We Have Met the Enemy and He Is US

There is a story in the NY Times about a U.S. effort to clean up a limited area that was contaminated more than 40 years ago by Agent Orange.  It appears to be a woefully inadequate clean up relative to the huge areas where Agent Orange was sprayed. But it's a belated beginning.

I probably wouldn´t have made a post about it, but for the fact that I just today finished the book Nixon and Kissinger, by Robert Dallek. It took me weeks of intermittent reading to wade through this depressing book that gave me flashbacks of how much I detested that cynical, manipulative, self-serving duo.

Of course the author points out that the final peace agreement that ended the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war could have been achieved in essentially  the same form four years and thousands of deaths earlier. And he provides a ton of documentary evidence, as if it were needed, that Nixon and Kissinger knew exactly what would happen when the U.S. withdrew.  They knew the corrupt South Vietnamese government couldn't survive without heavy U.S. support.  One of the things they wanted was a commitment from North Vietnam to wait a decent interval before overrunning the south.  Of course it was all about saving face and about Nixon's concerns about domestic politics at home.

But what even Dallek doesn't mention is the inherent absurdity of Nixon's attempts to achieve a "peace with honor."  There was no way to find an honorable end to a dishonorable war. The North Vietnamese had never declared war on the United States and they were never at war with us, except to the extent that we forced ourselves into their civil war with the south.

Imagine England intervening in the U.S. Civil War on the side of the South (a cause of concern at the time) and then getting tired of their involvement and trying to negotiate a "peace with honor" with Abraham Lincoln that would have required the North to abandon and ignore all of the just reasons for which it went to war in the first place, all to smooth the domestic concerns of the Palmerston government in England.  The very thought is absurd, and so was the Nixon and Kissinger idea that we could negotiate with North Vietnam to get ourselves out of the war. The only way out was to leave. The Vietnamese had their reasons for fighting and it had nothing at all to do with us.  As a New Hampshire Senator (a Republican, I think) said at the time, "we should just declare victory and leave."

I'm reminded of my favorite bumper sticker from that era: "How Many Vietnamese Fought In Our Civil War?"

So here it is, almost forty years after the end of the war, and I don't know how many years after the U.S. government has recognized some level of responsibility toward the U.S. servicemen whose health was damaged by Agent Orange, and we are just now acknowledging some minimum level of responsibility to the Vietnamese for this chemical warfare we engaged in. The cleanup we have committed to sounds pretty limited and the story in the Times cites a lot of Vietnamese who are dissatisfied with the tardiness and the inadequacy of the effort.

  Dow Chemical, by the way, still insists there isn't any proof that Agent Orange has any adverse health effects on humans.