12/16/09 – Martin Chulov – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, and our next guest on the show today is Martin Chulov.
He is the Baghdad correspondent for the London Guardian.
Welcome to the show, Martin.
Hi, nice to be with you.
I appreciate you joining us today.
You're welcome.
So this is a really sad story that you have here, that it's, well, on Antiwar.com our title for it was The Dust Bowl of Babylon, you can find it in Tom Englehart's archives there, he distributed it around a bit I think, and it was originally written for the World Policy Journal, and it's about the, I think mostly man-made drought, and destructions of the water flow through the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Is that part right, that this is mostly a man-made problem rather than just bad weather?
Pretty much so, yeah, Iraq has gone through a very serious drought over the last three years in which rainfall is 50-70% down on normal averages, however the biggest detraction, or the biggest loss of water throughout the Euphrates and the Tigris, as you say, has been production of up to seven dams on the Euphrates system in the headwaters of Syria and Turkey.
Those dams have been built over the last seven years, and we've seen water flow down through those two rivers drop by easily 50%, probably more, on top of that you've had a deficiency in rainfall, and that's led to a massive water shortage right throughout Iraq that is jeopardizing agriculture, power supply, irrigation, and even potable drinking water, it really is a dire situation there.
Well now why can't the Iraqi government say to the Syrians and Turks, hey let's figure out a deal we can make here so that we can share this water, I mean this is the cradle of civilization, dependent on those two rivers, right, you can't just dam it all up in Syria and Turkey and let Iraq die.
You bet, there's been a lot of talk about that, and the Iraqis have gone to Damascus, they've gone to Ankara as well, they've sat down with the Turks and the Syrians and also the Iranians, who have also diverted a river called the Karun River, which flows into the Shatt al-Arab in the south, they've made their cases as forcefully as they can over the last six months, they've sat down with delegations, they've exchanged technical data.
On some days the Turks have released extra water, down the Euphrates in particular, but that water has also been picked up by the Syrians, and why can't Iraq press their international requirements or international law?
The reason is it's a state that's unstable politically, it doesn't have a lot of clout with its regional neighbors, they don't have much leverage.
The Turks, the Syrians, have also had a water shortage of their own.
Iraq's rights under international law are not yet clear, and even if they were clear and able to be pressed, there would be some sort of resistance from both the Syrians, the Turks and the Iranians, to letting them have their rights under international law.
So they're at an imbroglio at the moment, they're not powerful enough, they're not strong enough to press their case, and the people are suffering significantly as a result.
Well, and let's talk about some of that.
I think the whole population, you say, two million face shortages of drinking water, the power generators, all the hydroelectric power has stopped working, of course crops and animals, but especially, and I'd like to give you time to be as broad as you like in telling the story, but I especially want to make sure that you have some time to talk about one of the oldest cultures in the world, right, the Marsh Arabs there, and what's their fate?
Look, the Marsh Arabs are in a desperate situation at the moment.
As we all know, they lost their waters in 1991 when the waters were diverted by Saddam, who would accuse them of aligning with the Shia rebellion at the time.
The Marsh Arabs have been an indigenous people, semi-nomadic throughout the ages, throughout millennia, they've grown, they've farmed water birds, they've been fishermen, they've been irrigators as well, rice paddies, they provided a lot of the agriculture to the rest of Iraq.
They've suffered extensively in 1991, but what they're going through now, with the flow of the Euphrates in particular being so low that the water is not reaching the marshlands, they're going through an absolutely desperate situation, a lot of them are leaving their lands and moving into the cities, into Nasiriyah in particular, which is the regional hub.
The Shatt al-Arab waterway in the south has been a mix of fresh water and salt water throughout the ages, with the Iranians diverting the Karun River, which flowed into the Shatt al-Arab.
We've seen a relentless march northwards of the salt waters from the Persian Gulf, and a lot of those farming lands, alluvial farming land, which is at the southern end of the marshlands, is now salted, and it can't be used for farming.
We're looking at a very, very significant risk to the future livelihoods of up to 300,000 people directly, and also the drinking water and the capacity to supply power to another 1.7 million, which we're talking 2 million people whose lives are being significantly affected by the drought and by the diversion of the Karun River, and the reduction in the flow of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Let me ask you this, Martin.
