Since 1945, the small Japanese island of Okinawa has been unwilling host to a massive U.S. military presence and a storehouse for a witches’ brew of dangerous munitions and chemicals, including nerve gas, mustard gas, and nuclear missiles. However, there is one weapon the Pentagon has always denied that it kept on Okinawa: Agent Orange. But a recently discovered U.S. army report puts lie to those denials once and for all.
Almost 40 years have passed since the end of the secret U.S. bombing campaign over Laos, and U.S.-Lao relations have made impressive strides. On her trip to Laos, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should reaffirm America’s commitment to cleaning up the deadly mess it left behind.
We won our independence from the British in a hard-fought revolutionary battle. Today, no hard feelings: the Anglo-American alliance is strong, we all love Downton Abbey, and our skirmishes are largely confined to disputes over which version of The Office is funnier and how to spell and pronounce the word “aluminum.”
Laos, a small landlocked country in Southeast Asia known as “the most bombed country on earth,” fittingly hosted an international disarmament conference in November 2010. This was a follow-up to an Oslo conference in 2008 when 94 nations signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an international treaty to ban all cluster weapons following in the footsteps of the global campaign to ban landmines which came into force in 1999.
The Pentagon’s refusal to acknowledge that Agent Orange was stored on Okinawa endangers the health of both local Okinawans and American service members currently stationed on the island.
From Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya, the first decade of the 21st century has solidified the U.S. reputation as the energizer bunny of war. While these conflicts continue to rage on, there are a growing number of signs that even the United States has a limit to how much war it is willing to wage.
Van Pao’s “secret army” was financed by the CIA as part of the war against North Vietnam. Is the U.S. also tolerating and empowering drug lords in Afghanistan?
There is always another “strategic” battle — in Afghanistan, as in Vietnam — that’s “key” to winning a war against an insurgency. But there are millions of hills and valleys and they are as meaningless in Afghanistan as they were in Vietnam.
The Khmer Rouge Tribunal delivered its first verdict in July against Kaing Guek Euv, alias “Duch,” the director of the notorious S-21 prison, a torture and extermination center under the rule of Cambodian dictator Pol Pot. After a 77-day trial, the five judges — two international and three Cambodian — unanimously convicted Duch of committing crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
In last month’s blitzkrieg tour of Central and Southeast Asia, two of the four stops Secretary Clinton made share the unfortunate bond of enduring an invasion by U.S. air and ground forces. In the space of a few days, Clinton visited both Vietnam and Afghanistan, thus physically linking what had once been, and then what has now become the United States’ longest war. One of the more insidious links that tie these conflicts together was highlighted in a few of the news stories about Clinton’s trip. That link, in a word, is agribusiness.