Voices in the Wilderness-NYC Moves to Bring Attention to Iraq’s Water Crisis

by Anna J. Brown, Voices in the Wilderness-NYC

In the “Bechtel’s Dry Run: Iraqis Suffer Water Crisis (2004)” report published by Public Citizen’s Water for All Campaign, its North American reader meets Ahmed Abdul Rida, a resident of Baghdad’s Sadr City. Mr. Rida, whose family members join a million others in dire poverty, is waiting for the two to three hours of electricity available per day to be activated so that he may use his family’s water pump. Since the water that he is able to pump is derived from the polluted waters of the Tigris River, what he and his family end up drinking is described as a “concentrated cocktail of pesticides, fertilizers, heavy metals from antiquated piping, and unknown amounts of depleted uranium, raw sewage and other chemicals from American and Iraqi munitions from the 1991 Gulf war, and the more recent Anglo-American invasion.” [1]

The story of Mr. Rida has been quite present to me during the month of July as I join friends and comrades in the WATER NOT WAR effort sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness of New York City. [2] When I ride the subway to each of our Wednesday and Saturday demonstrations, I meditate on the plight of the Rida family: What is it like to offer your young son or daughter a glass of brown colored and foul smelling water? What is it like to hand your elderly mother or pregnant wife a drink that may cause diarrhea, kidney stones, cholera and that damages the liver and brain? When I imagine the desperate thirst that wells up in a land where summer temperatures routinely top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the necessity and the urgency of awareness about this devastating water crisis in Iraq brings to mind this insight of Dr. Martin Luther King’s: “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be unless you are what you ought to be.” [3]

The moral imperative articulated by King must be applied to the present crisis in Iraq: Just as North Americans must have clean water to drink so must the people of Iraq. Accordingly, WATER NOT WAR has three objectives for its July and August of 2005 effort: to help others learn about why Iraqis face such a severe drinking water crisis; to raise money to purchase solar powered water filters for family use in Iraq; and, to resist and rebuke the trifocal American corporate-military-government machine that constantly grinds down human beings who “obstruct” the path to profit or power. Twelve different New York City sites, including the offices of Bechtel and Coca-Cola, the United Nations and the World Bank, Fox News and the New York Times, will be visited by a group of WATER NOT WAR folks who have thousands of educational leaflets, a solar powered water oven on display, a beautifully hand-crafted banner and a repertoire of peace and justice songs at their disposal and ready to be shared with others. The participants in WATER NOT WAR, some who have fasted during the month-long vigil, will join the Kairos peace community, the War Resisters League and others in an act of civil disobedience on the 60th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of civilians in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This act of civil disobedience will close the month long WATER NOT WAR campaign and will constitute one of the multiple efforts made to resist the dominion of death championed as “democracy in Iraq” by U.S. government officials, corporate leaders, military strategists, and to a substantive degree, the American public.

In One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse’s provocative reading of North American democracy and its compliant citizenry, its first line reads: “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.” [4] Much like the story of Mr. Rida, this one sentence comes to my mind repeatedly as I stand holding my packet of leaflets. We make the effort to distribute them and to engage those who pass by in conversation but for the most part we are ignored or rejected, albeit in a “smooth and reasonable” manner. The two-sided WATER NOT WAR leaflets have one side that pertains to the specific site of the demonstration and one side that has general information about the crisis situation in Iraq. On its general information side, there is one fact that makes me feel as if I am holding a burning coal in my hand: “Allies deliberately poisoned Iraq public water supply in Gulf war.” [5] The readily available literature on the water crisis in Iraq points to internal U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents [1991] which reveal that U.S. government and military officials planned and implemented a bombing and sanctions effort meant to wipe out the water supply and destroy the sanitation infrastructure in Iraq. Further, the DIA authors of the study reported: “Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment and some chemicals [embargoed during the 13 years of U.N. imposed sanctions] to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish with saline… Failing to secure water supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease (DIA 1991). [6]

Enter the second paragraph of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: “The rights and liberties which were such vital factors in the origins and earlier stages of industrial society yield to a higher stage of this society: they are losing their traditional rationale and content.” [7] In short, those who are comfortable have been bought-off and blinded by late capitalism’s material abundance. Accordingly, I knew it would be a struggle not only to pass off the “burning coal” contained within my leaflet but also to remind my fellow citizens, many of whom seemed quite intent upon entering the Disney store that was located next to the offices of Coca-Cola, that such a deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure violated Article 54 [found in what the current US Attorney General refers to as the “quaint relic”] of the Geneva Convention (1979):

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive. [8]

It is relatively easy to comprehend the incomprehension of most though certainly not all of those folks we have met in the streets of New York City these past few weeks. Consider the following, which is offered by the War Resisters League’s Stop the Merchants of Death research project: “The Office of Global Communication was given 200 million tax dollars to promote the invasion of Iraq. Further, the Rendon Group [a public relations firm] was paid $100,000 a month by the government to link Iraq to 9-11 terrorist attacks.” [9] When I contemplate the enormous efforts made to “manufacture the consent” of the American people, I often turn to Thucydides’ rendering of the Peloponnesian War. In his account of the Melian Dialogue, what strikes me is the starkness of the justifying arguments offered by Athenian military leaders who favored an invasion of Melos. The invasion was prompted by the “audacious” Melian refusal to align itself with the Athenian empire during its protacted war against the Spartans. The ensuing deaths of all Melian men of military age and the forced removal and selling of Melian women and children into slavery revealed the rot that was dwelling beneath the golden phrases of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, which had exemplified the apex of Athenian ideals. The primary justification offered by the Athenians for this devastation was devoid of “fine phrases… and a great mass of words that nobody would believe.” [10] Quite simply, the Athenians contended that based upon “our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men… it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule what one can.” [11] Not surprisingly, the Melian response to the application of this law was for them to become “open enemies” of the Athenian people. [12]

