by AlArabiya on YouTube. 26 April 2023. Fair use.

Saber Nasr El-Din, a 23- year-old student at Khartoum University’s Faculty of Medicine, also passed away on Sunday due to a severe drop in blood pressure. His roommates reported that he suffered due to his diabetes and was unable to find insulin because of the ongoing conflict.

Nasr El-Din’s family, who reside in Assuit’s Dayrout, was unable to transfer his body from the apartment where he was staying in Khartoum due to the ongoing fighting. His mother made social media pleas for him to be brought back to Egypt to be buried in his hometown in Upper Egypt. However, Nasr El-Din’s father, Mohamed Nasr, announced that his son was buried in a cemetery in Khartoum for the time being.

The young Egyptian student was not the only victim of the dire humanitarian situation in Sudan. The collapse of the health sector in the capital has led to over 52 hospitals in Khartoum being completely out of service due to the lack of power and medical supplies.

Via Globalvoices.org

Written byEgyptian Chronicles

The women of Vieques, an island off the east coast of Puerto Rico, have been on the front lines of the generations-long struggle for peace and justice to end the havoc wrought by U.S. foreign policy on their island, in their homes, and on their bodies.