The Water Wars Are Here, And They're Not Woke
The Iran War's latest horrifying component involves attacks on desalination facilities. A "not politically correct" conflict could render much of the region uninhabitableEdited by Sam ThielmanYASIIN BEY VOICE: That cool refreshing drink…When 'War' Secretary Pete Hegseth lauds the U.S.-Israeli aggression against Iran as "the opposite" of the "dumb, politically correct wars of the past," White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller heralds the end of the "Woke Pentagon," and the White House releases a propaganda video meant to associate the war with your favorite action movies, it's easy to dismiss their rhetoric as so farcically hypermasculine as to count as drag. But their meaning is measured in dead children, oil droplet rain over Teheran—and, perhaps most ominously, the destruction of the region's desalination plants. My phone this weekend filled up with vertical videos of Tehran burning and then smothered under dark clouds. The Israelis blew up fuel depots near the capitol, prompting a filthy soak in petroleum-inflected rain for miles around. "Something like a black monster has swallowed the sky over Tehran," a 27-year old teacher told Time. She called the air "unbreathable. … the skin on my face, especially my lips, is sore and raw. It burns and feels like diluted tear gas is in the air. It irritates my eyes, and I keep needing to clear my throat." Time further reported that the Red Crescent in Iran found yesterday that "about 10,000 civilian structures across the country had been damaged, including homes, schools and medical facilities." One of those schools, as Will Bunch eloquently writes, has made its way into the pantheon of U.S. wartime infamy. Researcher Carlos Gonzales of Bellingcat confirmed that the munition that destroyed an elementary school in Minab, killing at latest toll 175 people—an unknown-to-me but horrifying number of whom are children—was a U.S. Tomahawk missile. Trump's insistence that the Iranians blew the school up themselves was always an obvious lie, but at its heart is pure political fear: the recognition that the American people do not want to murder children. A scene like Minab isn't in Top Gun. J.A.R.V.I.S. in Iron Man distinguishes between civilians and combatants. Claude doesn't. I do not wish to move past the corpses of children the same age as my own. Nor do I wish to move past the unbreathable air over Iranian cities. But the war that produced them is escalating, and in a direction we should confront. Escalation is the reason why the oil markets shot from $60/barrel before the war to $100/barrel (as of this writing), even spiking at $120 last night. Much analysis early last week offered that oil prices weren't rising to 2022 Russian-invasion-of-Ukraine levels because the markets figured that the war would be over as quickly as Venezuela was. Now we're there, and the rising prices are outdone only by how steeply the line has climbed upward in nine days. Trump's vacillation last week over regime change had one virtue and one only: It meant he had left himself room to deescalate. Now his demand for "unconditional surrender" has left it to sink in that this war has barely begun. Even beyond the oil-depot bombing, we have started to get a frightening look into where it goes next. Both Iran and either the U.S. or Israel have begun to strike desalination plants in Gulf countries. (CENTCOM currently denies it, for whatever that's worth.) An Iranian strike last week on one of the world's most important ports, Jebel Ali in Dubai, came within 12 miles of hitting the 43 desalination units crucial to the viability of an economic powerhouse. Right now it appears the damage is minimal. But the threat of taking desalination offline represents the early manifestation of a long-feared development in the age of accelerating climate change: the targeting of water as a strategic asset. For those to whom this is obscure or unfamiliar: western Asia, and particularly the nations around the Gulf, suffers from a deficit of fresh water. That means desalination plants, where sea water is converted into fresh water, are the lifeblood of these countries. In November, as Iran suffered a severe drought, President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that parts of Tehran, where 10 million people live, might have to be evacuated. That was Tehran before the daily bombing (this latest run, at least) and the petroleum rain. "In the Gulf, desalination facilities are not merely infrastructure," Abdullah Baabood, an Omani academic at Waseda University in Japan, told the New York Times. "They are essential lifelines that supply drinking water to millions. Striking them risks turning a military confrontation into a direct threat to civilian survival." Once upon a time, U.S. intelligence forecasting contextualized the prospect of mass drought, including in Western Asia, within