The core of the Athenian argument in favor of an invasion was grounded in a customary understanding of “the facts of life”: The strong rule and the weak obey. There was not the effort made to glorify, to obfuscate, or to rationalize this rather low-level justification for a military invasion and for the political machinations that supported it. What presents a challenge for contemporary peace activists and concerned citizens in this age of perpetual warfare and precarious democracies is the ever-thickening veil of ignorance that is spun from the brightest political minds, the slickest public relations firms and buttressed in billions of corporate dollars. There are relatively few Americans who realize, for example, that close to three billion taxpayer dollars have been given to the Bechtel Corporation in the form of a no-bid contract that obliges that corporation to reconstruct the very water systems that US-led allied forces deliberately debilitated and destroyed during the Gulf war. [13] Even fewer understand that the Bechtel Corporation was waiting in the wings for the awarding of such a contract… prior to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and to any public debate on the either of the two wars in Iraq! [14] That the Bechtel Corporation has yet to fulfill any of its contractual obligations in the reconstruction of Iraqi water systems goes by for the most part unnoticed in American political discussions, though not in Iraq. According to Dahr Jamail, an “unembedded” reporter in Iraq, the Iraqi residents in the southern town of Diwaniya with whom he spoke “stated unequivocally that their living conditions are worse now than when Saddam Hussein was in power.” [15]

The French philosopher and activist, Simone Weil, contends that the essence of justice is “mutual consent.” Taking her cue from Thucydides’ she realizes, however, that the preservation of justice depends upon the “equality of power to compel.” [16] Given that the weak more often than not do not have the power to compel those who are strong, justice also requires, for Weil, a degree of madness. This particular type of madness is the madness of love. It requires a reversal of the typical relations of power: the strong would act as if they were weak and the weak would act as if they were strong. At present, we see such “madness” and a reversal of power relations in the act of a nonviolent hunger strike begun in July 2005 by detainees in the Camp 5 facility of the Guantanamo Naval Bay Station. At the heart of this strike are demands that amount to humane treatment of the detainees by US military and political officials who have rendered them to be inhuman by means of torture and abuse, denial of vital needs and circumventing legal rights. More often than not, however, such a prescription often falls upon deaf ears, particularly in a society that champions property, power and profits over people. As Weil demonstrates concretely for us: “It is not just to steal from shop counters. It is charitable to give alms. But a shopkeeper can send me to prison. A beggar, even if his life depended upon my succor, would not report me to the police even if I refused him.” [17]

When asked to describe North American, the poet Adrienne Rich wrote: “Here is a map of our country: here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt.” [18] We must see unmistakably, as our reading of Dr. King suggests, that each of us depends upon the succor of one another. Further, I do think that those who walk by our encampment would not do so with such indifference or haste in the deep summer’s heat if they did not have clean water to drink. At the moment when thirst arises, the reality of the situation would pierce through the veil of ignorance. Further, what needs to be done would be crystal clear: Who among us will be the first to offer a glass of water? Who will be the first among us the make the reality of the world’s suffering clear, regardless of the deaf ears it falls upon? Though the WATER NOT WAR effort may be a “drop in the bucket” in this time of crisis, we have no choice but to respond to the deep distress of so many in Iraq. Perhaps we may be mindful of what Walter Benjamin, the Jewish critical theorist of the Nazi era proclaimed: “It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.” [19]

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[1] Public Citizen, “Bechtel’s Dry Run: Iraqis Suffer Water Crisis,” April 2004

[2] Voices in the Wilderness-NYC is an activist community dedicated to uplifting the afflicted of Iraq and uplifting the afflicted of America. For more information, contact Brooklynbluebird@vitw.org

[3] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Remaining Awake Through the Great Revolution,” in A Testament of Hope, 269.

[4] Herbert Marcuse. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1991. 1

[5] Felicity Arbuthnot, Sunday Herald (Scotland) September 17, 2000

[6] Defense Intelligence Agency, Iraq Water treatment Vulnerabilities, January 18, 1991

[7] Marcuse, 1

[8] Nafeez Mossaddeq Ahmed, “Bleeding the Gulf: The United Sanctions on Iraq,” October 30, 2001

[9] G. Simon Harak, Stop the Merchants of Death

[10] Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. London: Penguin, 1972. 401

[11] ibid. 404

[12] ibid. 400

[13] Public Citizen, “Bechtel’s Dry Run: Iraqis Suffer Water Crisis,” April 2004

[14] ibid.

[15] ibid.

[16] Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. London: Penguin, 1972. 402

[17] Simone Weil. “Are We Struggling for Justice?” in Philosophical Investigations, vol. 10, no 1 (January 1987), 2.

[18] Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World. New York: Norton, 1991. 6

[19] Herbert Marcuse. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1992. 257