Nobody Is Talking About What This War Is Doing to the Water

Corruption of Power GriftMatrix

One thing I haven’t seen many people talk about yet is the pure environmental devastation going on in the Middle East right now.

Last weekend Israel bombed oil storage facilities in Tehran. Tehran has ten million people in it. The smoke was so thick that noon looked like ten at night. People couldn’t go outside. One woman told NBC News she was sitting inside her apartment with a headache and a bitter taste in her mouth.

Then it rained – except the rain was acidic and oily and was burning people’s skin. Iran’s own health ministry said it’s already getting into the soil and the water. Their foreign ministry called it chemical warfare. The UN raised questions about whether bombing a civilian fuel depot even qualifies as a legal military target.

There’s a group called the Conflict and Environment Observatory that literally just tracks environmental damage from wars, that’s their whole job, and they’ve already logged over 300 incidents since February 28th. Not in Iran alone – across Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Jordan, Cyprus, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman. Three hundred incidents in eleven days.

And then there’s the Persian Gulf situation. The Gulf is basically a closed system – it’s not like the Atlantic where stuff disperses. It has coral reefs that took centuries to grow, the world’s second biggest population of dugongs (which are like manatees, gentle herbivores, completely harmless), mangroves, 700 species of fish.

Right now there are 68 fully loaded oil tankers trapped near the Strait of Hormuz because Iran has restricted access. Sixty-eight. Together they’re carrying about 16 billion liters of crude. Greenpeace modeled what happens if one of them gets hit or collides with something in the navigation chaos – and it’s not good. One Iranian warship has already been torpedoed near Sri Lanka and left a 20-kilometer oil slick.

We already know exactly what happens when this goes wrong because we did it in 1991. Oil residues were still killing marine life along the Saudi coast a decade after the Gulf War. The hawksbill turtle population in the Gulf was basically wiped out from the Iran-Iraq war pollution in the 1980s. Some of those salt marsh habitats took over nine years to start recovering, and scientists say full recovery in some areas could take decades. We know this. We have the receipts. And we’re just doing it again.

The other thing nobody seems to want to talk about is drinking water. These Gulf countries don’t have rivers, most of them. They drink desalinated seawater – Kuwait gets 90% of its water that way, Oman 86%, Saudi Arabia around 70%. Those plants are right on the coast.

Bahrain has said Iran damaged one of its desalination plants. Iran said the U.S. hit one of theirs, cutting off water to 30 villages. A strike landed 12 miles from Dubai’s main desalination facility. Tehran was already in a water crisis before any of this – their reservoirs were at 10% capacity last summer and the president was talking about evacuating the capital.

So. To recap. We have toxic rain falling on a city of ten million. Sixty-eight oil tankers sitting like a loaded gun in an ecologically fragile closed sea. Desalination plants getting hit across a region where people literally cannot drink the water any other way. And the dominant media conversation is about what this is doing to oil futures.

Shell and BP stocks are up, by the way. Global Witness called it “an excellent crisis” for fossil fuel companies. Just so we’re all clear on who’s benefiting while the Gulf turns into a petrochemical disaster.

The UN Secretary General said renewable energy can’t be blockaded or weaponized. He’s right.

We’re just ruthlessly killing people and the planet over bombs and oil. Same as it ever was.

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