THE MOST EXTENSIVE use of weapons of mass destruction since the US/UK dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was not Saddam Hussein's massacre of 5,000 Kurds in Halabja, but was by the US in the Vietnam war.
Using a lesson leamed by the British during their anti-communist campaign in Malaya in the 1950s, US air force planes, masquerading as South Vietnamese units, dropped 70 million litres of herbicide (mainly Agent Orange), to kill the tree cover and jungle farms used by National Liberation Front guerrillas. New evidence shows that this started in 1961, the first year of liberal' John F Kennedy's presidency.
Bad enough in itself, the herbicides were known to be heavily contaminated with TCCD, the most deadly dioxin. Dioxins, mainly resulting from burning of waste, are all over the world, and cause cancers, liver damage and birth defects, but the new data show that at least 3,000 Vietnamese villages and up to 4 million people were sprayed directly with high concentrations.
The spraying destroyed 20% of Vietnam's forest and 30% of their mangrove swamps. Even worse, one estimate is that dioxins in Vietnam have caused 500,000 deaths and that 650,000 people have deformities and other life-threatening conditions. Dioxin stays in the food chain and a third generation of Vietnamese people is now suffering the effects.
The US government knew about the dioxin contamination and Monsanto, the main manufacturer, recognised Spreading the poison - and the effects live on for decades severe health effects with Agent Orange in the 1940s. Rather than test their positions in court, the manufacturers are now paying affected ex-US soldiers up to $2,000 a month.
The Vietnamese people have never received any help from the US for their millions of victims of this war crime. Instead, the US has spent - and still
spends -hundreds of millions trying to locate less than 2,000 (dead) American soldiers in Vietnam. Herbicide use as "counterinsurgency" was restarted under Clinton in the 1990s in Colombia. There, the alleged goal is killing cocaine crops in areas controlled by FARC guerrillas, but food crops and people are sprayed as well. No-one knows the environmental and health effects, but even scientific journals describe this as "chemical warfare".
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stance May 2003 15 International resistance