‘US sees the Middle East as one long war — fuelled by oil and water’
Q. In your book ‘Running Dry: Essays on Energy, Water, and Environmental Crisis’ you write about an ‘energy-water nexus’; How does this work in the Middle East?
A. From my first book, ‘The Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Created Modern Saudi Arabia’, I became interested in how a place with so little of one resource and so much of the other negotiates the relationship between the two. Saudi Arabia is water poor but oil rich; this is especially characteristic of much of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. The countries surrounding it tend to be arid and water poor. They face a dilemma: How to manage the essential life-giving power of water for populations who have little say in their political processes but still need it to survive and support farming and modern life?
I have been interested in the relationship between water and oil wealth, especially since the 1970s, when oil became more controlled by regional producers. Arab states, especially Iran, nationalized their oil industries, seizing them from the large American and British oil companies that had historically dominated the global energy market and reversing the way they accumulated capital and money from the sale of oil. After the 1973 energy crisis, Arab states achieved unprecedented levels of wealth; thus the energy-water nexus has become an interesting environmental and political project. Oil-rich states in the Middle East have begun to find creative ways to use water not only to make ends meet, but also to cope with domestic political challenges to pursue modernization plans and even the odd imagined agricultural project – Saudi Arabia, for example, became an exporter of wheat in the 1980s, while Dubai and Abu Dhabi are among the largest per capita consumers of water on the planet. Extraordinary oil wealth allowed this to happen. This includes not just money, but also the systems and facilities within which oil operates. All of this allows these states to use other environmental resources, such as water, to achieve political goals beyond the dollars generated by oil. This is a fascinating complex set of relationships; oil is not just about money, it is also about the material and political worlds it helps create. In the Arab Middle East, water is at the heart of this.
Q. How is water distributed, used and organized in this arid region?
Answer: First, there is an ancient form of hydropolitics in the region centered around rivers and their flows. What we think of as the ‘Middle East’ as a sort of settled geography is actually an invention of empire. The Nile, Tigris and Euphrates are linked to the ancient history of both the Ottoman and European empires. There was always politics and conflict over the control of water resources and how rivers formed political boundaries; for example, today the Litani river is a place that Israel needs to establish its northern security perimeter in southern Lebanon.
We must understand Israel’s aggressive maneuvers and occupation of Southern Lebanon as an attempt to seize it and establish a foothold in it. Competition over the Jordan River between Palestinians, Israelis, Jordanians, Syrians and Lebanese is also at the center of regional resource wars. Much of Egypt’s demographic, agricultural, imperial and modern politics takes place within the fertile borders of the Nile. In Iraq, the Tigris and Euphrates form the region historically called the ‘Fertile Crescent’.
Fresh water is a scarce resource; However, states with rich oil revenues in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf have eliminated this resource scarcity by converting salt water into fresh water. To do this, they used both the money produced by oil, the electricity produced by desalination, and their huge, expensive networks, which started in the 1970s, enabling all kinds of adventurous rentier political projects. States with great oil wealth often face the problem of how to deal with domestic political problems; They often do this by redistributing wealth, not only through cash incentives but also by providing basic services such as access to fresh water that would otherwise be unaffordable. The half-billion dollar desalination plan is fully subsidized by the government, coming from oil profits accumulated since the late 1970s.
These are indispensable features of political life in the region. They are also part of patronage networks; The Saudi state could subsidize desalination as well as dairy industries and wheat farming, or the Emirates could subsidize agriculture in Sudan with its oil wealth. These are patronage schemes aimed at redistributing wealth and defusing political complexity. Remarkably, these are authoritarian entities without democratic politics, so citizens have no right to lay claim to the state; however, the state anticipates the difficulties of this relationship by purchasing potential competitors or challengers. Water plays an indispensable role in this, creating small pockets of industry, encouraging would-be competitors to seize water wealth and pursue other economic opportunities.
Question: The United States is currently at war with Iran; When you research America’s oil wars historically, which war do you think was the most important?
