When the United States toppled the Ba'athist government in Iraq almost two years ago, the American media repeatedly showed footage of Iraqis pulling down the now famous statue of Saddam. Though few people outside of Iraq may have known about it at the time, that statue wasn't the only thing that was torn down:

Saddam drained more than 90 percent of the 5,800 square miles of marshes during his regime, in part to punish the Shi'ite Marsh Arabs who opposed him, in part to provide access to the border with Iran during his country's long war with its neighbor and in part to save water for cities upstream.

[...] As soon as Saddam was ousted by U.S. troops, farmers blew up dikes and earthen dams that had held the water back.

The floodplain that Saddam drained is often called the Fertile Crescent. It's the very same land that junior high school students know as the original birthplace of agriculture and thus of modern civilization, which explains why it's sometimes referred to as the Garden of Eden.

When the farmers destroyed the dams the land that Saddam had turned from marsh into desert was once again flooded, along with several local villages. At the time a major long-term concern was that the renewed flow of water would lead to the deposition of excess salts and chemical toxins. Fortunately, it doesn't look like this is happening at all:

Luckily, water coming into the area from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is unexpectedly clean, washing away toxic salts that built up when the area was drained under Saddam Hussein's regime, the international team of experts reported.

Bird species are starting to return, including pelicans, cormorants and wading species. The area was also important for spawning fish and shrimp and, with only 20 percent of the marshes restored, these animals have along way to go, the experts reported.

"The future of the 5,000-year-old Marsh Arab culture and the economic stability of large portions of southern Iraq are dependent on the success of this restoration effort," they write in next week's issue of the journal Science.

I absolutely agree that the restoration of the marshes and the return of the floodplain to the persecuted Marsh Arabs will be an essential part of any successful effort to stabilize Iraq. I do not believe, however, that this is a task only for scientists, ecologists, and environmentalists; it is a task primarily for the Arabs who were ousted from their land, and for the farmers who have persevered and remained.

The most important expertise required is that of the native farmers who, for 10,000 years (save the last ten years or so), managed the land successfully according to their needs. I grant that the draining of the marshes has created issues that farmers may not have the capacity to deal with, such as high soil concentrations of salt and the toxic metal selenium, and I expect that remediating these problems will require international cooperation. What I am suggesting is that we offer what help they want, rather than telling them what they need.

Just as the United States cannot force a democratic government on Iraqis and expect them to embrace it as their own, neither can we send our experts to restore the floodplain "for" the native Iraqis. The farmers took it upon themselves to destroy the dams and re-flood the floodplain, and the farmers are the ones who can decide how to restore and manage the land in their own interest. That is how democracy works.