When we try, we can really mess this place up. In 1990, President Saddam Hussein's retreating army decided to set Kuwait's oil wells on fire and devastated the Gulf's ecosystem.
Tides Of War (World, 10pm) is one of the most depressing, bleak, and disgusting nature documentaries that has ever been made because it shows not what human beings can do to one another in war time, but what we do to the natural world.
This film was made seven years ago, so it is not exactly hot new information. However, since we spent half of last year anxiously tuning in between Monicagate reports for news on the latest showdown with Saddam, it is well worth watching again.
The Iraqi army not only set fire to hundreds of oil wells, it also unleashed an oil slick of unimaginable size into the Persian Gulf. The film starts by saying there has been nothing quite as bad in human history. The slick was 200 times worse than the one from the Exxon Valdez.
The cameras return again and again to the image of a thick black sea lapping ominously at a slimy black shore. It never fails to chill, worse in some ways than the shots of oil-soaked birds stumbling about, or trying desperately to stay afloat as their feathers drag them slowly down into the muck.
The fire-fighting operation was a small miracle: five years work over in eight months. But there was little armies of volunteers could do for the birds: 'This a drop in the ocean' said a Belgian ornithologist.