Is there any place in Iraq, other than what they used to call the green zone, I don't know if they still do anymore there, where people actually get electricity 24 hours a day at all, this whole time?
You know, there's one area, and that's a very small pocket of Baghdad, which is called the Jaderiyah Presidential Compound in the south of Baghdad, the President Talabani's palace and the surrounding neighborhood, and only because it runs off two grids, but that gets 23, 24 hours a day.
The rest of Iraq is getting by in the winter on about 14 hours a day, and in the summer, down to around eight hours.
So, you know, services have not improved during the last six or seven years.
Those figures are comparable to what Iraq was getting before the war.
Oh, really?
Was it that bad before the war even started?
And back in 2003, in the Sunni areas of Baghdad, they were getting more than that.
In the Shia areas, they were getting around about that.
So, yeah, look, it's comparable.
Back in 2002, 2003, there was perhaps a little more for one side of Baghdad, but a bit less, or around about the same for the other.
Yeah.
Well, so, is Maliki just not in the position to say to the Turks, like, hey, you know, or to the Syrians, I forget, which is, the Turks that have built seven dams, you said?
There's been seven dams built into the Euphrates system in the headwaters, two of those dams are on the Syrian side, another five are in the Turkish side.
Maliki has made a case.
The Iraqi water minister, Dr. Latif, has been up there as well.
Turks have sat down, they've exchanged technical data.
The Turks have acknowledged that there is a problem and that they do need to release more water.
Well, what about Iraq's friends, the Americans?
Can't we tell the Turks, hey, man?
Yeah, well, look, you know, that's a form of international diplomacy that, as I understand, hasn't been kick-started yet.
To my knowledge, the Americans are not involved in this process at all, but as you say, I mean, they do have...
Okay, we'll give you some more fighter planes for bombing the Kurds with.
Just let some water flow to Iraq.
You know, it'd be a very useful contribution, I can assure you.
I've spent a lot of time along the Euphrates and the Tigris.
The water levels are way, way down.
The people are genuinely suffering there.
There has been a significant disruption to Iraq's ecology by many estimates, many reliable estimates.
It hasn't been this bad for bare minimum two centuries and maybe many, many centuries more.
So in terms of what the international community could do, I think quite a bit more.
The Iraqis have been pretty keen to demonstrate that they are now sovereign, but look around.
Their claim on sovereignty doesn't really amount to much when the people are deprived of such bare basic things as water.
I'm talking with Martin Shulov.
He's Baghdad correspondent for The Guardian.
Oh, well, before I move on to the other subject, I have a recent article here that you wrote about Fallujah that I want to ask you about.
But first of all, this article about the Dust Bowl of Baghdad here ends with, you know, this ironic kind of sad note where there's actually a new business booming in the south of Iraq and it's not growing anything with water.
It's where the water's now all gone.
It's left piles of salt behind.
And now Iraq is becoming, you know, one of the salt capitals of the Middle East, I guess.
It's one of the few growth industries.
It's a cottage industry at the moment.
There are lots of salt piles and there are people harvesting and sending them to market and they are making some money out of it.
But it is a sad irony, as you say, that the only good news that can come from the psychological crisis that we are seeing is that people can now harvest salt that was at the bottom of pools of water that were once their lifeblood.
Well now, could Saddam Hussein, I guess, it's hard to say the counterfactual, I mean, even in the 90s there was the blockade and all the sanctions and no-fly zones and these kinds of things.
It seems like, I don't know, 80s Saddam Hussein or somebody could have said, hey, you know, I got a bunch of, you know, Republican guard here who will, you know, open your dam one way or the other if you don't negotiate, right?
I mean, that's the whole, that seems to be a big part of this, is that America and our coalition of the willing, including Great Britain there, have basically smashed Iraq into a bunch of little pieces and now they have really no ability, they have much less ability to take care of themselves than even Saddam Hussein had.
In terms of being able to enforce their own basic rights, in terms of being able to say, this is who we are and this is what we are owed, you're right.
They don't have much political clout, they have less military clout, and in a pretty rough neighborhood, they don't have anywhere near the status that they used to.
Look, wars have started for a lot less in the Middle East than water, being deprived of a lifeblood like that.
Iraq is not in a strong position by any measure, and I think it's a reasonable take to deduce from that that the neighbors have taken advantage of it.
