And you thought the war was over
By Heather Mallick
I have found them. Yes, yours truly has tripped over WMD, the weapons
of mass destruction that Junior Bush and Tony Blair used to justify
their conquest of Iraq. Those missing weapons were variously explained
as a) destroyed before the war b) not literally there
and why arent reporters more conceptual in their thinking? c) never
there at all d) exported to Syria or e) in beakers in those two Winnebagos
a panicky Mr. Blair keeps mentioning.
Whats more, these WDs are not just M for mass, theyre F for
forever.
The embarrassing part is they were found not in Iraq but in Vietnam. We
forget wars fast. Wholl remember Iraq next year? Who thinks of Afghanistan
now? And who knew the Vietnam War was still being fought with WMDs?
What I am about to write upsets me a great deal and I have delayed writing
it. Some details may be distressing.
Despite Colin Powell saying Saddam Hussein was the biggest user of chemical
weapons since the First World War, the greater culprit was in fact the
United States. From 1961 to 1974, the United States admits that it dropped
72 million liters of chemicals on Vietnam, most of it Agent Orange with
a super-toxic strain of dioxin called TCCD. US soldiers dumped an additional
260,000 gallons of herbicide just to empty their tanks. The Guardian reports
that one soldier regularly dumped his poison into a central drinking water
reservoir. He doesnt want his name used, at which one can only smile
hollowly.
A Canadian environmental science company, Hatfield Consultants, has discovered
that the dioxin hasnt dispersed. It has rooted itself in the soil
at levels 100 times higher than would be tolerated on Canadian farmland,
spreading through water into the food chain and from there into human
blood, breast milk and fetuses.
The poison has blossomed through three generations of Vietnamese so far.
It appears it will continue. Its toxicity is difficult to describe. When
General Powell held up his tiny vial of what he said were scary anthrax
spores, it hardly compared to a small 80-gram tin of TCCD. That tin would
destroy New York City. The United States dropped 170 kilograms of it.
This WMD kills and maims unstoppably. The grandchildren of those who first
saw the sweet-smelling yellow powder fall from the sky are damaged beyond
belief. Agent Orange causes innumerable diseases plus almost every cancer
known to humankind.
I have obtained this information from web sites created by Vietnamese
hospitals and US war veterans abandoned by their government, as well as
e-mail with a Vietnamese doctor attempting to care for some of Vietnams
650,000 damaged children (500,000 have already died). Most of all, I have
relied on a recent Guardian exposé by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian
Levy. I cannot read it and look at the photographs without falling into
sadness for days.
Some dioxin babies were born with two heads. Thankfully they are dead
and float in formaldehyde. Another baby photographed in a crib has a massive
pointed head and eyeballs that bulge far outside his face. Another victim
is 19. In her photo, she looks about 6. She walks like a spider and her
skin is septic wet red rubble. Her sisters fingers and toes drop
off and she loses more skin each day as her mother watches. Polio, Down
syndrome and profound retardation are everywhere. Some children look scarcely
human. Some women, the Guardian reports, give birth to genderless squabs
that sound like the pigoons in Margaret Atwoods Oryx and Crake:
Lumps containing organs.
Were used to bad things dissipating as time passes. The fields of
France are green now and their people healthy. Agent Orange is different.
The World Health Organization says there are two ways to clean it up:
Bake all the soil in Vietnam to 1,000 degrees Celsius, or pave the country
with concrete and chemically treat what lies beneath. There are 80 million
Vietnamese living on that soil. The fact is, almost nothing can be done.
A Globe reader in Vietnam tells me the Vietnamese are resilient. They
tend to get on with things. People have to manage somehow and they
have a miraculous ability to do just that. Physical limitations are commonplace
here and are not understood as obstacles to participation in quotidian
life.
When I visit www.vnrc.org.vn (Vietnam Red Cross) and www.ogcdc.org, and
contact a doctor who talked to the Guardian reporters, his e-mail messages
back to me end with gentle good wishes for my family. I am stricken by
this mans courtesy to a Canadian who lives happily with her wealth
and health intact. He needs money to pay for operations on damaged children.
He runs the OGCDC (Office of Genetic Counseling and Disabled Children)
at Hue Medical College with small donations from around the world.
And there you have it. Agent Orange was the second time the United States
used a WMD, the first being Hiroshima, but its effects were worse. It
fits the Bush-Rumsfeld-Powell definition because poison is still flowing
now.
US politicians rarely think long-term. Whether we support or oppose their
efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, those were mere social calls by comparison.
In Vietnam, the war is still being fought by proxy, via an American liquid
that came in orange cans.
Source: Toronto Globe & Mail
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