a cluster of climate fears. War was considered a lesser risk. "Intrastate disruptions and conflicts probably are more likely to be the immediate result as pressures build within countries for relief and migration from impacted areas puts added strains on other areas," the National Intelligence Council (NIC) wrote in a 2012 report that no one read about the world in 2030. "However, the fact that many of the river basins in the most affected water-stressed areas are shared means that interstate conflict cannot be ruled out—especially in light of the other tensions ongoing between many of these countries." Four years ahead of the date the NIC forecasted, its caveat is now the headline. Between the United States, Israel, and Iran, the combatants of this war are notable for their disinterest in human rights and international humanitarian law. They also have the global economy in the crosshairs. FOREVER WARS friend Esfandyar Batmanghelidj made the sobering point on American Prestige on Saturday that not since World War II have cities crucial to the global economy come under sustained attack. "Most ships passing through the [now-closed] Strait of Hormuz are not oil tankers or LNG carriers, but container ships that connect the Gulf economies to global supply chains," Yar wrote in a Foreign Policy piece last week. (Stay for the part of the podcast where Yar explains how the Strait closure now taxes the minimal fuel storage capabilities of the oil exporters. When they exceed that storage, they'll have no choice but to depressurize their oil wells to slow or cease production, something that will take months to restore to capacity. The economic pain this war will cause is deep and global. On the other hand, who wants to speedrun decarbonization?) When Trump talks about unconditional surrender, it's even odds that in his mind, he's putting himself in Patton and saying the sort of thing that he thinks a decisive leader out of central casting must say during wartime. When Miller and Hegseth sneer at politically correct wars and woke Pentagons, they could easily be stroking the erogenous rhetorical zones of conservative voters who balk at long wars. These are men more equipped to waging a flame war than winning a real one. But it's worth returning to Hegseth's full quote, from his press conference at U.S. Central Command on Friday: We have clear objectives with maximum authorities on the battlefield. The dumb, politically correct wars of the past were the opposite of what we're doing here. They had vague objectives with restrictive, minimalist rules of engagement. For all Vice President J.D. Vance talks about "overlearning the lessons of the past" wars, Hegseth is shaped by his takeaway from his time in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Hegseth's view, the wars would have been won had we only removed "restrictive, minimalist rules of engagement." It's a cope I've heard often over the years. Invariably, it's invoked by people who don't wish to face the reality that these were unwinnable wars, propelled by the same bloodthirst that we hear from Hegseth lately. There is no such thing as a woke war. The "minimalist" rules of engagement during the War on Terror, as Azmat Khan has unearthed, allowed for, among other things, aerial destruction of urban landscapes and official deceit around them. The "woke Pentagon" allowed senior officers to teach that Mecca and Medina should be nuked. And I suspect Hegseth knows fully well that there are no "clear objectives" in the Iran War. What is supposed to come afterward is even murkier, just like in Iraq. Hegseth has been an enthusiastic proponent of the idea that the more indiscriminate violence a war features, the greater its likelihood of success. This is the mark of a person who should not be anywhere near a chain of command. When Hegseth says he wants "maximum lethality, not tepid legality," believe him. The longer the war drags on, the greater the potential for Hegseth to try proving his point, and doing so at machine speed. In the balance of a long war—again, waged by people on both sides who do not distinguish themselves by their commitments to the value of human life—is the potential to render large swaths of the region uninhabitable. THE BEST RESPONSE I have seen to Hegseth, after a fashion, came from Chicago Archbishop Blaze J. Cupich. In "A Call To Conscience," a statement the archbishop released on Saturday, he writes: Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. But, in the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military. We become addicted to the "spectacle" of explosions. And the price of this habit is almost unnoticeable, as we become desensitized to the true costs of war. But the longer we remain blind to the terrible consequences of war, the more we are risking the most precious gift God gave us: our humanity.Awmeyn.
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