Well, you know, I've been talking with Patrick Coburn a lot on the show and a lot of other great reporters, and all of the best experts on Iraq that I've talked to on this show seem to agree that Maliki basically has put himself in a position where his power depends on a coalition of people who he has promised he will stick by the Status of Forces Agreement deadline and kick the United States out by the end of 2011.
If he deviates from that, he'll lose his power, and so basically the Americans are in fact going to leave and not occupy Iraq forever with permanent bases like the Bush administration wanted.
But you talk in your article about how all this drought and everything is weakening the already weak Maliki.
He can't do anything about it because of how weak his position is, and it's just weakening his government even worse.
And I wonder if you think that maybe this could jeopardize the American withdrawal.
Is he going to be strong enough to stick by the deal he made with some of the Ba'athists and Saudis and so forth to solidify his coalition back a year and a half ago or whichever?
I don't think he can back down on that now.
He's campaigning pretty heavily on him being the person who helps secure that Status of Forces Agreement.
Maliki's society does en masse want the Americans out.
They do think it is time or it's past time for them to go.
It would be remarkable if Maliki was to turn around on that and say, all these security gains that I promised, all these claims that I've made about making the streets safer, making Iraq sovereign, well actually just put a hold on that.
We need our overlords to stay a bit longer.
I don't think he can do that politically.
I can't see any scenario in which that could happen.
He's saying that we want to stand up and do everything by ourselves now.
And he knows that he's faced with significant challenges that are beyond his capacity to deal with, water being high among them.
But I don't think he has any political opportunity at all to do anything other than ask the Americans to lean on the Turks and to perhaps use some influence, if they have any at all, with the Syrians.
But do you think that basically it's a safe bet that Maliki will remain in power?
He'll be the one to see us off and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out on December 31st, 2011?
You know, it's a good question.
I wish I could, with a degree of authority.
The Iraqi elections are very hard to read.
Maliki has been damaged over the last couple of months by this bombing campaign.
He hasn't been able to deliver services to the people in power, water, sewerage, basically any of the services that were meant to flow from notionally making the streets safer.
He has been attempting to court a secular coalition over the last couple of months.
But at the same time, he's also been looking to the more Islamically conservative side of politics.
And there has been a crackdown on Baghdad nightlife.
There has been an attempt to regulate the internet and telecommunications sectors a lot more.
So he's basically looking to do anything he can to garner as much support as he can to make a claim on leading Iraq again.
How's he traveling on that?
It's a difficult assessment to make.
It truly is.
And I don't think it's going to take shape until, you know, I guess by mid-January can we start to make some educated calls.
They don't do polling in Iraq.
The mood on the streets seems to be pretty good.
You know, shops are opening, restaurants are starting to work again.
People are getting about.
Maliki is reasonably well-received on the street.
And there haven't been too many other contenders who have pressed their own cases.
But things can change in Iraq very, very quickly.
So I guess it's a watch this space on that.
Well, I'm glad to hear another person basically assessing the situation the way I hear it from Coburn, which is that this war actually is going to end.
The Korean model that George Bush talked about is off.
The Republicans, the Democrats, whoever you like to point your finger at, they lost and we have to leave.
Thank God.
Right.
The war definitely is going to end.
We don't spend much time with the Americans as correspondents anymore because quite simply they're not as relevant as they once were.
You don't see them on the streets very much.
I've spent a little bit of time out in their bases talking to them, but all they really do want to talk about now is the plans for withdrawals.
The pull out of the American army or the bulk of it is due to take place within 60 days of the election taking place.
So within 60 days of March 7, you will see roughly two thirds of the American military presence leave Iraq.
They will go down from 125,000 troops to 50,000 troops by August 30.
And they're very keen to talk about that almost in a tunnel vision way.
There doesn't appear to be any scope at all to hang out.
Once you get onto the bases and spend some time with the people there, it's very clear that they're ready to go and the sooner the better.
All right.
Well, let me ask you about this article I found here, republished at countercurrents.org.
It's a Guardian article, huge rise in birth defects in Fallujah.
So sounds like the occupation truly is temporary, but the effects of it are going to live on and on.
Am I jumping to conclusions too fast?
