Why Iraq is Dying

[Music] this video is made possible by curiosity stream and nebula watch another full-length companion video to this one in my modern conflict series that explains the entire history of the wars of saddam from the iraqi invasion of iran to the u.s invasion of iraq which you can access by signing up for the curiosity stream nebula bundle deal for just 15 a year at curiositystream.com real life lore iraq is a country that is pretty well known for having a lot of problems but it's in a region where a lot of other nearby countries kind of don't compared to the other oil-rich countries around the persian gulf saudi arabia has a gdp per capita of more than 20 000 even higher than nine countries in the european union bahrain is more than 23 000 kuwait is more than 32 000 which is even higher than portugal the united arab emirates is more than 43 000 which is better off than italy while qatar is over 50 000 which is among the highest in the world and is even more than sweden or the netherlands but iraq's is only a little more than four thousand dollars which is more comparable to guatemala or namibia and part of the reason why is because in the past four decades since 1980 iraq has only known 13 years of peace separated by 28 years of open war and conflict in those years iraq's military has invaded two of her neighbors iran and kuwait her government has threatened two more turkey and syria whether rock itself has been invaded and occupied by the world's most powerful global superpower the united states and many of the reasons why have to do directly with iraq's geography you see the geography of the iraqi state pretty much guarantees that it will almost never be a land of peace and it was intentionally designed that way nearly a century ago wars and conflict surround iraq because they're pretty much intended to be inevitable and in order to understand what it is that makes iraq's geography so uniquely and devastatingly terrible both for itself and the peace of the rest of the world you've got to understand a lot about iraq's history human civilization pretty much began in present-day iraq around this area in between the tigris and euphrates rivers and for thousands of years since it's more or less remained the core of civilization in the area and it's no wonder why this area of western asia is nearly entirely covered by the vast and arid arabian and syrian deserts the largest deserts found on the asian landmass and where founding and sustaining large amounts of people are practically impossible intersecting through this empty and inhospitable desert however are the tigers and euphrates and the huge fertile oasis that the waters feed between them within this oasis was historically some of the richest and most fertile farmland found anywhere on the planet along with the vast marshes in the southeast the largest wetland environment found anywhere in western eurasia that was once roughly the same size as the u.s state of connecticut it was an ideal location for early humans to found their first settlements and with easy access to two major rivers it became the genesis point for the age of agriculture for centuries ever since the rich plain in between these two great rivers has been the epicenter of the global human population and the site of humanity's largest city many geographic lessons can be analyzed from iraq's history first of all water is the most precious of resources here without it the land would be nothing but empty and worthless desert and a system of canals are necessary to irrigate farms to feed the area's population when powerful empires like the babylonians the persians or the arabs concentrate their capitals in the area like with babylon stesophon or baghdad the soaring demand for labor will eventually lead to vast population increases that push the limits of iraq's ecological carrying capacity in the desert and when this happens a fragile and delicate balance exists between the people and the environment and since the region is on a relatively open plain on the doorstep of mountains in the north and the east it's always been pretty vulnerable to invasions from the hill tribes or migrating nomadic hordes that have the potential to utterly destroy all central authority inside of iraq which can then lead to the destruction and neglect of the region's vital water infrastructure and ultimately lead to a total collapse in the population and climate change throughout the ages poses an even further threat to this delicate and always present balance that is always difficult to maintain even during the best of times all of these historical and geographic realities continue to affect iraq today but they were even further exacerbated when the modern borders of iraq were drawn up by the british about a century ago prior to that happening the region of present-day iraq which at the time included kuwait was a part of the turkish ottoman empire and had been for centuries in 1913 what is now kuwait was a part of the basra province inside of ottoman iraq but the british entered into an agreement with a family who ruled the area that gave the british the rights to control their foreign policy which effectively meant that the area was a de facto british protectorate but it never actually signed any official independence from the rest of autumn in iraq the very next year came the first world war and the british suddenly finding themselves at war with the ottomans declared what became kuwait an independent british protectorate and then went on to occupy the rest