Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
The Ghosts of Desert Storm
Seventeen years and three wars later, the ghosts of Operation Desert Storm - the cancers, the chronic headaches and dizziness, the fibromyalgia, the ALS and so much more that have stalked returning vets, whose medical claims have been denied, ignored, relegated to the paper shredder - have just gotten a reality upgrade.
"The extensive body of scientific research now available consistently indicates that Gulf War illness is real, that it is the result of neurotoxic exposures during Gulf War deployment, and that few veterans have recovered or substantially improved with time."
Thus concludes the 452-page report of the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, presented last week to Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake. Suddenly the government has several hundred thousand medical claims emanating from a few months in 1991 it has to start taking seriously - and that's the easy part.
The implications of the congressionally mandated advisory panel's report, chaired by James Binns, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a Vietnam vet, may not be easy to contain. In the name of sanity and the planet's future, I hope this report blows the hellish toxicity of modern warfare wide open and creates a legal wedge by which the forces of moral outrage can hold governments accountable for what they do . . . for what our own government is doing right now.
For 17 years, the VA maintained that the strange, debilitating, sometimes fatal symptoms the vets of Gulf War I - that quick little romp that routed Saddam's army and left America feeling so good about itself - began experiencing was, to the extent that it was anything at all (or anything that had to do with the war), a mental thing, PTSD-induced. Vets learned that fighting the war may have been nothing compared to fighting the VA for treatment and compensation. It was a struggle that thousands didn't survive.
The Binns report estimates that more than a quarter of the GIs deployed during Desert Storm, around 200,000 of them, are suffering in some way from Gulf War Syndrome, and identifies two primary causes: pyridostigmine bromide, an anti-nerve gas medication all troops in the Gulf were required to take, and highly concentrated, DEET-like insect-repellents that were extensively used.
But the neurotoxic hell that is modern war cannot be reduced to two problematic substances. Many of the troops - and, of course, millions of Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians - were exposed to a wide array of toxic chemicals, which the report did not rule out as contributing factors. These include: the smoke from burning oil-well fires; fumes from poison gas dumps blown up by the Army; anthrax vaccines; and the extremely fine radioactive dust of exploded depleted uranium munitions, which may prove to be the deadliest of all the poisons modern war leaves in its wake.
What the report also exposes is the cynicism and denial of the U.S. war establishment, which, as we all know, disputed the toxicity of Agent Orange for 20 years before giving in, and which, it now turns out, suppressed evidence that substantiated Gulf War syndrome. Quoted in the report, according to Cox News Service, is Lt. Gen. Dale Vesser, acting special assistant to the secretary of defense for Gulf War illnesses, who said in 2001 that, while Saddam Hussein didn't poison U.S. troops, "It never dawned on us . . . that we may have done it to ourselves."
And M.J. Stephey of Time magazine wrote that the report "serves as a grim reminder that sometimes a soldier's greatest enemy is the government he or she is fighting for."
All of this is true, but the irresponsibility of the war establishment and the enabling media goes, I believe, deeper than the betrayal of our own troops. What are we doing to the world, not merely with our satanic weapons systems but with the unregulated toxic waste of war?
Consider, for instance, a recent story in Military Times about the open-air burn pits throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, where the military disposes of hundreds of tons of war-zone waste every day, including "unexploded ordnance; paints and solvents; and even . . . bloody bandages and amputated limbs." U.S. troops (and, of course, the locals) have almost no protection against the toxic fumes the pits produce. GIs report such symptoms as "stinging eyes, monster headaches, severe respiratory infections and 'plume crud' - prolonged hacking that produces blackened phlegm and sometimes blood."
No matter that the smoke contains "arsenic, benzene, carbon monoxide, sulfuric acid and dioxin, the cancer-causing main ingredient in the defoliant Agent Orange," the Pentagon insists that there's no long-term environmental impact. Yeah, right. Who here believes the soldiers in the war on terror aren't facing serious health problems because of such exposures? How long will we continue to tolerate our government's pattern of pathological denial?
Perhaps the Defense Department understands that if it ever begins taking responsibility - and conceding liability - for what it does, a moral and financial hemorrhaging will ensue that makes war itself impossible.
- Posted in
8 Comments so far
Show AllThus concludes the 452-page report of the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, presented last week to Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake.
Peake tore out each page separately, glued them together lengthwise, then cut the whole thing in half. He then sent it to George Wanker Bush to be used as toilet paper.
