Armies have been despoiling the environment of the Middle East for millennia. But it was the 1991 Gulf War, says Jay Austin, a senior attorney with the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Law Institute, that dramatically revealed the limitations of international law in governing the environmental ravages of wartime.

Saddam Hussein's environmental crimes were on an epic scale. During the Gulf War, his forces torched hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells. When that conflict was over, he drained the vast Mesopotamian marshlands of southern Iraq as an act of collective punishment against the mostly Shi'a "Marsh Arabs," who had the temerity to oppose his rule.

Now that Saddam is gone, who is responsible for the health of the Iraqi environment? Before the current war started, Secretary of State Colin Powell famously warned President Bush of the "Pottery Barn rule": If you break it, you own it. But was that rule supposed to apply to the environment? And if so, who was to enforce it?

The clearest prohibition of environmental abuse in wartime is contained in the 1977 Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions. But the United States has refused to ratify the protocol, with the Pentagon claiming that its humanitarian tilt "would thwart quick victories in war." According to Ken Hurwitz, an international humanitarian-law specialist with Human Rights First in New York, "The problem is that although the United States has accepted many of the provisions of Protocol I in practice, it has specifically rejected Article 55." This bars "methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment."

If the Geneva Conventions offer no remedy, what about the laws that govern the postwar conduct of a victorious occupier? "You're more or less stuck with the Hague rules," says Hurwitz, referring to the 1907 Fourth Hague Convention, which makes no mention of the environment. Yet while occupying forces often take a minimalist view of their responsibilities, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq did exactly the opposite. It demanded sweeping legal powers to remake Iraqi society, arguing that peace and security depended on reviving the economy and guaranteeing the provision of basic services. In the process, the coalition -- unintentionally, no doubt -- assumed broad responsibility for protecting key elements of the Iraqi environment.

The centerpiece of the reconstruction effort was to restore electrical power and clean water. And even if international law offered few enforceable provisions in these areas, U.S. law most certainly did.

In October 2003 Congress appropriated $18.6 billion for Iraqi reconstruction. The lion's share of work in the power and water sectors was given to the Bechtel Corp., the giant San Francisco-based engineering concern. Like all federal contractors, Bechtel was bound by the regulations of the government agency that issued its contract.

The agency in question was the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), which awarded Bechtel two contracts worth a total of $2.8 billion. About $1.8 billion of this was earmarked for "assessing and repairing selected power, municipal water and sewage systems."

Bechtel said that it would repair water treatment and distribution systems in 15 cities within six months; within a year, every town in Iraq was to have potable water. At the same time, Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Authority, vowed that electricity production would rise from about 4,400 to 6,000 megawatts by the time the occupation ended in June 2004. None of this happened. Power output remained stalled at the depleted prewar levels, and Iraqis were forced to swelter through a second summer of rolling blackouts.

Clean water is directly related to the reliability of power supplies. Iraq's sewage treatment system, which relies on a network of pumping stations, breaks down when blackouts occur and the pumps stop running. When this happens in Baghdad, for example, huge quantities of raw sewage and industrial waste pour directly into the Tigris River, the city's only source of drinking water. The result, says Bathsheba Crocker, a post-conflict reconstruction expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., is "an increase in water-borne diseases, everything from cholera to hepatitis and chronic diarrhea."

Far from being the key to increased security, water and power supplies instead became a principal focus of roiling public discontent. By April 2004, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that just 11 percent of Iraqis believed "coalition forces are trying hard to restore basic services such as electricity and clean drinking water."

It's tempting to let Bechtel off the hook by citing the inevitable delays caused by violence, sabotage, and looting. But in fact Bechtel's problem was that it often moved too fast, not too slow. Above all, the company rode roughshod over AID's environmental regulations. In June 2004, on the eve of the transfer of sovereignty, the agency published a scathing audit of Bechtel's performance. In 60 of its 72 projects, Bechtel had failed to carry out an adequate environmental review before starting work. AID has the power to issue exemptions, but it had declined to do so in Bechtel's case, given the critical environmental importance of its projects.

The Iraq occupation has shown again that international law remains a dead letter as far as the environment is concerned, while U.S. law is easily flouted by private contractors. The challenge now, says Jay Austin, "is to harness some of our newfound awareness to the task of reforming international law. In the same way as we've learned to address human rights issues and the movement of refugees, so we're beginning to apply some of the lessons to the issue of environmental damage and the health of civilian populations."
-- George Black