The next Vietnam
The U.S. is poised to go to war in the Andes

By nessie

If the war on (some) drugs could be won, it would have happened by now. It's been going on for nearly a century. It's the new Hundred Years War.

Have we learned nothing from history? We should. History is very clear about what to do when you can't win. When you can't win, quit. Cut your losses and switch to plan B. This does not appear to be happening anytime soon.

Even worse, the WO(S)D is not our only war. The Gulf War, we were told, lasted a hundred hours. In fact, it is still going on. So far, the blockade and bombing of Iraq has killed, depending on whose version of the story you chose to believe, a half a million to a million Iraqis. Almost all of them have been women and children. But Americans either don't know, don't care, or both. After all, they are only Arabs. Most Americans don't really care if Arabs die. Most Americans don't even care about other Americans, unless they are close personal friends or are related by blood or marriage. If we did, we would not permit paper to sleep in a palace while people sleep in the street. But we do. That's the kind of people we are.

If American bodies were coming home from Iraq in boxes, then America would care about the war in Iraq, and the war would come to a stop. No matter what happens in the field, without the support of the people at home, protracted wars cannot be won. As the recent Somalian fiasco demonstrated, even small interventions of limited scope and duration are dependent on public support. The Vietnam War proved conclusively that even a major military effort can be stopped in its tracks by enough disgruntled civilians back home. It took a long time, a lot of work, and a lot of suffering. Some of us died in the process. Others went into prison or exile. But we did it. We stopped the damn war.

Why? Because it was in our collective self-interest to do so. Self-interest is a powerful motivator, especially of selfish and self-centered people like us. Had only Vietnamese been dying in the war there, few if any Americans would have taken notice, let alone taken to the streets. I'm sorry to have to say this, because I, too, am an American and I would really, really like to be able to take pride in who we are. I'd like to at least be able to believe we are a moral people, a caring people, a just people, and not ruthless, serial invaders of weaker nations around the world. But the truth is the truth. The only real choice we have in this life is to face the truth and deal with it one way or the other, or to live lives of delusion. Truth is better. Delusion can be exceedingly dangerous.

The truth of the crime that is being committed against the people of Iraq is that it is not in the self-interest of most Americans stop it. That's why it goes on, no other reason. Were we a moral people, this would not be so. But we are who we are. And so until Americans start coming home in body bags, America's antiwar movement will lie stunted and dormant.

But not to worry. All too soon we'll be up to our ears in body bags. Then the antiwar movement will bloom. Mark my words. Congress just approved $1.3 billion for America's steadily escalating adventure in Colombia. The introduction of ground troops is only a matter of time. Military "advisors" are already actively participating in the decades-long civil war there. They have already begun coming home dead. If the present policy of escalation continues, America will be up to its neck in a quagmire so soon it will make your head spin. This is not paranoid hysteria on my part. It's not even pessimism. This is the lesson of history.

If you are too young to remember how America became involved in Vietnam, ask someone who's not. You should know people like us. We're a useful source of valuable information. If you only have friends your own age, you are making a serious strategic error in life. Get over it.

Learn from the mistakes of your elders. We made a doozy when we failed to notice what was happening in Vietnam until after hundreds of thousands of ground troops were already engaged. Trust me on this. I know. I did it too. A bunch of us did. It was an error of epic scope. The consequences were ghastly. Had we mobilized in mass when American involvement was still at the level of "advisors" and military hardware grants, countless lives could have been saved. But we didn't. Repeat our mistake at your own peril. We were stupid, self-absorbed, and above all, shortsighted. Don't you be. It could haunt you for a very long time.

Three decades later, the walking wounded of the Vietnam War can still be seen in American streets. At the scene of the crime itself, the legacy of the war is far worse. Not only were the Vietnamese people slaughtered wholesale, the land itself was poisoned as well. Vast swaths of Vietnam were defoliated with Agent Orange. People living there still show elevated levels of dioxin contamination.

