Response to DoD's Environmental Record

[Don Zweifel <zweifel@chapman.edu>]

Kuwait had 1330 wells all of which were actively pumping more than two
million barrels of oil daily before the war began. Shortly after the
Iraqi invasion on 2 August 1990 their forces began rigging explosives to
most of these wellheads located in the vast Burqan and Al Wafrah
oilfields. 

On the 21st of January 1991 Saadam became the greatest environmental
polluter in history when those charges were detonated. Over three percent
of Kuwait's oil reserves were lost or nearly three billion barrels of crude 
oil, roughly half of which either burned up or subsequently poured into
the Persian Gulf. Over 11 million barrels of oil gushed into the Gulf
daily until most of the wells were finally capped in November of that
year. 

Atmospheric contamination from this debacle spread all the way to the
Himalayas where black snow was reported. Acrid smoke and acid rain
extended to an area twice the size of Alaska. Tens of thousands of sea
birds, countless numbers of fish and other aquatic flora and fauna were
decimated. Ecologists stated that it will take many generations for the
Gulf and land mass encompassing Kuwait to recover. 

Saadam now has the singular distinction of probably being the first to
destroy a significant proportion of a precious natural resource so
ruthlessly and expeditiously.

Saadam also launched a scorched earth campaign against Kuwait's tank
farms, sole refinery and export terminals which effectively destroyed most
of this tiny nation's oil-production capacity. 

How can one condemn the Department of Defense and/or our government for
the sins and depredations of an aggressor nation? To be sure there was
plenty of jetsam and flotsam left over from this war in the form of
unexploded ordnance but shouldn't the initiator of this conflict pick up
the tab for clean-up via war reparations? Does one surmise that the allied
nations that were there to come to that nation's defense bear the brunt of
these costs?

In summation may we ask that our goal might be to glean information from
various diverse sources to enable us to come up with a relatively unbiased
point-of-view? At least a POV based on fact?

 Don Zweifel 

P.S.: The financial cost of the war including environmental depredation
and clean-up to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and hopefully Iraq amounts to $620
billion. Nearly 90 percent of the military campaign was underwritten by
Japan, Germany and the Arab League nation-states. The US was reimbursed
for most of it's military expenditures. We collected $54 billion via Tin
Cup I and Tincup II fund-raising expeditions. 

Sources: "The Gulf War Reader," by Micah Sifry & Christopher Cerf
and "Crusade, the Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War," by Rick Atkinson