Javier Blas
The CIA calls it the “strategic commodity” of the Middle East. But it’s not referring to oil or natural gas. What the American spy agency has in mind is far more prosaic: drinking water. Don’t underestimate it, though, because if military hostilities continue to escalate, water could become the geopolitical commodity that decides the war between the US and Iran.
The Persian Gulf is gifted with a fabulous hydrocarbon endowment, worth trillions of dollars. What its desertic countries don’t have is water. From the 1970s onward, the oil money bought a solution: desalination plants. Today, the region relies on nearly 450 facilities to stop everyone from going thirsty.
The US Central Intelligence Agency has been briefing American policymakers for decades on the inherent risk of relying on those plants for such a crucial supply. In a secret assessment in the early 1980s – since declassified – the CIA said: “Senior government officials in some of the countries perceive it [water] as more important than oil to the national well-being.”
More than four decades later, not much has changed. Desalination remains a relatively cost-effective technology to transform seawater into drinking water. The downside is the vulnerability of the installations, and the oil and gas consumption required to fire the power generators that run the plants. About 100 million people live in the countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – all now under Iranian attack. Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE are, for all practical purposes, completely dependent on the desalination plants, particularly for metropolises such as Dubai. Saudi Arabia, and especially its capital, Riyadh, also relies heavily on them.
Under international law, the desalination plants are protected. But I have seen enough Middle Eastern wars to know the weight of the Geneva Conventions when missiles and bombs start flying. And they are: Iran has attacked a power station in Fujairah, UAE, that keeps one of the world’s largest desalination plants running. In Kuwait, debris from a drone interception caused a fire in one of the country’s plants.
The risk is enormous. Take the Jubail desalination plant, located on the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. It supplies Riyadh, via a roughly 500-kilometre-long pipeline system, with more than 90 per cent of its drinking water. “Riyadh would have to evacuate within a week if the plant, its pipelines, or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged or destroyed,” according to a 2008 memo from the US embassy in the kingdom released by Wikileaks. “The current structure of the Saudi government could not exist without the Jubail desalinisation plant,” the memo stated.
Since the cable became public, the Saudis have reinforced their water network. Other countries have also built up redundancy. Still, all the water plants are equally vulnerable – and all of them are within range of the Iranian missiles. The good news is that water is so strategic – and so human – that any Iranian direct attack on them would be considered a massive escalation, so perhaps a step too far for Tehran.
Still, Iran doesn’t have many options to prevail. Militarily, it cannot escalate against the combined Israeli-American war machine. Its only options are to hunker down, in the hope that a long-lasting conflict becomes economically too painful for its enemies, or go after so-called soft targets like energy sites, airports and water installations. From its actions, it’s clear the Islamic Republic has chosen to hit soft targets and hunker down, hoping to outlast the assault. Ultimately, the Islamic Republic sees surviving as winning – even if victory comes with immense losses.
Attacking several of those desalination plants would put Persian Gulf countries in an impossible situation. Outside military circles, the Middle Eastern water desalination plants receive little scrutiny; it’s almost a taboo subject. It makes sense: It’s difficult to believe that someone would deliberately target something so essential to human life.
But if we have learnt anything over the last few years, it is that the unthinkable happens. Remember Russia shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, the largest in Europe? Worse, perhaps, the history of the Middle East teaches us that the unthinkable has already happened when it comes to water supplies. Back in 1991, the Iraqi troops under Saddam Hussein deliberately opened the taps of a key Kuwaiti oil pipeline, spilling the crude into the Persian Gulf. The aim was twofold: hamper an amphibious landing by the US and its allies to liberate the country, and pollute the sea in the hope of damaging the nearby Saudi desalination plants.
Let’s hope the Islamic Republic, feeling cornered and fighting for its own survival, doesn’t resort to the very same tactics its once archenemy Saddam used. But the risk is real – whether by targeting desalination plants deliberately, or by accident due to a stray missile or drone. Oil is essential, but water is irreplaceable.
Bloomberg