of iraq when the war was concluded the british found themselves in possession of the entirety of ottoman iraq and they decided that now they needed to drop the boundaries between their own protectorate and their new colony which is how we ended up with iraq and kuwait being separated but the boundary was problematic for the newly created iraq as it only left them a mere 58 kilometers of coastline and most of that was covered by marshes and swamps and almost none of it contained any deep water areas for actual ports meaning that iraq was mostly landlocked even the iraqi king feisal the first despite having been installed as a puppet king by the british in the first place loudly voiced his disagreements at the absurdity knowing full well that those borders would mean iraq could never hope to become a serious naval power but his disagreements were ignored and while both being under british control iraq and kuwait both recognized the border in 1923 and ratified it once again upon iraq's own independence from the british in 1932. for decades afterwards the iraqis would argue and claim that kuwait was a rightful part of iraq and had only been separated from them by the meddling british and this would ultimately serve as the causas fellai for saddam when he eventually invaded and annexed kuwait decades later in 1990. iraq's meager coastline not only ensured that it would never become a strong naval power but it also ensured that the country would be one of the easiest in the world to blockade with two separate critical weak points the first was the small coastline itself wedged in between kuwait and iran and really only centered on the port of um kasser iraq's single and only deep sea port directly downstream from the large city of basra this is the only location on iraq's tiny coastline where modern large oil tankers can dock and load up at so capturing or otherwise neutralizing um kasir would shut down 100 of iraq's maritime trade but even that isn't entirely necessary because further up through the persian gulf is the strait of hormuz the only possible maritime exit point from the persian gulf to the global world ocean by blocking either of these two points one can shut down the entirety of iraq's maritime trade and her entire economy which is highly dependent upon maritime trade because of oil oil was of course one of the few late-game buffs that iraq was given but it's still a double-edged sword iraq possesses the world's fifth largest known reserves of oil and is also the world's fifth largest oil producer which ordinarily would have brought fabulous wealth to the country as it has in the other arab gulf states but the difference in iraq is that the oil isn't distributed evenly between iraq's various demographics you see when the british drew up the borders for iraq they didn't only separate kuwait and practically deny iraq a good coastline they also divided various demographics within which has kept iraq internally destabilized pretty much ever since its inception the country's borders contained within it very distinctive and separated shia arab sunni arab and sunni kurdish areas while the vast majority of iraq's oil reserves can be found within the shia arab and the sunni kurdish lands in the southeast and the north but very little is to be found anywhere in the sunni arab lands this has naturally led to the oil wealth in the country being unevenly distributed and it's even further exacerbated iraq's internal ethnic and religious differences that haven't been present in the other oil-rich arab gulf states to complicate matters further two-thirds of iraq's entire economy is made up exclusively of the oil industry today a resource that they do not exclusively control this means that when other oil-rich external powers like saudi arabia russia or kuwait decide on over producing oil they can crash the price and in turn crash the undiversified iraqi economy in the process this was another factor that led to iraq invading kuwait back in the 1990s because their overproduction of oil at the time was seen by the iraqi regime as a severe existential threat to their entire existence but even without these external pressures iraq possesses few means of exporting their oil out of the country there's one pipeline from the northern oil fields that stretches out to a turkish port on the mediterranean but this is within the kurdish territories which has a massive amount of autonomy from the central government based over in baghdad since nearly the entire western half of iraq has sparsely inhabited desert her trucking infrastructure is limited there's only two highways that connect iraq's central core between the tigers and euphrates to saudi arabia and there's only one highway leading into jordan shut these down and you largely shut down your rock's trucking capacity for the most part that leaves only maritime shipping but as mentioned before iraq's coastline is pathetically small and incredibly easy to blockade and shut down add in the decades of recent warfare and you're left with a situation where most of iraq's oil drilling and processing infrastructure is in a complete state of disrepair all of these factors mean that iraq's geography makes it incredibly easy to destroy her economy but we've barely even started yet because iraq's greatest geographic weakness isn't anything that i've mentioned yet it's water you see the tigers and euphrates rivers have blessed the deserts down here with life for thousands of years but in the 21st century iraq doesn't control either of these river