What we're talking about is the results of America's various wars of aggression, miniature wars of aggression against Fallujah during the occupation.
Look, Fallujah is the only place in Iraq in which there were two very large set piece battle sports, and that was, they were both in 2004, as we know.
During those battles, there were a lot of heavy ordnance, a lot of depleted Iranian white phosphorus, ionizing radiation used in some small arms and also some artillery rounds as well.
That's a fact.
We cast forward now to 2009, we spent a lot of time with doctors, obstetricians, oncologists, pediatricians up in Fallujah over the last couple of months.
We've sat down, we've examined the records that they've made.
Now our caveat to this is Iraq is not an ideal place in which to mount a scientific study and the bookkeeping isn't as rigorous as it is in other countries and we need to bear that in mind.
However, more than anecdotally, factually we can say that the birth defects there, especially neural tube defects in infants which are basically the deformities of the lower limbs, the spine, the brain are up by significant levels.
We're talking spikes of 70% to 80%.
During the three trips that I made to Fallujah, I spent a lot of time in the neonatal wards and the infant wards there and there was ample evidence of newborns being diagnosed with these very, very serious defects which manifest in different ways, mostly loss of use of lower limbs, large and swollen brains and many other long-term debilitating injuries.
Now this kind of defects hasn't been explained scientifically yet.
The doctors there say that there could be other contributing factors like a follic acid in mothers, the psychological status of mothers, malnutrition, whatever.
But throw into that the other ingredient that it is the only place in Iraq in the last five years in which a lot of heavy weapons, depleted uranium has been used.
It has to be a factor at least to study and we're at a point now where scientists need to take over.
We can only do so much as journalists.
We're looking at some very startling figures there.
You know there were a couple of other kind of analogous set-piece battles in Najaf against the Sadrists also in 2004.
They had their twin uprisings in Fallujah and Najaf in the spring and then if I remember right America attacked the Sadrists, the Americans attacked the Sadrists in August and then Fallujah again in November after Bush's re-election, right?
That's true.
And there has also been a spike in birth defects in Fallujah, sorry in Najaf over the last five years as well.
The figures there aren't as scientifically prepared as they are in Fallujah but the Iraqi Ministry of Health is reporting as a fact that there have been more diagnosis of similar defects to which we've talked about in the Guardian, they've been neural tube defects and also cancer clusters amongst children up to two, three, four years of age.
The Najaf side of things does need to be explored more.
On Fallujah we're looking at more of a body of evidence than elsewhere in the country.
Now where are you exactly right now?
I'm in Beirut.
I've just taken a few days out of Baghdad just to get some downtime.
But you've basically been in Baghdad, do you go and do the tours around all the various provinces or you pretty much stay in Baghdad now or how does that work?
No, no I get around, the situation is such that we can get around almost to anywhere in the country.
As I say I went to Fallujah three times over the last month, we do Ramadi, we do Mosul, we do the south, we do basically anywhere.
There's only a couple of no-go zone areas now and one of them is northern Diyala province and the other is the north of Mosul.
But no, we get around as far and wide as we can in an effort to tell the story through Iraqi eyes.
And now is that because you're one of the few and the brave or because actually pretty much any reporter can go ahead and do that now because the war's over or what?
Seems like there's still a lot of violence in the headlines.
There is, but we're not seeing the sort of sectarian stuff that we saw in 2006-2005 and nor are we seeing the kidnappings that we saw throughout the same period which extended into 2007.
So you can do it now, but it's not all that easy to do.
It's pretty hard for independent operators to get around because you do need to maintain some security protocols and that involves taking two cars with you, you know, a couple of translators, a few eyes and ears and things that are still reasonably expensive to put together in a media age where it's all about cost-cutting.
So look, we can get out and about and there are some of us there.
The Guardian is there, the Times is there, so is the New York Times, LA Times and a couple of the other players, but we don't see the television networks.
The only one that's in town is CNN and they get around, they do their thing, but the rest of the American networks are long gone.
So look, there's a story to tell, there's an important story to tell and we're lucky that we can do it now.
It's just, I guess it's now down to a core group of say 10 to 15 who actually have the resources and have the commitment to continue to tell the story.
Well and it's surprising too when it seems like the American TV stations, the cable news networks and so forth, could basically spend an average peaceful day as all due to General Petraeus' brilliance and whatever.