Answer: For the last 10-12 years, when I started publishing about the relationship between oil and the American war in the Middle East, I was arguing that there was not a series of ‘oil wars’. When the British finally dismantled their empire in the 1970s, Americans were driven by purely hegemonic aspirations. Leveraging the growth of oil profits in the region, the United States has built a form of militarism that has once tied authoritarian states, including Iran, but especially the Saudis and Israelis, to the American political order; this aims to maintain American hegemony and control the flow of oil out of the region. More importantly, the United States both pursued and activated military capacity here; It also carries the belief that the Middle East region is in a constant state of crisis. Since the 1980s, the US intervened in the Iran-Iraq War in 1986, expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, maintained its harsh sanctions regime against Iraq and Iran throughout the 1990s, invaded Iraq in 2003, and now went to war with Iran in the Persian Gulf and seized control of the Strait of Hormuz – these things we have not seen. It is necessary. Not wars to choose from, but a long war. The United States has maintained its long-term commitment to militarizing this region and understanding the threats to it. My work highlights that the United States has always viewed the Middle East as both in crisis and potentially unstable; But this state of potential and actual instability is also incredibly profitable for the United States. Therefore, the USA is trying to maintain its ‘almost war’ position in the long term. The beginning of all this was the Iranian Revolution in 1979; This was followed by the Reagan presidency and the Carter presidency, which committed the Americans to protecting the Persian Gulf by all means, and from the 1980s onwards there was a build-up of American military capacity in the region with an almost willing willingness to use military force for any reason to maintain hegemony. So this should be seen as a long war.
Q. What are the environmental impacts of this war on the Middle East?
A. It’s terrifying in many ways. At its most basic level, war is always a toxic project. The US targeted the Iraqi countryside from 1991 to 2012. It has also engaged in a sustained war against Iraq’s infrastructure and the systems that allow its living conditions to be maintained. We see a similar approach as a strategic priority by the Israelis in Gaza and Southern Lebanon today. During this Iran war, the United States and Israel targeted Iran’s infrastructure, oil fields, oil storage facilities, hospitals, logistics and electrical networks. Iran’s plans to strike desalination facilities in the region, as well as the toxic effects of destroying oil facilities and destroying the electrical, physical and other logistics networks that circulate food and water, are the kind of regional chaos and environmental disaster that will have short-term and long-term effects on people’s health. It will affect water quality and harm wildlife and ecosystems. This is a devastating situation and will remain largely unseen outside the region. However, I argue that it is not capricious, it is deliberate and aims to inflict maximum pain. This is an old American playbook and a newer Israeli playbook.
Question: Many Americans find the current Iran war unacceptable, but the war continues. What does this tell us about American democratic structures?
A. We are seeing two events right now. First, the planned US-backed coup in Venezuela and threatening maneuvers around Greenland reflect an attempt to reestablish American hemispheric hegemony, much like the Monroe Doctrine and old American imperial logic. This demonstrates a worrying disregard for international law and sovereignty. The United States acts with impunity because it maintains military superiority and therefore considers itself not accountable to international law. The Iran war certainly fits this logic. There are now connections between Donald Trump’s actions and previous American presidencies. The long war is a long war; Trump didn’t start this. It operates within a structure that it partially took over. But the way he asserts this is a radical departure from how past presidents have waged wars in the region. There is no claim to international consensus; For example, the sinking of an Iranian boat while returning from exercises with the Indian Navy shows me that international law is disregarded.
It also appears that domestic law is being disregarded and American institutions are being put under pressure. Many Americans can see that we are in a political crisis, and it could potentially be an existential crisis. The Iran war is opposed across the entire American political spectrum, including former members of the MAGA movement who support Donald Trump, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and other American ideologues on the increasingly anti-war right who are frightening for all kinds of reasons. Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, American liberal, left-of-center politics have become deeply critical of both American power and its relationship with Israel. However, there is nothing to talk about America’s political opposition. Although the popular will of America is anti-war, we do not have politically responsible people willing to oppose the administration; Which means we’re in real trouble. Going forward, Americans will pay a heavy price in terms of their political credibility, both in their domestic economy and in terms of how they are understood and accepted outside the United States. This is a tragic unraveling of the American political order in rapid time.
Opinions expressed are personal
