[News] Agent Orange in Vietnam

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff10162009.html

October 16-19, 2009


Agent Orange in Vietnam


Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

By DAVE LINDORFF

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story 
headlined “Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to 
Agent Orange,” which was sure to be good news to 
many American veterans of the Indochina War. It 
reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased 
spreading the deadly dioxin-laced 
herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, 
it was acknowledging what veterans have long 
claimed: in addition to 13 ailments already 
traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also 
responsible for three more dread 
diseases­Parkinson’s, ischemic heart disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of 
Veterans Affairs, the VA will now start providing 
free care to any of the 2.1 million Vietnam-era 
veterans who can show that they might have been 
hurt by exposure to Agent Orange.

This is another belated step forward in the 
decades-long struggle by Vietnam War veterans to 
get the Defense Department and the VA to 
acknowledge the American government’s 
responsibility for poisoning them and causing 
permanent damage to them and often to their 
children and grandchildren.  Dioxin, one of the 
most poisonous substances known to man, is known 
to cause many serious systemic diseases, 
autoimmune illnesses, cancers and birth defects. 
(It is also a warning about the general Pentagon 
and government approach to other hazards caused 
by its battlefield use of toxins­most 
significantly the increasingly common use of 
depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and 
bullets­an approach which features lack of 
concern about health effects on troops and 
civilians, denial of information to troops, and 
denial of care to eventual victims.)

Missing from the Times article, written by 
military affairs reporter James Dao, which did 
include mention of the obstructionist role the 
government has played through this whole sorry 
saga, was a single mention of the far larger 
number of victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam­the 
people on whose heads and lands the toxic 
chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant 
refusal by the US government to accept any 
responsibility for what it did to them.

According to the article, the VA estimates that 
there may be as many as 200,000 US veterans who 
are suffering from Agent Orange-related 
illnesses. But according to a court case brought 
on behalf of Vietnamese victims, which was 
dismissed by a US Federal District Judge who 
ruled that there was “no basis for the claims,” 
there are at least three million Vietnamese, and 
possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are 
suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses 
as American veterans and their children. It is 
estimated that as many as 800,000 Vietnamese in 
the country’s south currently suffer from chronic 
health problems due to Agent Orange exposure, 
either to themselves, or to a parent or 
grandparent. Most of these victims, some of whom 
are retarded, and others of whom cannot walk or 
have no use of their arms, need constant care.

Veterans for Peace, an organization whose 
membership includes a large number of Vietnam War 
veterans, has issued a call for the US to provide 
funds for health care, education, vocational 
education, chronic care, home care and equipment 
to clean up hotspots of dioxin in Vietnam­a call 
which Congress and the White House have 
consistently ignored.  Tests have found dioxin 
levels around the sites of the three main former 
US bases in what was South Vietnam to be 300-400 
times recognized safe levels. The US dumped huge 
amounts of Agent Orange for miles around those 
bases to kill off jungle cover that Vietnamese 
fighters could use to approach the bases, but it 
was never cleaned up when the US pulled out.

One organization that includes a number of 
American veterans of the way, including former 
military doctors or soldiers who later became 
physicians, is the Vietnam Friendship Village 
Project USA Inc., which raises funds to help 
establish communities in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange.

It may seem a pathetic stab at principle given 
America’s use of two nuclear weapons against 
civilian targets in Japan a few years later, but 
back in World War II, in the midst of the most 
brutal island-to-island fighting during the 
Pacific War, a US Judge Advocate General in the 
Pentagon ruled that a military request for 
permission to use herbicides against the Japanese 
on Pacific islands would be illegal under the 
Hague Convention (forerunner of what are now 
called the Geneva Conventions). He ruled that 
trying to destroy the crops of civilians on those 
islands to deny food to the Japanese troops would 
be a war crime.  The US went ahead and used the 
herbicides anyway, arguing that even though it 
was illegal, the US was free to go ahead, since 
the Japanese had already broken the laws of war 
by using strychnine to kill military guard dogs 
in Siberia. Under the rules of war, if one side 
breaks a rule, the other side is no longer bound by it.

But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never used 
toxic materials against US forces or against 
South Vietnamese forces. And the Pentagon in the 
Vietnam War never even considered whether 
spraying a highly toxic herbicide over 1.4 
million hectares­12% of the total land area of 
Vietnam and almost 25% of the southern half of 
the country­might be a war crime.

Moreover, the Pentagon knew, before it began its 
massive defoliation campaign, about studies 
showing that Agent Orange was heavily laced with 
deadly dioxin, but covered up those studies, some 
by the chemical’s makers, Dow Chemical and 
Monsanto, and never even warned the troops who 
handled the material daily, or who were sent out 
to fight in areas that had been heavily sprayed.

The ongoing medical disaster in Vietnam caused by 
America’s criminal use of Agent Orange to 
defoliate a nation would be a good place for 
President Obama to start earning his just-awarded 
Nobel Peace Prize. He could kick off his peace 
campaign by finally honoring President Richard 
Nixon’s immediately broken promise to provide 
several billion dollars in reconstruction aid to 
Vietnam at the conclusion of peace talks at the 
end of the war.  Not a dollar of such aid was ever given.

Dao says he didn't mention significance for 
Vietnamese dioxin victims of the VA's decision to 
recognize three new diseases as being  Agent 
Orange-linked, because "my beat is veterans," and 
because he only had 800 words in which to cover 
his story. That may be true (though surely the 
Vietnamese at least deserved a one-sentence 
mention). But back on July 25, when the Times ran 
a story (by Janie Lorber, not by Dao) about the 
finding by an expert panel of the National 
Institute of Medicine linking Parkinsons, 
ischemic heart disease and leukemia to Agent 
Orange, upon which the latest VA decision was 
based, it also failed to mention the Vietnamese 
victims. In that case, the lapse was simply 
journalistically inexcuseable, since it was about 
a new medical finding, not a policy decision 
regarding the treatment of veterans.

At this point, the only way the New York Times 
can salvage a bit of its journalistic reputation 
on this topic would be by having Dao, Lorber or 
some other reporter write a piece about the 
impact of America’s Agent Orange use on the 
people of Vietnam. They could start by calling a 
veteran at Veterans for Peace or the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist 
and columnist. His latest book is 
“<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031237254X/counterpunchmaga>The 
Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 
and now available in paperback). He can be 
reached at <mailto:dlindorff at mindspring.com>dlindorff at mindspring.com




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