Episode 19: The Footprint of Industrialized War (from the archive)
Murtaza Hussain on How War Contributes to the Climate Crisis
Speaking at the United Nations Climate Conference this November, President Biden called climate change “the existential threat to human existence.” And in October, the Department of Defense issued its own warning, noting the effects of climate change are “exacerbating existing risks and creating new security challenges for U.S. interests.” But while the Pentagon takes climate change’s risks seriously, it remains one of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gasses. This week, we’re revisiting another favorite episode from season 1 with Murtaza Hussain, a political and national security reporter for The Intercept, who helped us understand the ecological and health ramifications of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how the military’s expansive footprint exacerbates the climate crisis.
Listen Here: Apple Podcasts | Google Play | Libsyn | Radio Public | Soundcloud | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS
Murtaza Hussain is a journalist for The Intercept whose work focuses on national security, foreign policy, and human rights. He is the author of the 2019 article, “Industrialized Militaries Are a Bigger Part of the Climate Emergency Than You Know.”
This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.
Transcript:
September 27, 2019
MURTAZA HUSSAIN: We've had a tendency to bucket climate change under the category of environment. And in reality, it's something which is not in any category separate from the rest of our lives. It's at the core of anything that's valuable to humans—it’s the stability of our climate.
***
MARK HANNAH: This is Mark Hannah of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Welcome to None of the Above. This week we're talking about climate change. As Climate Week wraps up here in New York City at the seventy-fourth General Assembly of the United Nations, we're reflecting on the climate crisis and its vast implications not only for our planet, but for American foreign policy. Murtaza Hussain just wrote a piece for the intercept called “War on the World: How the Industrialized Militaries are a Bigger Part of the Climate Emergency than You Know.” Murtaza, glad to have you here today.
HUSSAIN: Thank you for having me.
HANNAH: How did you become a national security, war, and foreign policy reporter?
HUSSAIN: The last eighteen years have been very formative. The developments around the world feel that an era of endless war behooves people to comment on it, and I just began writing about it on my own.
HANNAH: Which countries have you visited and reported from?
HUSSAIN: I’ve reported from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, France, Bosnia, Serbia—those are ones I remember off the top of my head.
HANNAH: The Pentagon has a lot of research to show that climate change and the political instability it creates is a growing problem. But you sort of flip that back around on them in your article and show that it's not just climate change that contributes to war, but in fact, war contributes to climate change. Talk a little bit about your article for us.
HUSSAIN: So the Department of Defense is one of the biggest institutional emitters of CO2 in the world. And the fact is warfare in the modern form is a very industrial process. There's heavy logistics involved.
The munitions are more damaging to the environment than in previous eras. During the era of war that started after 9/11, the U.S. has emitted hundreds of millions of tons of CO2, more than many nations around the world. And the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, of course, created a terrible human impact. But the impact on the environment in these countries has also been devastating. And the knock on effects of increased rates of disease, crop failure, and the overarching contribution to our climate crisis from the emissions of the CO2 is one of the under-counted forecasts of war.
HANNAH: Can you give us an example of a war right now in which the devastation to the climate has taken a toll on the population as well?
HUSSAIN: You look at the conflict in Iraq. There was a huge deployment of U.S. troops over very large distances. If you think about the impact of commercial flights, you can magnify that many times. Military flights, industrial-scale movement of people, burn pits where they burn chemical debris and other military waste…
HANNAH: They're essentially burning all their refuse.
HUSSAIN: Right. They're engaging practices which would be very controversial if done in the United States because of the obvious impact to the local ecology and the local population. And there have been studies done in Iraq that show the location of these military bases correlates to higher rates of birth defects and cancer. So what we're seeing is a stress on the environment globally from the emissions of CO2 being used to facilitate large-scale wars, which in many cases seem to be unnecessary and have gone on for unnecessary duration. And secondly, the reality of modern warfare is very destructive to the environment by its nature. I think the first war people start realizing this is World War I. The new emissions, meaning new munitions created during that war, had a very devastating impact on the environment of Europe.
And that has only escalated as time has gone, as weapons have become more and more sophisticated. You see that the damage they can do in the long term to the ecology of places where war is fought is more and more difficult to recover from.
