So Israel allowed Lebanese scientists to have a look at the damage the oil leak was causing to the coast. No clean up permitted yet of course, so fish and crabs and birds and shellfish go on dying and an ecosystem will be damaged at least for decades, perhaps irreparably.
Funny thing about wars. At one level about the clash of armies, at another about civilian deaths, at yet another about infrastructure damage. But rarely, ever, any concern about the damage to the world we all, victors, vanquished, and collaterally damaged, have to live in after the captains and the kings depart.
There seems to be something about the military mind that sees the environment as either an obstruction to shock and awe, or a test tube for refining the shock tactics. Since time began, all over the world, military training and action both seem to involve endless environmental degradation, with rarely a word spoken against it. Other businesses may be held to some kind of account, as inadequate as that may often be, but the business of the armed services, it seems, has a free pass when it comes to destroying the world we all, military and civilian alike, have to live in.
So bomb oil tanks and the safety mechanisms meant to hold back oil spills, and destroy the coast of Lebanon. Saddam Hussein had people opening up the valves on oil wells and setting fire to the oil. Elsewhere we have seen Agent Orange sprayed on jungle, practice bombing runs over coral reefs, sonar causing the death of cetaceans, rockets test fired into unspoilt country, wrecked tanks and other equipment left sitting on battlefields, depleted uranium used in artillery shells that now litter the Middle East, tens of thousands of mines dropped from planes, plans for massive test explosions, atomic submarines either sunk or leaking, and so on, and on.
I thought the business of armed forces was to protect their countries. It seems, instead, that they are often happy to destroy, not villages, but whole countries, in order to save them. Is it something about the military mind, do you think, or is it something about us that we allow this to continue, without protest, because it is done in the name of defence? It is a bit like destroying civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism, but civil liberties, can, eventually, be brought back. The environment, once lost, is lost forever.
Increasingly the public understands that one of the costs of doing business must be preventing or repairing environmental cost. We should also increasingly recognise that the cost of doing war on the environment must also be accounted for.