The Watch takes a look at what Agent Orange did to Vietnam:
The US government sprayed it, and they knew what they were doing. They promised to stop using chemical weapons, and they kept going. Millions of Vietnamese are already dead from this poison, over a million more are now seriously damaged by it. But there will probably never be a war crimes trial for any of the individuals responsible for poisoning the genome of so many Vietnamese, for saturating their best land and reservoirs with it. Because war crimes are only committed by other countries, or something like that.
And in a final fit of irony, the sick among the Vietnamese are less than ciphers to a US government that to this day continues to look for the bodies of dead Americans. Just as, immediately after the war, the starving there didn’t matter more than these dead Americans. And perversely, those dead Americans received more attention than the living American veterans who were sick and dying from being doused during their tours of duty. More attention than the sick or deformed children they had when they came home.
The US government wants marble monuments to the glory of the republic. The hallowed tombs of the heroic war dead. I guess a hydroencephalic child just doesn’t fit the image they’re going for. An ex-veteran that has the ill grace to waste away of cancer instead of being cut down in his idyllic prime by a hail of bullets doesn’t pass PR muster.
The dangers of depleted uranium today are still largely ignored or pooh-poohed. I wonder what we’ll be saying in twenty years time.