HANNAH: You mentioned the Pentagon as part of the problem, but there, they've also been pretty clear-eyed about the reality of climate change.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HANNAH: Does that awareness give you any hope?
HUSSAIN: Well, it's the case that the Department of Defense is one of the few branches of the U.S. government which is absolutely unequivocal that climate change is real and is being caused by human activity. They're also one of the biggest funders of climate research, because—I suspect—they're insulated to a greater degree from the politicization of other branches of the government. So in a sense, it's good that they have an accurate picture of what the climate emergency is, and they’re trying to develop a more accurate picture. As an ordinary person, I do find it scary because in the study they're releasing the future they're envisioning is very bleak—a climate-ravaged world with greater levels of human displacement, greater levels of political instability and violence, all stemming from climate change.
In an ideal world, you wouldn't want the military to be the only one who's honest or funding this issue. It should be a whole society effort of which the military is one component.
HANNAH: You talked about an Indian gentleman, a reformer who kind of took stock of the ecological catastrophe he saw, when he just saw something which, as you write, we almost regard as mundane nowadays—an oil spill. Can you talk about him and his observations?
HUSSAIN: Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian philosopher and polymath during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he was quite an incisive critic of the new industrial civilization, which was coming about around the world, and recently in India that time. He had very stark warnings about the ecological impacts of industrialization generally and industrial warfare in particular.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HUSSAIN: He warned about a century ago during a period of World War I that if this process of industrial warfare continued escalating, it would result in very serious impacts on the global environment, which could potentially make human life impossible or lead to some self-destructive cataclysm among human beings, either due to direct violence against each other or by undermining the environment upon which all of our lives depend.
So it seems that over time his warnings, which were couched in general philosophical terms, have become more material. We can see what he was talking about. He and others, when they were warning that if we do not change the way we created modern society, change the way we fought, and fought less perhaps, we will be heading for a crisis which none of us can manage collectively. We have had a tendency to bucket climate change under the category of environment, and in reality it's something which is not in any category separate from the rest of our lives. It's at the core of anything that's valuable to humans—it’s the stability of our climate. It's an all-encompassing category. I think as time goes on and as the crisis becomes more acute, we have to look at politics, culture, and national security all within the climate frame. And when we talk about endless war, we should talk about it in the same category and with endless consumption, because we are not recognizing the limits on our ability to have certain things.
HANNAH: So it sounds like a criticism of the military industrial complex, but also a criticism of modern industrial life more generally.
HUSSAIN: Well, you know, it is not a criticism of modernity generally, because, of course, it has brought us many good things which we value. And Tagore, who I quote, was not a wholesale critic of modernity, but he did perceive a potential downside to it if it was not modulated by certain other human impulses to constraint and to compromise.
And I think about it in terms of the wars. We've been fighting a war in Afghanistan for eighteen years now, and there does not seem to be any conclusion in sight if we continue fighting. And yet we're continuing to fight them now, to not any particular end, but in the hope that some sort of better solution at some point online will come about. In the meantime, we're killing a lot of people. We’re dying in great numbers as well, and we’re causing irreparable harm to the Afghan environment. So at some point we have to factor in the full range of costs of going to war.
HANNAH: The environmental cost is something that's—and you cite this new, relatively recent “Cost of War” project report on military and carbon emissions from Brown University. Can you talk a little bit about that report and what you learned from it?
HUSSAIN: The Brown University “Costs of War” study is one of the first attempts to quantify the Department of Defense’s CO2 emissions over the last two decades, roughly, of war.
They found that if the DOD was a country, they'd be a bigger emitter of CO2 than most countries in the world. And its most CO2-intensive activity specifically is warfare. So the study kind of tells us something that could have been suspected, but it's valuable because it gives us a figure. And the figure is in the hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 emitted over this time in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And these wars have not been popular in the United States because there's a feeling they haven't brought any benefit. They’ve reduced American prestige. They haven't achieved any specific goals for the most part. And we talk about the cost—the human cost and lives lost and the money spent—but then also more money is going to be spent, more lives will be lost in the climate crisis, to which this is a not insignificant contributor.
HANNAH: I want to go back now, Murtaza, and talk about some more specific effects. We talked about burn pits and deforestation. Are there any other specific sorts of ways in which you see this problem crop up?