That's going to be their narrative anyway.
Why not go and film some relative peace in Iraq and use it for pro-war stuff?
They just forget it.
They don't even want us to talk about it at all, I guess.
I think most of them have diverted their resources en masse to Afghanistan.
I think the story, the Iraqi story has tired a lot of people and there tends to be a fatigue amongst not just the practitioners who put these stories together, but also the viewing public.
That's certainly the view of people who make the decisions about how to spend their resources within the TV networks.
Afghanistan is hot, Iraq is not at the moment.
Well, not that I really want you to plug your competition necessarily, but I wonder if there's anywhere else that you know of that's a good resource for people to learn about the drought.
I know Patrick Cockburn has written about it and I've talked with him about it on the show before, but you're the only other writer I've seen on this subject.
I think the Allied Times put together a piece a couple of months ago.
The New York Times seemed to be quite committed to telling the story through Iraqi eyes.
They've also had a look.
Yeah, I guess I have seen a New York Times article about it as well, yeah.
Yeah, but there aren't that many of us there at the moment and even though it's easier than it used to be to get around and tell the tale, it's still an expensive and partly dangerous proposition.
So, as I say, the onus does fall upon a few of us now and I think all of my colleagues in Baghdad are doing the best they can and I think we'll just chip away at this story.
It's an emerging story, it's an evolving tale and it's one that really does need to be told.
Well, it makes me wonder about all the refugees, all the people who fled to Jordan and to Syria.
Are they ever going to be able to come home when home is falling apart still?
I mean, even if the civil war is over, like you're saying, all the Marsh Arabs are coming to town.
They're leaving their marshes.
Good question.
We are seeing a trickle of refugees coming back to their neighborhoods, especially the mixed neighborhoods which were just war zones for a couple of years there, but there really isn't a lot of incentive, when you look around, for them to continue to come back.
Look, the salaries are up, I guess, but government ministries are just being targeted all the time now.
You wouldn't want to be a civil servant in Iraq.
The private sector hasn't developed and it's going to take a long time to do so.
It's not really an enticing place and it doesn't look like it's going to be any more enticing over the next couple of years.
Well, now, there is a silver lining to some of this and you mentioned this in your article as well.
I think you were meant to bring this up earlier and that is that Iraq does have oil and they can trade that oil for money and then they can buy things with that money.
Problem is, they've been through such chaos for, what, going on 30 years in a row now, 20 years almost, 19 years of American bombing in a row at this point, and the Iran-Iraq war before that, the sanctions and blockades and all that.
It seems like if they could just, you know, get rid of all the interference and sell their oil on the market, they might be able to really develop their society, fix up all their irrigation and all their water systems and whatever.
It can't be that expensive when you compare it to oil revenue, right?
Well, look, they're banking their lot on oil, they're throwing everything they can at getting the oil industry up and running as soon as it possibly can and to get them competing with the neighbours, with the Gulf states, with Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Oil basically is the future, according to the Iraqi government there.
That's what they want to do, they've embraced private sector partnerships, the large oil companies are in town, they're doing business, and the deal is that they provide the infrastructure, they get paid a fee per barrel of oil, and Iraq has reserves of 115 billion barrels, it's verified reserves, which should be enough to get them through a century, even given their wildly optimistic projections of getting 10 million barrels out per day.
So, look, they're banking on that.
They want to say that the streets are safer, investors can come in, we can start getting things happening and we can finally start paying to build the society from ground zero.
But, you know, we're looking at a security situation which isn't anywhere near as good as we're being led to believe, and we're looking at all sorts of other disasters, high among them water, which are really crippling the government's capacity to do anything.
Yeah, in other words, it's going to be generations before Iraq is okay again, at best.
You know, I think so, I think that's accurate.
Even spending most of my time there, it is a difficult society to read, but if you step back a bit, and you reflect on the developments, the setbacks, all that is going on, I can't see this turning around in the next generation, and it's probably going to take a couple, as you say.
All right, everybody, that's Martin Chulov, he is Baghdad correspondent for the London Guardian.
The article was originally at World Policy Journal, you can find it at antiwar.com slash Engelhardt, it is Baghdad's Dust Bowl, or Dust Bowl of Baghdad.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.