Vietnam en Irak

Dit zijn Amerikaanse vliegtuigen die Vietnam besproeien met het verdelgingsmiddel Agent Orange, zwaar giftige dioxine om bossen te ontbladeren en oogsten te vernietigen. Ruim een kwarteeuw na het einde van de oorlog in Zuidoost Azie worden daardoor nog steeds kinderen lichamelijk mismaakt ter wereld geboren. Vietnam telt momenteel tenminste drie miljoen slachtoffers van die chemische ontbladeringsmiddelen. Zie: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3798581.stm En: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange En vooral ook: http://www.vn-agentorange.org/ Volgens de Vietnamezen hebben de Amerikanen 72 miljoen liter aan chemische stoffen over hun land gesproeid, waarvan tenminste 40 miljoen liter het zwaar giftige dioxine, geproduceerd door Monsanto en Dow Chemical. De Amerikaanse redacteur en auteur Tom Engelhardt schrijft nu een interessant artikel over de steeds sterkere overeenkomsten tussen de oorlog in Vietnam en die in Irak. 'Tomgram: Vietnam Veterans on Civilian Casualties in Iraq. No one should be shocked then that in practically the first moments of the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam analogy instantly burst back into consciousness. The very phrases of that former war -- winning hearts and minds, search and destroy, credibility gap, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs -- were almost immediately on the lips of military men, administration officials, soldiers, and critics alike. Marilyn Young, who wrote an essential history of that previous era, Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, caught the strangeness of all this back in February 2003, before the invasion of Iraq even began -- and then, with the actual invasion barely underway, pronounced the Iraq War, "Vietnam on crack cocaine," a description that remains remarkably accu! rate to this day. Somehow Americans just couldn't help themselves. Vietnam was still on the brain. The "Q-word," for example, made its ominous appearance even before Baghdad fell, an embarrassed shorthand stand-in for that Vietnam era classic, "quagmire" -- what the United States was supposedly stuck in while in Vietnam. (Forget, for the moment, that to the Vietnamese, Vietnam was neither swamp nor bog, but home). Even where Vietnam-era terms were avoided -- a good example would be the infamous "light at the end of the tunnel," that hopeful official statement of progress in Vietnam that became a catch-phrase for American failure and defeat -- they could still be felt lurking just over the horizon. In the case of the ever-evasive, ever desired "light," the phrase remained lodged just behind the repetitive assurances of top military commanders and administrations officials that we had reached various "turning points" or "tipping points" or "landmarks" in Iraq, that "progress" was indeed constantly being made, that "violence" was just on the verge of beginning to fall away. (After each such point, as it happened, there would only be more and worse of the same to come.) ' Lees verder: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=51741