Opening this week’s edition of TIME magazine (June 26, 2017), my eye caught a pictorial article on the environmental battle that was waged last year in Iraq when ISIS set fire to oil fields to hinder the advance of the Iraqi and coalition force pushing them out from the territory they terrorized for years.
It is quite instructive that the world has become well-versed in the environmental and human toll of oil spills and fires. In that region, decades of poisoned water, poisoned wildlife, and landscapes as a result of months of exposure to deliberate acts of evil men, toxic fumes, oil -laden smoke and chemicals have been largely overlooked by the European and American “globalists”. Twenty-five years ago, while one American political party blamed another party, the apolitical Government bureaucracy was ignoring the toll on forces of the first Gulf War; I remember the “Gulf War Syndrome” where U.S. veterans had to fight through the courts to obtain needed care and Government acknowledgement of responsibility for their ailments.
The TIME article and other sources make the point that the Iraqi firefighting forces – petroleum engineers specialized in fighting these – have been doing so for years. With ongoing battles against terrorists’ IEDs, bullets at the same time as fires hot enough to incinerate men and equipment, Iraqi forces extinguished the fires the terrorists set along their retreat. The Iraqi people who lived through a “scorched -earth” mandate from Saddam Hussein to his forces in 1991, are the same people who suffered again from an extremist army who once again set fires, IEDs, and booby-traps; from the oil fires damage caused in the aftermath of the Gulf War, those exposed suffer from cancer, skin diseases, birth defects, mental issues and myriad other life-shortening illness. And that terrorists set their world ablaze again, the effects will continue to plague people. It is no wonder that the poor have risked dying in the attempt to flee to other countries.
While we wonder whether carbon dioxide in the air over the U.S. is a harmful pollutant, perhaps the same “climate change” advocates can travel to Iraq to advise them that ending America’s reliance on hydrocarbons will end their suffering.
Further reading:
- http://www.scpr.org/blogs/environment/2011/08/19/3282/photo-burned-oil-fields-kuwait-20-years-after-gulf/
- http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1426&context=auilr
- https://petapixel.com/2016/11/29/day-sun-never-rose-joey-l-captures-harrowing-images-iraq/utm_content=bufferee097&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Truths, Half-truths, and Sea Stories 