Cross-posted from TomDispatch. This report appears in the winter 2009/10 issue of World Policy Journal and is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine. BAGHDAD -- From his mud brick home on the edge of the Garden of Eden, Awda Khasaf has twice seen his country's lifeblood seep away. The waters that once spread from his doorstep across a 20 percent slab of Iraq known as the Marshlands first disappeared in 1991, when Saddam Hussein diverted them east to punish the rebellious Marsh Arabs. The wetlands have been crucial to Iraq since the earliest days …
