Imperialism kills and keeps on killing in Vietnam, Iraq etc.
LLCO.org
2009
According to a recent, 2009 study by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense, land mines and unexploded ordnance dot the landscape of Vietnam even though the war ended nearly 35 years ago. More than one third of the land in six central Vietnamese provinces continues to be a serious hazard. According to Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense, 6.6 million hectares (6.3 million acres) are still contaminated.
Land mines have resulted in 42,000 deaths since the war’s end in 1975. Quang Tri and Quang Binh are two provinces that have suffered many deaths. 7,000 deaths in the former, 6,000 in the latter. Death resulting from such explosions are part of the ongoing legacy of imperialism in Vietnam.
In addition, the Vietnamese people still suffer from the consequences of the massive amounts of chemical agents dumped into their environment by the US. Millions of gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed across the Vietnamese countryside. Agent Orange contained a strain of dioxin known as TCCD which is one of the strongest poisons known to humanity. In 2003, the soil was sampled in Vietnam and found to contain 180 million times the safe dioxin levels as prescribed by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
There are roughly 150,000 children whose birth defects can be traced to their parents’ contamination to Agent Orange. According to the Vietnam Victims of Agent Orange Association, three million Vietnamese were exposed to the chemical during the war. As a result, serious health problems affect one million of the victims. The US pays up to 1,500 a month for Americans who have problems resulting from dioxin exposure during the war. The US refuses to pay anything to the vast numbers of the Vietnamese victims — the underlying assumption by the US is that a Vietnamese life is worth less than that of an American.
This pattern is repeated today in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iraqi landscape, like Vietnam’s, is scarred by the US war machine. Not only do unexploded ordnance litter Iraq, but also depleted uranium from US ammunition. Just as Vietnam suffers decades since the war’s end, some claim that this will be so with Iraq as well since the half-life of depleted uranium is billions of years. Like Vietnam, Iraq has also reported an increase in birth defects since the war. The US believed that using depleted uranium was dangerous to the Iraqi civilian population. A US training manual requires that anyone who comes within 25 meters of depleted uranium wear respiratory and skin protection. A report prior to the Iraqi war identified children as risking the most danger from exposure. Cancer and kidney problems were two dangers identified in the report. However, the same report warned its military readers that public knowledge of these dangers could result in a ban on depleted uranium use in weapons.
The hypocrisy in all of this is missed on most Americans. In order to justify its imperialist occupation of Iraq, the US claimed that the state of Iraq had stockpiled and had used chemical weapons. However, it is the US whose stockpiles of chemical weapons are the biggest in the world. It is the US that exposes whole populations to chemical and radiological agents.
According to the former president of the Vietnamese Red Cross, US tactics were “a massive violation of human rights of the civilian population, and a weapon of mass destruction.” Contaminating the environment of a whole country with explosives and poisons such that, decades later, people are still suffering in the thousands as a result is tantamount to genocide. Such actions end up affecting the entire population, including future generations. Even though imperialism was defeated for a time in, the US continues to kill, cripple, and maim. Imperialism kills and keeps on killing.
Sources
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3798581.stm
3. http://www.seattlepi.com/national/95178_du12.shtml
4. http://ivaw.org/dufactsheet
5. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1112-01.htm
6. http://www.brusselstribunal.org/pdf/DU-Azzawi2.pdf
7. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3715