President Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War
excerpted from the book
Lying for Empire
How to Commit War Crimes With A Straight Face
by David Model
...
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The ... purpose of the bombing was to defoliate South Vietnam. American troops were not as skilled at fighting guerrilla warfare as the Viet Cong forcing American policymakers to shift the war from jungle warfare to conventional warfare by destroying the jungle. Destroying vegetation also destroyed rice and deprived the enemy of a major source of food. The main herbicide defoliant was called Agent Orange which is highly toxic to humans. Approximately 20 million gallons of herbicides were sprayed in Southeast Asia.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, in Manufacturing Consent, describe:
... The combined ecological, economic, and social consequences of the wartime defoliation operations have been vast and will take several generations to reverse"... there is no way to estimate the human effects of the chemical poison dioxin at levels "300 to 400% greater than the average levels obtaining among exposed groups in North America."
The damage caused in the south included 9000 hamlets, 25 million acres of farmland, 12 million acres of forest, one-and-a-half-million dead cattle, the creation of one million widows, and approximately 800,000 orphans.
Agent Orange is a chemical weapon and clearly qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction. It was also aimed primarily at foliage in the jungle which is clearly a civilian target. Many civilians died or were severely burned by Agent Orange and many American soldiers who had handled the defoliant experienced effects many years later. Therefore, the use of Agent Orange, authorized by President Johnson on March 9, 1965, was a war crime. It should also be noted that this weapon of mass destruction was used in South Vietnam against the people whom the United States were supporting in this war.
Napalm, a sticky substance which disperses over a wide area and ignites, was another chemical used to defoliate the jungles in South Vietnam. Edward Herman, in Beyond Hypocrisy, refers to the effects as follows:
it burns at 800 to 1300 degrees centigrade and may continue to bum for fifteen minutes, causing deep, severe bums with a very high death rate-about half of those wounded by napalm die from the burns. Among those suffering phosphorus bums, about three fourths die ...
p138
The Vietnam War caused massive destruction to the land, factories, and infrastructure of North and South Vietnam. It was also devastating to Cambodia and Laos. The estimated death toll in South Vietnam was over 3 million and in North Vietnam over 30,000. By way of comparison, U.S. casualties, though devastating, were far smaller in number. The number of U.S. troops stationed in Vietnam was 540,000. American deaths numbered 58,152, those seriously wounded, 153,303.
Headquarters for the Viet Cong was suspected of being situated in Cambodia and the Ho Chi Minh trail, which was located in Laos and Cambodia, was used for troop movements and supply routes. The United States, in attempting to destroy these targets, was responsible for the death of another one million people, bringing the total death toll for Indochina to over four million. Tens of millions of people in Indochina were displaced from their homes. People are still suffering the effects of the war as Noam Chomsky points out in Necessary Illusions:
Thousands of Vietnamese still die from the effects of American chemical warfare." He [Amnon Kapeliouk] reports estimates of one-quarter of a million victims in South Vietnam in addition to the thousands killed by unexploded ordinance... Kapeliouk describes the "terrifying" scenes in hospitals in the South with children dying of cancer and hideous birth deformities...
Dr. Le Cao Dai, a Hanoi surgeon, and other doctors observed the effects of Agent Orange and its impact on people and the environment. They concluded that the millions of gallons of Agent Orange that poured down on South Vietnam during the Vietnam War caused liver and other cancers, immune-deficiency diseases, miscarriages, birth defects and persistent malaria. Vietnamese estimates show that 400,000 people have been killed or injured by Agent Orange and it has contributed to the birth defects of 500,000 children. (Robert Dreyfuss, Mother Jones)
Many of the 2.6 million U.S. vets who served in Vietnam have complained about a litany of ailments that have been traced to exposure to Agent Orange. The Department of Veterans Affairs agreed to compensate 270,000 vets registered with the Veteran Affairs Agent Orange Program for respiratory cancers, soft tissue sarcoma, prostate cancer and skin diseases. (Robert Dreyfus, Mother Jones)
The multiplicity of lies and war crimes of a number of presidents that were needed to defend the American sphere of influence in South-East Asia resulted in widespread and massive destruction in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. President Johnson contributed his share.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Johnson_Vietnam_LFE.html