sources they both begin up here in the high mountains of modern turkey while the euphrates continues to flow across half of syria before even entering iraq 90 of the euphrates's entire annual flow originates from within turkey while the remaining 10 percent is added inside of syria but absolutely no water is contributed to the river further downstream anywhere inside of iraq which means that in effect iraq is entirely left to the mercy of how much water they receive from the syrian and turkish governments at the same time multiple tributaries that feed the tigers begin over in neighboring iran the lands of iraq are further downstream from all of these sources which ultimately means that more than 80 percent of iraq's entire fresh water supply from both rivers begins in and is controlled by her three neighbors which is just a total recipe for a disaster all three of these countries can theoretically construct dams across their sections of the rivers to hoard more of the water for themselves and that's exactly what all three have been doing now for decades beginning back in the 1960s and 70s turkey began what they called their southern anatolia project wherein they constructed 14 dams across the euphrates basin and added eight additional dams across the tigris the crown jewel of the whole system was the autoturk dam here on the euphrates the fifth largest dam in the entire world that they finished in 1990. upon the dam's completion the turks withheld the entire flow of the whole euphrates river for an entire month in order to fill up the dam's reservoir an action that both syria and iraq protested over vehemently right up until the present the auditor dam alone has single-handedly reduced the flow of the euphrates further downstream by a third and collectively all of the dams across the river in both turkey and syria mean that only a quarter of the euphrates's historical flow even reaches iraq now this means that if turkey and or syria decided to flex their damn muscles iraq suffers the iraqi government has meanwhile repeatedly accused both countries of holding the river hostage and using water as a weapon and turkey knows this so their dams spread across both rivers are extremely well defended by multiple anti-air missile batteries should a regime in iraq ever get any dangerous ideas ultimately this all means that iraq just isn't getting enough water to supply her thirsty population of more than 40 million people nor enough to irrigate her farms and that's a notoriously dangerous problem historically for iraq to make matters even more dire it's also causing the rivers to get even more polluted than they otherwise would be when the rivers are flowing naturally the sheer volume of water rushing through them is enough to push most of the sewage and garbage that gets dumped into it further out into the persian gulf and away from the cities but when the flow is low this process gets crippled and it leads to even further water problems for iraq's population and farms and all of this isn't even to mention climate change which is making the temperatures inside of iraq hotter causing the water to evaporate even faster than it has in the past and while iraq has done some damp construction of their own across the two rivers they haven't been anywhere nearly as successful the largest of these is the mosul dam located here on the tigris just a bit upstream from the iraqi city of mosul it provides electricity from asul's nearly 1.7 million residents but unfortunately the entire thing could potentially collapse and destroy the entire city you see the saddam regime constructed the dam atop a surface of gypsum a soft mineral that dissolves deer in contact with water which is obviously not the greatest substance that you want to build a massive dam over and because of this the dam requires a small army of engineers performing constant maintenance to keep it from collapsing because if it does the massive water reservoir behind it will surge through the tigris and totally annihilate the city of mosul and continue surging from there to put even baghdad at a serious flood risk a 2006 report from the u.s army corps of engineers calculated that the dam collapsing would result in the deaths of as many as 500 000 iraqis prompting the writers of the report to further label the mosul dam as the most dangerous dam in the world shortly after the mosul dam's problems became apparent saddam's government began construction of another dam further downstream the tigers before masoor called the badushdam this dam's primary purpose was to block the potential tsunami of water that would be surging through the tigris in a hypothetical collapse of the mosul dam scenario before it hit the city of mosul itself however construction on this fail-safe only began in 1988 and then just two years later saddam led iraq into invading kuwait which brought them into war with pretty much the rest of the world and the fail-safe dam has never been finished since to make matters even more complicated isis ended up briefly seizing control of the mosul dam in 2014 during the iraqi civil war and the constant maintenance required to keep the dam from collapsing halted as they chased government technicians and engineers away by 2016 the u.s government was issuing dire warnings that the dam was in imminent danger of total collapse and that evacuations of cities downstream like mosul tikrit samara and baghdad should all be organized even the iraqi prime minister of the time repeatedly urged the citizens of mosul to evacuate but