Author: Carol Watson

Take a two day trip with Dahr Jamail, a freelance journalist from Alaska, as he collects data on the present state of the water infrastructure in Iraq. Some excerpts:

Hilla, right near Babylon, has a water treatment plant and distribution center that is managed by Salmam Hassan Kadel, who is also the Chief Engineer. The wastewater project here, like in Najaf and Diwaniya, is specifically named on Bechtel’s contract as one that they are responsible for rehabilitating. They have had no contact from Bechtel, or a subcontractor of said. “We have had no change since the American’s came here. We know Bechtel is wasting money, but we can’t prove it.”

At another small village between Hilla and Najaf, 1500 people are drinking water from a dirty stream which slowly trickles near the homes. Everyone has dysentery, many with kidney stones, a huge number with cholera. One of the men, holding a sick child, tells me, “It was much better before the invasion. We had 24 hours running water then. Now we are drinking this garbage because it is all we have.” A little further down the road at a village of 6000 homes called Abu Hidari, it is more of the same…8 children from the village have been killed when attempting to cross the busy highway to a nearby factory in order to retrieve clean water.

In Diwaniya, and each of the 5 other villages I visited the story is the same. Change the names of the people and the names of the city/village, and we find cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, nausea, less than 8 hours of electricity per day, contaminated water (or no water), and everyone is suffering.

Mr. Mehdi is an engineer and Assistant Manager at the Najaf water distribution center. With help from Red Cross and the Spanish Army, they are doing some of the rebuilding on their own. He says that Bechtel started one month ago; painting buildings, cleaning and repairing storage tanks and repairing and replacing sand filters. This is the only project he knows of that Bechtel has been working on in Najaf. There has been no work on desalinization, which is critical in this area, or other purification processes. He states, “Bechtel is repairing some water facilities, but not improving the electricity, which is their responsibility.”

I ask him if he thinks Bechtel can meet their contractual obligation of restoring potable water supply in all of the urban centers of Iraq by April 17th, and he laughs. He tells me at least 30% of Najaf doesn’t have clean water simply because of lack of electricity.

“No occupation ever makes things good for the people. All the people in the world must know the American’s are here just to help Mr. Bush win this next election.” — Mr. Hassan Mehdi Mohammed, an Iraqi villager.

Day I – Baghdad to Babylon
Day II – Water, Sickness & A Brewing Storm

Citing the high cost of maintaining their contingent of peacekeepers, Nicaragua warns it may have to pull out of the Iraq coalition.

Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, has 115 troops in Iraq. Most are medical personnel and landmine experts and are protected by a small group of special forces.

“It’s not a political matter. We have already said on previous occasions that the problem is we don’t have the money,” Foreign Minister Norman Caldera told journalists. He said Nicaragua had expected financial help from other countries for a planned rotation of troops in February but had not received any so far.

He did not say which country Nicaragua hoped would help it…read more

Okay, everybody, you have three guesses as to which country is supposed to foot the bill.

We were apparently so busy looking for Saddam’s “WMD-related program activities,” that we didn’t even bother to secure his real nuclear waste stockpile back in April, creating a health and environmental disaster for the people of this small rural village in Iraq.

Back in the 1980’s, nuclear armed Israel carried out a pre-emptive bombing of Iraq’s Al-Tuetha nuclear power station which is located just south of Baghdad. While Saddam Hussein didn’t posses nuclear weapons, his nuclear power station which was being constructed still had much radioactive waste stored in two large warehouses. The waste, stored mostly in large metal drums, sat dormant for many years.

After the Anglo-American Invasion last spring the warehouses were looted, and many of the barrels containing radioactive material were carted away to be washed out in the small stream which separates the tiny rural village from Al-Tuetha. After being cleaned in the water supply for the area, the barrels were then sold to uneducated people in the village to be used for storing their drinking water. Thus, the water and now food of the entire village is contaminated with radioactive material.

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More than 500 pairs of empty Army boots were placed side-by-side in downtown Chicago Wednesday to serve as a reminder of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. The black boots, some dusty and dirty from use, were placed on Federal Plaza in front of a posterboard display that listed the names, ages and states of all soldiers killed in the war…

Sometimes, we have to go back to the innocence of our childhood, when we learned to count using apples and beads as numbers, to fully appreciate how many of our troops have died unnecessarily in Iraq. The boots show us the visual reality of the number “500.” That’s an awful lot of boots, and lives. Take a look.

the 500 boots

They flew together, they fought together, now the five rest together in a single flag-draped coffin…in peace at Arlington.

Although “bringing democracy” to Iraq, Syria and Iran and “protecting the world from terrorists and WMD” have been the stated goals of the Bush Administration, it becomes more apparent that one of the main unstated goals is control of the Persian Gulf’s oil production — and thereby control of growing Asian economies such as those of China and India, as well as Japan and S. Korea, which now consume 90% of Middle Eastern oil exports. The use of oil embargoes to exert control over other nations’ policies can have disastrous effects, as did the embargo against Japan, dependent upon the United States for 80% of its oil in 1941, which led to war. From The Daily Star (Lebanon), a fast primer on the changing face of Mideast oil politics by Youssef F. Ibrahim of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group. He previously served as senior Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and Energy Editor of the Wall Street Journal for 26 years.

Once upon a time there were four US oil companies that controlled the world of oil. Their names were Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and Texaco. The world of oil then was focused. These four found the oil, pumped it, and set its price to the world…Over the past 40 years, however, the world of oil has been turned upside down, and the rules have changed. The most important of these changes is that American oil companies no longer constitute the entirety of what we call “Big Oil.”

The other big change is that the US is no longer the most important client in need of oil. The new giant consumer of oil is China ­ a burgeoning economic superpower and the fastest growing market on earth, with over a billion consumers. Then there is India, another major oil customer that is growing fast. In fact, statistics show that 90 percent of the oil produced from the Gulf region that includes Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, among others, is going to Asia, not America.
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