Lament for a once-lovely waterway

It was plaintive the way that Jabbar Amin Jabbar, chairman of the provincial council in the Iraqi city of Basra, pulled up old photographs of the Shatt al Arab on his computer. More than anything else, it is this waterway that shapes this port city in southern Iraq. Unnaturally colored postcards from the 1960s and 70s showed a pristine waterway–an economic and cultural lifeline in the blazing desert–that no longer exists today. "They were so beautiful," he said of the cafes and parks along Basra's Corniche. That sense of an irretrievable past makes the environmental and economic disaster facing the Shatt al Arab all the more poignant. This river, formed by convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates, has been the contested border between the Arab world and Persia for centuries. It was the front line of the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, and as I note in an article in The Times, the devastation of that war remains evident in the shattered buildings along its banks and the rusting, half-sunken wrecks of ships.