Legitimating the environmental injustices of war: toxic exposures and media silence in Iraq and Afghanistan

Abstract

During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US Department of Defense burned the majority of its solid waste in open-air pits or trenches, producing large amounts of potentially hazardous emissions. While journalists have covered stories of US service members who link their illnesses to these fumes, they have almost entirely ignored potential civilian impacts. However, satellite images demonstrate that pollution from open-air trash burning on US bases could not have impacted US personnel without also harming Iraqi and Afghan civilians living near bases, indicating that burn-pit pollution is an important, if unacknowledged, environmental justice issue. Content analysis of news articles shows the extent to which civilian impacts have been left out of mainstream US media reporting on burn-pit pollution. This selective attention is symptomatic of the way military violence is legitimated, which involves a complicit news media that typically overlooks the humanitarian impacts of war.

Keywords:

• Environmental justice
• Iraq War
• Afghanistan War
• treadmill of destruction
• legitimation
• war reporting

Acknowledgments

I thank Nabil Al-Tikriti, Leslie Martin, and the anonymous reviewers at Environmental Politics for their helpful comments and advice.

Notes

1. These estimates were made using the lower eight pounds of waste per day average.

2. This analysis relies upon my observation of Google satellite images of current and former US bases, the locations of which were confirmed by at least two other sources. Such an analysis can only provide rough estimates of the proximity of homes and important landscape features near bases. While more exact mapping and measurements should be done in future research, my observational analysis is adequate for the argument at hand, which is simply making the point that US bases weren’t located in desert no-man’s-lands, but in populated areas and near environmental features upon which people depended.

3. This search was conducted in LexisNexis Academic, using such search terms as: ‘Burn pit and (Iraq or Afghanistan)’ and ‘waste and burn and (Iraq or Afghanistan).’

4. I used an iterative process for my content analysis, in which I first anticipated – given my initial familiarity with the topic – the categories I thought would best fit the stories being depicted in these news reports (Altheide 1987). As I read through the articles, I recorded which story matched each category, but I also ran across new articles that required the creation of new categories, or that challenged my categorization scheme. I therefore made additions and adjustments as necessary, and then went back to reassess previously coded articles.

5. For examples, see Amin and MacVicar (2014), LaPlante (2010), Senate Hearing (2009), and Simonich (2011).