How many?
How many has this military establishment backed by politicians of both parties killed and maimed for whatever bullshit reason using weapons to kill everything in sight or smell or any other sense that we have? Is this not a definition of insanity? It is an overriding greed where nothing and I mean nothing surpasses the acquisition of money or goods, things; all more important than a life. If Obama does not change this I’m going to make me a sign get a permit and protest in front of the Capitol in Sac., CA. Tony,VietVet
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955),
One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976), Autobiography (1977)
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948), "Non-Violence in Peace and War"
Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
Mao Tse-Tung (1893 - 1976)
Remember that the US Military, specifically the leaders of the pentagon , are NOT Patriots. They are PR people. It there job to sell war as a product and it their job to cleanse the product of any negatives.
There a reason well over 300 claims of war crimes committed by US forces in Vietnam were covered up by that same Military and it the same reason they covered up the effects of Agent orange or of Gulf War Syndrome.
War is a Glorius product. It is a grand adventure every American should want to partake in. There is NO higher calling. It makes trillions of dollars for the profiteers. In order to ensure that message sells and that the War machine is continually supported by the US Citizen it the pentagons job to put the lipstick on that pig.
(With apologies to pigs ).
Grunt soldiers are nearly always the youthfully naive playthings of the deranged older men who corruptly rule. Often enough, too, the same can be said of the general populations of most countries who, historically and predictably mindlessly 'ralley round their flag' at the behest of vilely governing leaders.
Americans have engaged in scores of wars, but by any remotely morally sane standard only four can be called 'justifiable:'
The American Revolutionary War, The War of 1812, the American Union's Civil War, and the Second World War.
All of these conflicts were eiher responses to in-house tyranny and/or armed aggressions, or were atypical defendings of sine qua non moral principles.
The rest of America's wars have been nothing but monstrous predations, unprovoked by any aggression against us, and always servicing illicit hegemonical and/or economic agendas of an illicitly ruling elite.
Many other nations have worse records than the US - both in terms of initiating wars of aggression and in the treatment of their own and 'the enemy's' soldiers.
But no nation today exceeds America in its delusional, public self-congratulations regarding participations in outrageously unjustified wars, and/or in the treatment of its more-complicatedly injured troops resulting therefrom.
While the VA generally attempts to provide a fairly high baseline of gross-physical care to standardly-injured veterans, there remain tens if not humdreds of thousands of vets from the Vietnam, Gulf 1 ,and Gulf 2 wars who suffer from inadequately or entirely non-treated, life-ruining neurological and psychological injuries.
In the case of strictly neuro-immunological injuries (typicaly the result of exposure to chemical and/or radiological toxins), neither the VA nor the congress nor the media nor the general public want to hear about or deal with such medical complexities --even though a post-soldier's 'functional life' is usually fully at stake in such instances.
As I mentioned above: Americans aren't finally much better or worse in their hideous activities of war than any other people or nation.
But Americans are insufferably worse than most of humanity -- precisely in the arrogance in which they believe themselves to be better-than-all in these regards.
I would argue the revolutionary war, and the War of 1812 was not necessary. Britain granted independence to a number of her colonies by their asking for it.
The war of 1812 was a war of choice as well and a territorial grab by the United States. Prior to the wars outbreak the british crown had agreed to every demand the US Government and indicated they woudl address every grievance. The Governmnet of the US felt that with the british tied up against Napolean, it would be an opportune time to grab Canada and claim the continent as their own.
I can make an argument that the Civil war was not "Necessary". Canada ended slavery some 50 years prior without having to go to war over it.
In short there we options to correct all these perceived "wrongs" through peaceable means.
The thing that absolutely turned my stomach in the Gulf war was the media Interviewing a number of Flyboys leaning up against their helicopter after a number of missions.
These people were laughing and joking as how to they were slaughtering Iraqis that were fleeing Kuwait and South iraq and how it was like shooting fish in a barrel. They were basically shooting everything that moved and high fiving one another over it and the reporter was declaring them as heroes.
One was saying something like (paraphrasing) "they could not even see us..we could see them with our night vision gear running from one direction to the next as we fired on them" all the while wearing a big grin. FUN FUN FUN.
They were actively participating in a WAR crime and were laughing about it.
Looks like everyone forgot the Indian wars, or America's Holocaust.