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The
testimony of George Claxton, a Vietnam veteran who served in Southeast
Asia in 1967, reveals just how widely the United States used Agent
Orange. “I took showers in the stuff,” he says. “We
had wooden stalls with a tub overhead filled with rainwater that
was tinged slightly orange. We would pull the string hanging in
the shower and bathe in it. We knew it was Agent Orange because
we saw the planes spraying it on the jungle every day. We didn’t
think anything of it really and at first we thought, ‘Hell,
the army is spraying for mosquitoes.’ ”
Claxton’s experience was not unusual. Between 1965 and 1975,
the U.S. military sprayed millions of tons of Agent Orange on the
jungles of Vietnam in “ADMs”—airborne “area
denial missions” intended to deny cover to the Vietcong and
North Vietnamese Army. The strategy worked: large areas of Quang
Tri Province along the 38th Parallel and a swath of land in the
“iron triangle” of Tay Ninh Province west of Saigon were
stripped of all vegetation.
In the wake of Vietnam, there was worldwide concern about the environmental
damage caused by U.S. military operations in Southeast Asia. Shortly
after the end of the Vietnam War, in 1975, it began to become clear
that a disproportionate number of Vietnam veterans were coming down
with non-Hogkins lymphoma and skin sarcomas. The Centers for Disease
Control would later determine that the cause of these cancers was
the dioxins contained in Agent Orange. The extent of the damage
to the natural environment of Vietnam as a result of the spraying
was also becoming apparent. While no systematic survey of defoliated
areas of Southeast Asia has been conducted, the anecdotal evidence
is enormous. Huge portions of Quang Tri and Tay Ninh provinces “look
like a moonscape” and remain unsuitable for agricultural use,
according to Chuck Searcy, the director of a humanitarian program
in Hanoi. And Vietnamese doctors have attested to significant increases
in birth defects among people in the affected areas.
The major piece of international humanitarian law prohibiting environmental
war was drafted in reaction to what took place in Vietnam, and is
contained in two articles of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the
Geneva Conventions. Article 35 states that “it is prohibited
to employ methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may
be expected, to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to
the environment.” This prohibition is spelled out in detail
in two sections of Article 55.
The first of these sections involves the protection of the natural
environment. “Care shall be taken in warfare,” it states,
“to protect the natural environment against widespread, long-term
and severe damage. This protection includes a prohibition against
the use of means of warfare which are intended or may be expected
to cause such damage to the natural environment and thereby prejudice
the health or survival of the population.” The second provision
declares that “attacks against the natural environment by way
of reprisals are prohibited.”
Unfortunately, these provisions are more unclear and more ambiguous
legally than at least some commentators and activists might have
wished. While they impose the obligation to take precautions, they
fall far short of a blanket interdiction against certain methods
of warfare that may harm the environment. The use of the expression
“long-term” is understood to mean decades, not years,
so a considerable degree of environmental harm seems to be tolerable
under international humanitarian law.
Some further limitations on the ravages of environmental war were
secured by the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any
Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD),
which was opened for signature in 1977—again, largely in response
to the American use of defoliants in Vietnam—and was ratified
by the United States in 1980. This convention is now accepted, along
with Articles 35 and 55 of Additional Protocol I, as the clearest
expression of international humanitarian law in the field of environmental
warfare.
By the terms of the ENMOD, States agree not to “engage in military
or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having
widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction,
damage or injury.” In practice, it remains to be seen whether
enough ambiguity has been removed from the law to make these provisions
serve as an effective way of preventing the most extreme kinds of
environmental attacks. These provisions were not in effect at the
time of the Vietnam War, so, obviously, they cannot be applied retroactively
to what took place then. Some have argued that the Iraqi government’s
decision, in the waning days of its occupation of Kuwait in 1991,
to set fire to the Kuwaiti oil fields and to purposely dump millions
of tons of oil into the Persian Gulf was an instance of such a crime.
But since no Iraqi officers were ever indicted or tried for these
offenses, the practical impact of the provisions remain unclear.
Kuwaiti
Oil Wells
By Robert Block
Dante would have at been at home in Kuwait in 1991. A desert paradise
had been transformed into an environmental inferno by a spiteful
Iraqi leader.
Across the land more than six hundred oil wells ignited by Iraqi
soldiers spewed out orange and red fireballs and roared like untamed
beasts. The smoke was so thick and so black that when the winds
failed it became midnight at 10:00 A.M. Grease dripped from the
skies and soot fell like snowflakes from hell. Everything whose
natural color should have been white was a charcoal gray: cats,
sheep, and the carcasses of slender-billed seagulls who dropped
from the heavens while overflying the country.
The burning oil fields on the Kuwait skyline is perhaps the most
enduring image to survive the Gulf War and is also one of the greatest
environmental crimes ever perpetrated.
It was Saddam Hussein’s final defiant gesture. Defeated but
unbowed after the Gulf War, his troops placed explosive charges
next to every well they could reach in the Ahmadi, Dharif, Umm Quadir,
Wafra, Minagish, and Rawdatayn oil fields. If the entire dispute
that led to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was over oil, then Saddam’s
attitude appeared to be, “If I can’t have it, neither
can you.”
During the war, the Pentagon issued exaggerated assessments of the
oil fires and the deliberate oil spills the Iraqis unleashed, putting
Saddam Hussein’s acts of ecoterrorism in the worst possible
light. Nevertheless the horror of the fires and the ecological damage
to the Gulf’s fragile flora and fauna from what locals called
“Saddam’s memorial cloud” was very real.
At the time, John Walsh, a biologist with the World Society for
the Protection of Animals, was particularly concerned about dozens
of species of migratory birds from Central Asia which traveled over
the Gulf. He would brave the heat and the smoke from the burning
wells and collect dead birds. After picking up one dead gull, he
surveyed the spectacle and wondered aloud: “Is this what the
end of the world looks like?”
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