thankfully the disaster never came iraqi government forces recaptured the dam from isis and for the past few years since the maintenance schedule has been maintained and the dam's risk of collapse seems to have been mitigated so basically iraq's geography sucks because it has multiple points of catastrophic failure all of its maritime trade can be blocked by mining just this tiny area or by capturing this single city its highways leading out across the land can be easily shut down and bombed outside oil rich powers can attack our economy and cause recessions by simply drilling more oil inside of their own territory the oil inside of iraq itself is distributed unevenly amongst the different ethno-religious groups and fuels internal instability a single well-placed missile or attack here will destroy a dam that will completely devastate and the entire country with biblical scale floods while three neighboring countries can collectively just decide to basically shut off nearly all of iraq's water supply at a moment's notice and global climate change is just making all of these matters even worse iraq is geographically not in a secure location and that has caused iraq's leaders from time to time to lash out and attack their neighbors shortly after seizing power in 1979 saddam hussein initiated a massive and catastrophic invasion of neighboring iran that would end up resembling the first world war after eight years of chaos and bloodshed saddam then initiated another iraqi invasion of neighboring kuwait in 1990 which brought nearly the entire world in a coalition against him for years afterwards he initiated further military campaigns within iraq against various rebels opposed to his authoritarian regime and then everything culminated in 2003 when the united states united kingdom and other allies invaded iraq itself and finally overthrew him for nearly a quarter of a century saddam ruled iraq and led the country through four disastrous conflicts and the entire story is incredibly complicated and controversial to tell full of countless tragedies misunderstandings and outright lies that all culminated into why iraq and the world are the way they are today without a doubt the wars of saddam were one of the most critical and fascinating conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries to understand but unfortunately it's at the same time not acceptable for me to cover in any kind of detail on youtube due to their terms of service after nearly six years of making videos here on the site i know how making videos on youtube works and i know that this video already has a pretty high chance of becoming demonetized and unpromoted by youtube's algorithm because of the controversial content that i'm discussing but the moment i really start diving into the whole history of saddam's wars against iran kuwait and the western coalition why they began how they were fought and how they led to where we are today it's definitely a guarantee that this video will be censored and you won't get to see it so instead i created yet another full-length companion video in my ongoing modern conflict series that's about the same length as this video with all of that controversial but fascinating information included and uploaded it directly to nebula which as you've probably heard by now is home to tons of exclusive ad-free content like my entire modern conflict series with seven other additional full-length videos that you can go and watch right now detailing the soviet invasion of afghanistan the israel-palestine conflicts the russo-ukraine war the 2020 armenia azerbaijan war and the conflict between north and south korea of course the reason why all of these videos are only on nebula is because the youtube algorithm actually punishes me and all other creators forever trying anything new or controversial but nebula is a different platform without an algorithm and without any ads it's just a platform about great and unique content made by great and independent educational creators with plenty of other projects from other creators you probably already know like wendover productions have is interesting tier zoo and tom scott along with many others the best way to get access to nebula and all of this incredible content is definitely through the amazing curiosity stream and nebula bundle deal with its current sales price it's less than 15 a year to get full access to both sites and curiosity stream has some phenomenal stuff that you'll enjoy as well like kurdistan the untold story of mesopotamia an epic 52-minute long feature documentary shot on location in the northern part of iraqi kurdistan that will take you across an intensive archaeological expedition uncovering the ancient ruins of civilizations like the assyrians and the persians if you felt like my video didn't go deep enough into iraq's fascinating ancient and medieval history then this is the video for you with gorgeous 3d visualizations secret satellite imagery and beautiful historical animations i really can't recommend this documentary enough and i genuinely don't know about a better deal that exists in streaming you get two streaming sites both of them with content you'll actually watch and all of it for less than 15 a year at the current sales price but 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 6,705,670

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, iraq, iraq geography, geography sucks, iran iraq war, gulf war, ways to destroy iraq

Id: rkZfmySToZk

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021