By Walt Zlotow
Trump’s orange legacy may be worse that his fake orange hair.
Ask someone to comment on Trump and orange and you’ll likely get a snarky reference to his hilarious orange hair.
But Trump may go out with an infinitely more dubious connection to orange: the president who dumped US efforts to eradicate Agent Orange in Vietnam, still disabling over 3 million there 50 years after the war ended.
The half century acknowledgement of America’s skedaddling from Saigon, April 30, 1975, has brought renewed interest in the Agent Orange nightmare US imposed on the hapless Vietnamese in that senseless war.
To remove cover from advancing Viet Cong and North Vietnam troops, the US poured down nearly 20 million gallons of defoliants to lay barren the Vietnam landscape. Over 40 million litres were Agent Orange, a benignly named poison that contained cancer causing dioxin. Agent Orange leached into food and water supplies in 58 of Vietnam’s 63 provinces. Nearly 3% of its population suffers serious health issues associated with its use.
America was slow to recognize the human and environmental catastrophe they unleashed upon Vietnam. It wasn’t till 1991 when US Viet Nam vets were provided benefits related to Agent Orange disabilities. It took another 15 years to acknowledge and begin funding cleanup in Vietnam.
But Trump’s cuts to US AID and other foreign aid have put US assistance to Vietnam, impossible without aid, in doubt. Most US AID staffers in Vietnam are scheduled to be out this year. That would leave nobody to administer the cleanup even if that project remains funded, which is doubtful. An estimated 70% of the 500,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil remain untouched.
Trump trumpets his America First mantra which implies the other 194 countries are a distant second. But if he does cut off the Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam, it will mean America First, Vietnam Last… dead last.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL
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Expect nothing good to come from this second Trump administration; a stoical perspective might aver, ‘this too shall pass.’ The contamination of Vietnam’s soils is, as noted, utterly tragic and likely to continue to poison the people of that country for years to come. Laos similarly, the most bombed country in history, and it wasn’t even officially part of the Vietnam War. Cambodia also. The criminality of the political class is staggering; four presidents, Kissinger, Robert McNamara (a former Ford MoCo executive who took to warmongering like flies to a fresh corpse), along with a raft of similar dead-eyed heartless American apparatchiks who eagerly donned the sequins and spangles as cheerleaders for the utterly appalling horrors they were promulgating across the Pacific.
The karmic legacy of the barbarity of the US military’s actions in SE Asia imply suffering and retribution for the USA into the unforeseeable future, as is just per those laws of cause & effect.