neighborhoods experience less than two hours of publicly provided electricity a
day, forcing citizens and business enterprises to utilize expensive and
polluting gasoline generators.
In spring of this year, 81% of Iraqis reported that they had experienced
inadequate electricity in the previous month. During the heat of summer and the
cold of winter, these shortages create real health emergencies.
In 2004, the UN estimated that $20 billion in reconstruction funds would be
needed for a fully operative electrical grid. The estimates now range from $40
billion to $80 billion.
Water: The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which flow through the
country from the northwest to the southeast, have since time immemorial
irrigated the rich farming land that lay between them, nurtured the fish that
are a staple of the Iraqi diet, and provided water for animal and human
consumption. American-style warfare, with its reliance on tank, artillery, and
air power, often resulted in the cratering of streets in upstream Sunni cities
like Tal Afar, Fallujah, and Samarra where the insurgency was strongest. One
result was the wrecking of already weakened underground sewage systems. In the
Sadr City section of Baghdad, for instance, where much fighting has taken place
and American air power was called in regularly, there is now a lake of sewage
clearly visible on satellite photographs.
The ultimate destination of significant parts of the filth from devastated
sewage systems was the two rivers. Five years worth of such waste flowing
through the streets and into those rivers has left them thoroughly
contaminated. Their water can no longer be safely consumed by humans or
animals, the remaining fish cannot be safely eaten, and the contaminated water
reportedly withers the crops it irrigates.
Iraq's never-adequate water purification system has proven woefully
insufficient to handle this massive flow of contamination, while inadequate
electric supplies insure that the country's few functional purification plants
are less than effective.
In many cities, the sewage system must be entirely reconstructed, but repairs
cannot even begin without a viable electrical system, a reinvigorated
engineering and construction sector, and a government capable of marshalling
these resources. None of these prerequisites currently exist.
Schools: Education has been a victim of all the various
pathologies current in Iraqi society. During the initial invasion, the US
military often commandeered schools as forward bases, attracted by their
well-defined perimeters, open spaces for vehicles, and many rooms for offices
and barracks. Two incidents in which American gunfire from an occupied
elementary school killed Iraqi civilians in the conservative Sunni city of
Fallujah may have been the literal sparks that started the insurgency. Many
schools would subsequently be rendered uninhabitable by destructive battles
fought in or near them.
Under the US occupation's de-Ba'athification policy, thousands of teachers who
belonged to the Ba'ath Party were fired, leaving hundreds of thousands of
students teacherless. In addition, the shuttering of government enterprises
deprived the schools of supplies - including books and teaching materials - as
well as urgently needed maintenance.
The American solution, as with the electric grid, was to hire multinational
firms to repair the schools and rehabilitate school systems. The result was an
orgy of corruption accompanied by very little practical aid. Local school
officials complained that facilities with no windows, heating, or toilet
facilities were repainted and declared fit for use.
The dwindling central government presence made schools inviting arenas for
sectarian conflict, with administrators, teachers, and especially college
professors removed, kidnapped, or assassinated for ideological reasons. This,
in turn, stimulated a mass exodus of teachers, intellectuals, and scientists
from the country, removing precious human capital essential for future
reconstruction.
Finally, in Baghdad, the US military began installing ten-foot-tall cement
walls around scores of communities and neighborhoods to wall off participants
in the sectarian violence. As a result, schoolchildren were often separated
from their schools, reducing attendance at the few intact facilities to those
students who happened to live within the imprisoning walls.
This autumn, as some of these walls were dismantled, residents discovered that
many of the schools were virtually unusable. The Times's Dagher offered a vivid
description, for instance, of a school in the Dolaie neighborhood which "is
falling apart, and overwhelmed by the children of almost 4,000 Shi'ite refugee
families who have settled in the Chukouk camp nearby. The roof is caving in,
classroom floors and hallways are stripped bare, and in the playground a pile
of burnt trash was smoldering."
The Dysfunctional society: Much has been made in the US
presidential campaign of the $70 billion oil surplus the Iraqi government built
up in these last years as oil prices soared. In actuality, most of it is
currently being held in American financial institutions, with various American
politicians threatening to confiscate it if it is not constructively spent. Yet
even this bounty reflects the devastation of the war.
De-Ba'athification and subsequent chaos rendered the Iraqi government incapable
of effectively administering projects that lay outside the fortified,
American-controlled Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad. A vast flight of the
educated class to Syria, Jordan, and other countries also deprived it of the
managers and technicians needed to undertake serious reconstruction on a large
scale.
As a consequence, less than 25% of the funds budgeted for facility construction
and reconstruction last year were even spent. Some government ministries spent
less than 1% of their allocations. In the meantime, the large oil surpluses
have become magnets for massive governmental corruption, further infuriating
frustrated citizens who, after five years, still often lack the most basic
services. Transparency International's 2008 "corruption perceptions index"
listed Iraq as tied for 178th place among the 180 countries evaluated.
The Iraq that has emerged from the American invasion and occupation is now a
thoroughly wrecked land, housing a largely dysfunctional society. More than a
million Iraqis may have died; millions have fled their homes; many millions of
others have been scarred by war, insurgency and counterinsurgency operations,
extreme sectarian violence, and soaring levels of common criminality. Education
and medical systems have essentially collapsed and, even today, with every kind
of violence in decline, Iraq remains one of the most dangerous societies on
earth.
As its crisis deepened, the various areas of social and technical devastation
became ever more entwined, reinforcing one another. The country's degraded
sewage and water systems, for example, have spawned two consecutive years of
widespread cholera. It seems likely that this year, the disease will only
subside when the cold weather makes further contagion impossible, but this
"solution" also guarantees its reoccurrence each year until water purification
systems are rebuilt.
In the meantime, cholera victims cannot rely on Iraq's once-vaunted medical
system, since two-thirds of the country's doctors have fled, its hospitals are
often in a state of advanced decay and disrepair, drugs remain scarce, and
equipment, if available at all, is outdated. The rebuilding of the water and
medical systems, however, cannot get fully underway unless the electrical
system is restored to reasonable shape. Repair of the electrical grid awaits a
reliable oil and gas pipeline system to provide fuel for generators, and this
cannot be constructed without the expertise of technicians who have left the
country, or newly trained specialists that the educational system is now
incapable of producing. And so it goes.
On a daily basis, this cauldron of misery renews powerful feelings of
discontent, which explains why American military leaders regularly insist that
the country's current relative quiescence is, at best, "fragile". They believe
only the most minimal reductions in US forces in Iraq (still hovering at close
to 150,000 troops) are advisable.
Even if Washington prefers to ignore Iraqi realities, military officials
working close to the ground know that the country's state of disrepair, and an
inability to deal with it in any reasonably prompt way, leaves a population in
steaming discontent. At any moment, this could explode in further sectarian
violence or yet another violent effort to expel the US forces from the country.
Michael Schwartz's new book,
War Without End: The Iraq War in Context(Haymarket, 2008), has just
been released. It explains just how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the
US to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling sectarian civil war
inside that country. A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University,
Schwartz has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His e-mail
address is ms42@optonline.net.
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