This paper considers how environmentalism, specifically the biodiversity conservation of Iraq’s southern marshes, was instrumental to the counterinsurgency strategy in the recent Iraq war. It investigates the central question: is environmentalism a form of humanitarianism? In 2003, a group of Iraqi exiles in collaboration with the U.S. government set out to restore the marshes in southern Iraq as a revitalized Garden of Eden. In 1991, Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in retaliation for an uprising that began there and threatened to depose him. In 2003, marsh advocates would restore the marshes as a national symbol for a new, post-Ba‘ath Iraq. The project was quickly celebrated as the success story of the war. The triumphant narrative of marsh revival worked in other ways too: it concealed the motivated aims of its donors who sought to capitalize on the jackpot wealth potential of giant and supergiant oil fields encapsulated beneath the marshland reservoir. Under the cover of altruism, environmentalism enabled foreign donors to gain political power in wartime Iraq. In the “post-conflict” era, environmentalism bloomed in Iraq: the U.N. prompted the creation of the Iraqi Ministry of Environment, raising environmental infrastructure in Baghdad as more than 30 million U.S. dollars poured into the marshes. Unlike humanitarian projects, which manage human populations, environmentalism’s stated goal is to do work on land for the benefit of nature. Yet environmentalists in Iraq enacted a program of international development that restructured relations of people to the state, reshaped understandings of national identity, and framed an ethics of citizenship. This paper brings together literature on humanitarianism with literature on biodiversity conservation to demonstrate that environmentalist goals often reach beyond the natural world.