HUSSAIN: One of the other big examples in Iraq is the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HUSSAIN: And as it turns out, these munitions were used in the recent bombing campaign in Syria as well, although the DOD had indicated at one point that it wouldn't be. These are highly radioactive munitions. They're typically used for armor-piercing purposes in combat. And yet they have a great impact after the war is over, after the fighting is done, because they have an impact on the local population and the levels of radioactivity in people's hair and blood and teeth, which are elevated.
There was a battle in Fallujah during the Iraq war, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, where depleted uranium was used quite intensively, and later studies showed there was a very high rate of cancer incidents in Fallujah, elevated rates of birth defects. It certainly had an impact, a generational impact, on Iraqis well beyond that time of the battle.
When you're imposing generational costs on people who weren't freshly born in time the war began, it's a very serious cost of war not added into the death tolls that we typically consider.
HANNAH: What do you think it's going to take to get people to really care about ending a forever war? You know, there's this climate of urgency. Do you think the climate reporting you draw on and do yourself will shake the public consciousness, or what do you think? What do you think is required there?
HUSSAIN: Well, the issue is that people tend to only consider a crisis as urgent when they see the direct effects in their own locality or among people they see a shared identity with. There was a lot of public pressure to end the Iraq war, the original U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, because there was a heavy rate of U.S. casualties in that war.
And that created a great impetus from the public to end the war. The war in Afghanistan has a very low rate of U.S. casualties. There's a smaller or more defined U.S. footprint. Most of the casualties are Afghan, either on the government side or on the Taliban side. And so you can have a forever war as long as there aren't flag-draped U.S. coffins coming back to the United States, which will antagonize people here. So it's very difficult. The war could technically go on for a very long time as long as that doesn't happen.
HANNAH: How is that possible, though, when you have Donald Trump, who ran on ending this war and saying in his latest State of the Union that great nations don't fight endless wars? And you've got now some of the major 2020 candidates talking about starting to bring troops home right away. Are you just not too optimistic that any of them are going to follow through?
HUSSAIN: I think the wars may end because it's still a great commitment of U.S. resources. Those resources could be used elsewhere. It's just not as pressing an emergency as it would have been if a lot of Americans were dying. There were recent peace talks with the Taliban, which fell apart, and the U.S. government is comfortable with it potentially falling apart, even if that's not their preference, because they know there's not an immediate, urgent public backlash that will ensue if the peace talks fail. Whereas Iraq, there was much more fire that had to be put out. And when the U.S. did go back to Iraq to fight ISIS, they made sure their presence was mainly in the sky. So there were minimal, if any, U.S. casualties.
I still think the war in Afghanistan is probably reaching a breaking point. I think it's due to other slower-burn issues like financial cost and strategic costs of being there. If people can consider the climate impact of the war, that's also very important. But it's also the case that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is not as huge as it was in Iraq. So Iraq was really the bigger climate impact, although the war in Afghanistan certainly has not been salutary to the Afghan climate. And the continued breakdown of Afghan society under war has created a lot of knock on effects such as deforestation, which will have long-term impacts on that country.
HANNAH: So you are not a climate or environmental reporter. You mostly do national security, and you've done more reporting like, what is it? What is the one thing that surprised you the most while doing research for this article?
HUSSAIN: Well, I wouldn't say I was surprised necessarily, but I would say it does make me think all reporters should have some tertiary familiarity with the major issues of climate change, maybe the figures that the goals the IPCC have set out for what we should look for. What does it mean when there's x parts of carbon per million in the atmosphere? I think reporters generally should have familiarity with the issue because it's going to be the macro issue of the coming generation.
Interlude featuring archival audio
HUSSAIN: If we can look with a climate frame at more of the things we slot into national security or politics or other categories, we can give a better appraisal as to how they truly impact people, what the real costs and benefits are, and everything we're doing, because it's all occurring in a potentially constrained environment—which is a natural environment—which seems to be reaching a breaking point because of our emissions of CO2.
