A brief history of American use of chemical weapons

This cannot by any means be complete or detailed, but I do want to hit some of the high points of American use and/or approval of use of chemical weapons. The level of hypocrisy in Washington is appalling.

Before I forget, however, isn’t it great that we have elections? The anti-war movement is pretty much dead now because Democrats are making war. Republicans are generally in favor of war, and Democrats oppose Republican wars. George W. Bush’s people had to mount a major scare offensive, complete with the Colin Powell debacle at the UN, to invade Iraq. Democrats then won control of the congress in 2006 by campaigning against the Iraq war. But it turns out they didn’t mean a word of it! But from surface appearances, it seems that we get the same wars with either party. The only difference is the manner in which perceptions are managed.
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No doubt a historian of repute can give us a more thorough chronology of chemical weapon use by the United States. These are merely some highlights.

• Vietnam: Wait just a minute, you say – Agent Orange did not kill people on contact, and so does not qualify. Here’s what it does – it destroys foliage and causes genetic mutations. (Here are some photos, far too gruesome for inadvertent display.) Americans, for a brief time, were concerned about returning soldiers who were exposed to it. But I’ll grant some leeway: Agent Orange was meant to defoliate the jungles and destroy the crops of Vietnamese peasants. You’ve got me there. Americans did not want them to die on contact with the DDT-based substance. They wanted to starve them. Birth defects and cancers … collateral damage. They would have been wise to surrender.
• Saddam Hussein: In 1990, when the US was ready to launch its first post-Cold War strike, George H.W. Bush condemned Saddam Hussein for his used of nerve gas and other poisons in 1988. We now know that the US not only knew about the chemical attacks on Kurdish villages, but provided satellite telemetry to guide the bombs to their destination. Of course, poison gas was nothing new to Kurds. The first use that I know of was done by the Brits in 1920 – airplanes in combat were relatively new at that time, and served as delivery vehicles for toxins to punish “recalcitrant” Arabs.
• Iraq, 1991-2011, depleted uranium: The health effects of depleted uranium are disputed by the US and Britain, and for good reason. Any soldier suffering ill effects becomes a costly liability. Better to merely deny collateral harm to anyone. Millions of Iraqis were exposed as well, but who cares about them.
• Fallujah: Americans really lost their temper there. The first attempt to conquer the town failed, and everyone was pissed. In 1994 the US sealed off the city and hit it with mustard gas, nerve gas, and other burning chemicals including white phosphorus. More curious is this: The population of Fallujah has been genetically altered, and is suffering from bizarre ailments, birth defects – the usual. The assumption was that this city, like the rest of Iraq, was feeling the effects of depleted uranium. But it’s worse than that. Studies of the population there show the presence of enhanced uranium, the type found in nuclear bombs. Can Fallujah be placed aside Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It appears so. It appears that the US got so pissed at the recalcitrant Arab’s of Fallujah that they nuked them.

We can argue semantics here – kinetic weapons are just as harmful as anything else in use. But there is a general aversion to chemical weapons. (Syria has not signed the treaty prohibiting use, and neither has Israel.) I’m not opposed to chemical weapons, per se, any more than I am to any other form used by Americans, including nukes, chemicals, percussion bombs, fire storms, starvation, radiation … we’ve done it all.

But when it was reported that the Assad regime might have used them (it appears they didn’t*), John Kerry found his empathy and conscience. They were still in their original containers, never having been used before.
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*Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh are reporting that rebels are claiming to have set the bombs off by accident. Since the American media has not yet picked up on this, I would guess that it is a back-up story designed to save face for the Obama Administration should it fail to rally enough support for an attack.