No hurricane is needed to breach Mosul dam. As it is built on soluble gypsum, its stability has depended on continual grouting. In 2007 the US Army Corps of Engineers carried out repairs.
But since the withdrawal of US forces, the dam has deteriorated. For several weeks in 2014 it came under the control of ISIS. Fighting between ISIS and Kurdish Peshmerga forces is just one of the reasons it has fallen into disrepair. The dithering of the Baghdad government is another.
“If the dam fails, it will be catastrophic,” General Lloyd Austin, the commanding officer of US Central Command, told the Senate armed services committee last week.
According to Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, a breach could send a 14m-high wave down the Tigris, killing up to 1.5 million people. Within three days the flood would hit Baghdad. It would, Power said, be “a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions”. She might equally well have said “of biblical proportions”. After all, the story of Noah’s ark has its origins right there, in ancient Mesopotamia.
The irony is, of course, that a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions is already happening in neighbouring Syria. According to the Syrian Centre for Policy Research, the death toll in the civil war stands at 470,000. The war has driven 4.8 million refugees to flee Syria, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. And Syrians form only part of the flood of displaced persons and migrants arriving in Europe by sea at a rate of roughly 100,000 a month. Last month about a third of asylum applicants in Germany were from Syria; 15 per cent were from Iraq and 11 per cent were from Afghanistan.
As Colin Powell, US secretary of state at the time of the invasion of Iraq, famously warned: “If you break it, you own it” — the so-called Pottery Barn rule. Future historians will struggle to decide which was more disastrous: US president George W. Bush’s decision to “break” Iraq by sending the US military to overthrow Saddam, or his successor’s decision to call for the overthrow of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad without taking effective military action, while at the same time withdrawing US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Either way, this is where we are: Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are all broken. But President Barack Obama doesn’t want to own them.
The crucial point, symbolised by the Mosul dam, is that this could all get much, much worse. I certainly see no reason why the sectarian conflict that is tearing the Middle East apart should not continue to escalate. I see no reason why the terrorist networks — of which Islamic State is only one — should not continue to grow. And I see no reason why the flood of humanity trying to escape from the failing states of the Muslim world should suddenly recede. In terms of the potential for exodus, the dam has yet to burst.
This disaster cannot be blamed solely on Obama, of course. Yet there is something appalling about the way he now seeks to pass the buck.
In a fascinating article in this month’s Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg reveals a President in denial about the consequences of his own sins of omission and commission. Everyone is to blame — everyone but him. At the top of the list of scapegoats are America’s traditional allies: not only Britain and France (Libya’s descent into chaos was all their fault), but also Israel, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
The President is gratuitously critical of British Prime Minister David Cameron, warning him that the special relationship will be over if Britain doesn’t spend more on defence, accusing him of being “distracted” when he should have been focusing on Libya and implying that he should avoid using the phrase “radical Islam” because it encourages “anti-Muslim xenophobia”.
Cameron is in good company. Also on the receiving end of Obama’s disdain are the Washington “foreign policy establishment” and the US military, which, the President complains, are always trying to “jam” him into going to war. Next in line for criticism are the members of his own cabinet — among them the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton — who urged him to intervene in Syria in 2012.
The President says he is “very proud” of his decision in 2013 not to carry out his threat to take military action if the Assad regime used chemical weapons in Syria. He seems not to understand that by asking President Vladimir Putin to “force Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons”, he opened the door to Russian intervention in the Middle East, a region the Kremlin was in effect shut out of by Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s.
Wondering why the death toll in Syria has leapt upwards in recent months? Step forward, Putin, whose air campaign against every anti-Assad force except Islamic State has been a bloody horror show.
In Obama’s mind, Syria’s civil war is just an irksome and senseless deviation from what he likes to call “the arc of history”. He believes that “overall, humanity has become less violent, more tolerant, healthier, better fed, more empathetic, more able to manage difference”. The big exception is the Middle East, because of the persistence of “tribalism”. This analysis helps to explain why the President has so badly underestimated Islamic State, calling it the “JV team” (short for “junior varsity”) in 2014.
More recently, he has come up with a new analogy. Islamic State, the President has explained to his advisers, is like the Joker in the Batman movie The Dark Knight.
Seriously? Last week we learnt that the intelligence services have got hold of Islamic State files containing the names and personal details of 22,000 jihadist fighters, including at least 16 British recruits.
Obama thinks he can defeat Islamic State, Batman-style, by taking out its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He does not understand that we are fighting a global network and networks generally can’t be decapitated.
The Mosul dam symbolises the critical state of an entire region. Like a huge wall of water, barely held in check by a crumbling dam, the combined forces of Islamic extremism, vicious sectarianism, networked terrorism and Arab-Iranian rivalry have yet to wreak all the havoc of which they are capable. The President, “very proud” of his declaration in 2013 that the US is “not the world’s policeman”, seems to think he can fix this dam with an assassination.
Last week’s good news? Google’s AlphaGo computer won a five-game tournament against Lee Se-dol, a leading player of the ancient Japanese strategy game of Go. Can someone please persuade AlphaGo to run for president?
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
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There is a powerful symbolism in the impending collapse of Iraq’s Mosul dam. Built on the cheap by Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s, it holds back up to 11 cubic kilometres of water, more than four times the volume of Loch Lomond and roughly twice as much as Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. Readers will recall what happened when Hurricane Katrina breached the levees around Lake Pontchartrain in 2005.