America’s Devastating Legacy of Endless Wars in the Middle East

• America’s Devastating Legacy of Endless Wars in the Middle East
  by M. REZA BEHNAM, https://www.wrmea.org/
  Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2021, pp. 38-39, 47
  Special Report
  PRESIDENT-ELECT Joseph Biden has advocated for domestic policies focused on equity, decency, justice and climate change. These noble principles cannot be achieved at home if they are not practiced abroad. If the new administration is serious about establishing America’s moral authority in the world, it must change its behavior in the Middle East—a region that has suffered profoundly as a result of policies that have been devoid of these ethical precepts.
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  The Bush administration’s decision after the attacks of 9/11 to use force in Afghanistan, Iraq and in its “war on terror,” has damaged and destabilized a region already struggling with severe political and environmental difficulties. Although America’s endless wars have been a windfall for the Pentagon and weapons manufacturers, the human toll has been enormous.
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  Less attention, however, has been paid to the devastating impact on the region’s land, air and water caused by the military’s industrialized warfare. Additionally, as the major arms dealer, the U.S. has catalyzed conflict in a volatile part of the world.
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  For decades, the U.S. military’s main purpose in the Persian Gulf has been to safeguard the flow of oil. It uses a massive amount of fossil fuel defending its access to the fossil fuel of the Gulf and in protecting the autocratic regimes that guarantee U.S. control. The Pentagon—the largest institutional user of petroleum—consumes more than 320,000 barrels of oil a day (not including fuel used by contractors).
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  In protecting its investment, the U.S. has wreaked havoc on the environment of the Middle East. Exempt from climate agreements, the Pentagon is one of the world’s biggest polluters. Since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, it is estimated that the U.S. military has emitted 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide—blamed for global warming—into the atmosphere.
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  An environmental assessment, conducted by the United Nations Environment Program after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, concluded that, “Iraq’s environmental contamination is one of the more serious cases of conflict pollution that UNEP has investigated.”
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  The war has caused irreversible environmental damage not only to Iraq, but to its neighbors. In its spurious pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—a stated intent of the war—the U.S. has overwhelmed the country with the toxic remains from our own WMD. Military debris including unexploded ordnances, spent cartridges, abandoned military vehicles and depleted uranium from munitions, has contaminated Iraq’s soil, its water supply, and has been linked to an epidemic of birth defects and cancer. 
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