Weapons of Mass and Durable Destruction in Vietnam and the ME

Three decades after US soldiers and diplomats scrambled aboard the last planes out of Saigon in April 1975, the toxins they left behind still poison Vietnam.

In the 3,160 villages in the southern part of Vietnam within the Agent Orange spraying zone, 800,000 people continue to suffer serious health problems and are in need of constant medical attention. Last month, members of a US Vietnamese working group reported that it will cost at least $14m to remove dioxin residues from just one site around the former US airbase in Danang. The cost of a comprehensive clean-up around three dioxin hotspots and former US bases is estimated at around $60m. The $3m pledged by US Congress last year is a pathetically inadequate amount set against the billions spent in waging war and deploying weapons of mass destruction.

This, as well as Israel's use of outrageously huge amounts of cluster bombs in south Lebanon in 2006, most of them leftovers from US's munitions from the Vietnam war era, will certainly go unnoticed and unpunished while these same countries are waging and threatening wars in the ME in the name of cleaning the area from WMD. I think the lesson to be learned from Vietnam is that the goal of USrael is not to clean the region from WMD but to inundate it with its own, threreby renewing its stock, feeding the war industry, and prolonging the war effects on the ennemy's civilian population, in the absence of a clear military victory against the ennemy.

HRW: Flooding South Lebanon. Israel’s Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006.

UPDATE: For a more complete information go and visit Gorilla's Gguides' article which cites this one and expands on it by adding more sources and information.

More from Gorilla's: What a nice way of saying "genocide" (part 2)

And this is how This Old Brit feels about it all.