World Water Day for a plastic world

Al Jazeera English

The theme of this year's World Water Day - marked annually on 22 March - is "Nature for Water", which, as the website of the United Nations Environment Programme informs us, "explores nature-based solutions (NBS) to the water challenges we face in the 21st century." 

The challenges are clearly dire; as the UN notes, 2.1 billion people currently "lack access to safely managed drinking water services," while an estimated 1.8 billion "use an unimproved source of drinking water with no protection against contamination from human faeces." 

In theory, of course, nature-based solutions are the obvious answer to problems in nature. The UN advises planting more trees, restoring wetlands, and reconnecting rivers to floodplains.

But while the whole "NBS" campaign will no doubt generate handsome revenues for a UN system that specialises in self-enrichment, no solution to water or related challenges is possible within a global capitalist system that is itself destroying nature.

And even if water is considered a basic human right under international law, there isn't much room for "rights" in a neoliberal milieu of comprehensive commodification and the eradication of any sort of terrestrial harmony in favour of the financial tyranny of an elite minority. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Iraq, 15 years on: A toxic US legacy

Middle East Eye

Fifteen years ago this month, the United States spearheaded a fantastically bloody war on Iraq as part of its ongoing effort to ensure the Iraqi nation’s perpetual misery.

Straight-up carnage aside, there were some other more trivial, yet still “spectacularly unsavoury”, results of the invasion, as veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn recalls: “Soon after US occupation officials took over Saddam Hussein’s palace complex in central Baghdad as their headquarters,” for example, “the lavatories in the palaces all became blocked and began to overflow. Mobile toilets were rapidly shipped into the country and installed in the palace gardens.”

As it turned out, the Americans had failed to read up on bathroom traditions in the Middle East, or to realise that in many parts of the world, defecation is not accompanied by massive quantities of toilet paper.

And while such visuals were no doubt also metaphorically relevant, given the excrement that passes for US policy in the region, the fallout of the war on Iraq has been toxic in far more extraordinarily pernicious ways.

Consider, for instance, Cockburn’s 2010 article for The Independent, headlined “Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah ‘worse than Hiroshima’”. In it, he outlined the results of a study by British scientist Chris Busby and colleagues Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi on the increase in reports of cancer, birth defects, infant mortality and other forms of suffering in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, the focus of a particularly vicious US assault.

To be sure, as one of the top polluters on the entire planet, the US military has never been thrilled about acknowledging what would appear to be obvious: that saturating the environment with toxic materials will have repercussions on both environmental and human health, including the health of the United States’ own warriors, as underlined by the afflictions affecting veterans of the Vietnam War and first Gulf War, among other imperial escapades. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Iran and Honduras: A Tale of Two Protests

The Washington Spectator

When scattered protests broke out in Iran at the end of December, Donald Trump took enthusiastically to Twitter to interpret the events for the rest of the world: “The people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime. The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The US is watching!”

And again: “The USA is watching very closely for human rights violations!”

The press breathlessly followed suit. As Oxford-based historian of modern Iran Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi observed on December 30, “Within the space of some 24 hours, nearly every mainstream Western media outlet has inclined to assimilate legitimate expressions of socio-economic distress and demands for greater governmental accountability into a question of ‘regime change.’”

Unsurprisingly, no such ruckus was elicited by events much closer to home—in that part of the so-called U.S. “backyard” known as Honduras—where protests following November elections that were widely denounced as fraudulent had reportedly left at least 31 dead by the beginning of January.

Indeed, the United States has never watched too closely for human rights violations in Honduras—perhaps because the United States is itself often complicit. (Not that the gringos haven’t been implicated in abuses in Iran: the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the demo- cratically elected prime minister, comes to mind, as does the ensuing reign of the notoriously repressive shah, a dedicated U.S. ally and obsessive purchaser of American weapons.)

Back in the 1980s, for example, Honduras was the playground for the CIA-trained death squad Battalion 3-16, while also serving as a launchpad for the U.S. Contra war on neighboring Nicaragua—a lengthy affair that was blatantly irreconcilable with even the most forgiving of human rights standards. READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR.

Elections, migrants, and a fascist renaissance in Italy

Middle East Eye

Earlier this year, Italian politician Attilio Fontana warned radio listeners that the "white race" was under existential threat thanks to the usual suspects: immigrants.

The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera quotes his analysis as follows: "We must decide whether our ethnicity, our white race, our society should continue to exist or should be erased."

Fontana is a member of the political party known until recently as the Northern League (Lega Nord), before the "Northern" qualifier was dropped to accommodate right-wing maniacs in central and southern Italy.

The League, commanded by European Parliament deputy Matteo Salvini, is part of what is described as a centre-right coalition, although it is anyone's guess how the "centre" fits in. Led by the Forza Italia party of Italy's recurring affliction, Silvio Berlusconi, the coalition is predicting favourable returns in Italy's general election on 4 March.

According to Salvini, who is also quoted in the Corriere della Sera article, the problem with immigrants is not so much "skin color" as the "Islamic presence in the country," which has resulted in a situation in which "we are under attack; at risk are our culture, society, traditions, and way of life ... Centuries of history are at risk of disappearing if Islamisation prevails."

Salvini credits the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci with having prophesied the attack, which indeed she did, in numerous unhinged rants on subjects ranging from alleged Muslim plots to blow up Saint Peter's cupola in Rome to equally nefarious Muslim schemes to replace European mini-skirts with chadors and cognac with camel's milk.

(Nor did Fallaci confine her ominous forecasts to the European continent. She also lambasted US universities for permitting persons by the name of Mustafa and Muhammed to study biology and chemistry despite the threat of germ warfare.)

In 2006, Fallaci threatened to explode a mosque and Islamic centre slated for construction in Tuscany, no doubt a rather ironic solution to the problem of terrorism.

Salvini, meanwhile, may have a particular problem with Muslims, but that doesn't mean that all other "others" are off the hook. The League has pledged mass deportations of asylum seekers to Africa, while Berlusconi has put the number of prospective deportees at 600,000.

Despite a long history of misdeeds - from tax fraud to mafia ties to infamous "bunga bunga" parties - billionaire Berlusconi is back in the game yet again, although he is barred until 2019 from holding office.  READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.