You mentioned Syria at the beginning, and there was a drought in Syria preceding the war. It's not that the drought caused the war, but it creates stresses in a very authoritarian system which was unable to deal with these kind of stresses or unsuited to deal with moving populations. The drought occurred in Lebanon and Israel and Jordan, but because they had more flexible systems, they were able to evolve and adapt to it. But the world is created on the whole edifice of imperfect human institutions, and a lot of those institutions are going to go through a real stress test. And many of them are going to break as it did in Syria.
HANNAH: You wrote, “The United States is poison to the world for vanity projects.” Explain what you meant by that.
HUSSAIN: Well, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001 weren't really necessary. The war in Iraq was very arguably not necessary—I think it was inarguably not necessary. It was a war of choice. And then the war in Afghanistan, after the Taliban was defeated in late 2001, could have ended on better terms than it will end now. The Taliban was basically defeated. They were begging for any sort of agreements. They were mainly interested in going back to the villages unmolested, and they were ready to effectively disband as a group. But then instead of accepting that surrender effectively, the U.S. went on a mission to eradicate the Taliban completely, which forced them to back into a corner where they decided to fight, and to fight back very effectively. And now, eighteen years later, they're in a much stronger position than ever. And the U.S. is going to leave at some point with a worse deal than they could have had in 2001. In pursuing a very maximalist utopian solution that has actually killed hundreds of thousands of people now—in these wars in which people do not have to die—they've done harm to the environment. And, you know, they're going to get something worse. This is a great scandal. It's the biggest scandal of the war, that they're going to negotiate an end to it now, which they could have done a very, very long time ago. So, I wrote the article to be provocative, but I think there's definitely a message that we have to look at what is necessary and what's not. We have to recognize even the awesome force of the U.S. military is limited. And if we are going to pursue things which do not have time-bound, achievable goals, eventually they will essentially be pursuits of vanity, and they will have horrible ecological and human consequences because the mode in which we wage war is, by its nature, so destructive to the environment.
HANNAH: And I mean, you're talking about war. We're talking about climate degradation and catastrophe and emergency. How do you personally, in your own life, cope with these kinds of stressful topics?
HUSSAIN: Well, you just have to try to keep in mind that history is very long, and change is constant. There have been very bad points in human history before, and people persevered through them. There was the Black Death. God forbid we ever recreate something like that. But, you know, you just have to hope things will be OK. And the planet’s going to—
HANNAH: You are, in the end, an inherently hopeful person as well?
HUSSAIN: I mean, I wouldn't say that necessarily, but, you know, the planet’s going to survive. We may not survive, all of us with it. And I think there's going to be a lot of suffering in the future. But losing hope is very dangerous. If you see we've passed a point of no return, it doesn't matter anymore. We might miss the opportunity to make things significantly better than they would have been, even if things do get worse. And every degree of warming we avoid is tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people whose lives could be saved.
HANNAH: What kind of sacrifices have you made in your own personal day-to-day life as a sort of climate-conscious journalist?
HUSSAIN: Well, I'm trying to avoid driving as much as possible, and flying as well. I think we do have to think about this in macro terms, though, because I think of —going back to India and the article—the example of Gandhi. Gandhi was speaking when he saw the—when he was taking part in the free India movement, he adopted the image of a fakir, a very poor Indian itinerant individual. And he stopped wearing Western clothes. He started spinning his own robes on a loom to show, “Look, if I'm saying you're oppressing us in England, I'm the embodiment of rejecting that, and my own personal behavior, even though I actually was a British-trained barrister and still practiced law in South Africa.”
But his personal politics of rejection were not efficacious. They did not result in policy change he wanted to see. It was actually very hard for political organizing on a macro level, which they did.
So I think we should all do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint and be cognizant of it, especially cars and flights and the individual, very serious contributors to climate change. But ultimately, it's going to take something else that occurs at a collective level—a collective sacrifice, together—which will make a decisive difference.
HANNAH: Well, Mutaza Hussain, thank you very much for joining us. You can catch Murtaza’s article on The Intercept. This has been Mark Hannah for the Eurasia Group Foundation, bringing you another episode of None of the Above, where we seek new answers to America's foreign policy questions. If you like what you heard, and you want to hear more episodes like this one, you can catch us on noneoftheabovepodcast.org or anywhere you get podcasts. Tell your friends. Please rate and review us, and we appreciate you tuning in. Catch you next time.