Now chemical and biological warfare (CBW) is coming to the Andes. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair report that already the United States is "planning" the testing and widespread application of fusarium oxysporum, an anti-coca fungus in the Andes and western Amazon. For over a decade coca growers in Peru have accused the United States of secretly applying the fungus there to attack coca plants, in the process also harming food crops and farm animals. Mother Jones reports that Florida has put an indefinite hold on its plans to test the fungus for its own antidrug efforts after environmentalists and a state official warned that it could mutate, spread rapidly, and kill off other plants, including food crops. The fungus can, under certain circumstances, even cause lethal infections in humans with weakened immune systems.

It's ironic, but some CBW research has been outsourced to former enemies. At the Institute for Genetics, in Kazakhstan, former Soviet biowarriors are being financed by the United States and Britain to test myco-herbicides, specifically a fungus called Pleospora, to kill opium poppies and marijuana plants. The 2000 budget contains at least $23 million for these programs. Further appropriations are almost certainly buried in covert military and intelligence budgets. CBW is only part of the Colombia plan, 90 percent of which is military aid and includes 18 Blackhawk and 42 Huey II helicopters. For we who remember the creeping escalation that led to the catastrophe of Vietnam, it's déjà vu, all over again.

The fusarium oxysporum strains that infect coca plants are closely related to those that attack yams, a staple in the Andean diet. All moral people must at least question the appropriateness of weapons whose collateral damage includes a potential threat to the food supply of civilians. But we who know history must also consider an even more heinous possibility: that the creation of famine is actually part of the plan.

Hunger is not a new weapon. American forces used it in Vietnam. By now most people have heard of Agent Orange. Less well known is Agent Blue, whose target was rice production. Rice plantations deemed to be of service to the Viet Cong were sprayed and obliterated. The effects on local families were predictable.

Then there was Tailwind, a series of CIA directed missions in 1970 that allegedly involved the use of the poison nerve gas sarin to kill American defectors, among others, in Laos. In typical fashion, it was 28 years before the American public was informed.

The story broke on CNN as a feature news segment on the show Newsstand. Eye witnesses were not in shortage. Retired Gen. John Singlaub immediately led the charge to discredit the story. Among other things, Singlaub is a former commander of the U.S. Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal, where most of the U.S. sarin supply was produced. He's best known by the company he keeps.

Singlaub sued the show's producer, April Oliver, and the network for defamation and slander. He also demanded a public apology and exoneration. In the likely event that Singlaub et. al. are lying, then the story is true. This means that during the Vietnam era the United States committed acts, specifically the use of nerve gas, that would be considered war crimes under current international law. Indeed, Mike Rupert notes that the United States has repeatedly bombed civilian and military targets in Iraq, supposedly in retaliation for Saddam Hussein's use of the exact same tactics.

On Jan. 17 of this year a deposition of retired Joint Chiefs chair Adm. Thomas Moorer was taken in connection with a number of the civil suits filed in the aftermath of the CNN reports. It provided significant evidence to support the original story.

One way to tell if people are lying is to watch for when they contradict themselves. Both Singlaub and Moorer have denied that they used the gas or brought it any closer to Southeast Asian operations than the island of Okinawa. Yet, according to admissions made near the end of the deposition, as much as 300 pounds of the gas were stored at a secret CIA-controlled Thai air/operations base called Nakhorn Phanom. Oliver's attorney, Roger Simmons, also secured a basic admission from Moorer that the Tailwind missions into Laos were controlled by Henry Kissinger and the CIA, not the Pentagon. This then invalidated Moorer's original strident assertions that he had controlled these missions as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and that he had never authorized the use of sarin gas or allowed it into the area of operations.

Typically, Moorer's deposition is not front-page news. But it is a public document. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions.

These are the kinds of war crimes that we can look forward to if the present course of escalation in Colombia continues. Arguably, war itself is a crime. Aggressive war is certainly a crime. When your country is invaded, it is the height of hypocrisy for the invaders to say that some things they do there are crimes and some are not. Invasion itself is a crime. It is much akin to rape, just on a grander scale. The killing of women and children, particularly by poison and hunger, is exceptionally heinous. But worse by far is to make war on the earth itself.

CBW is war against the earth. It is truly a crime against nature. And American taxpayers are footing the bill. And for what? So that a few may profit from the suffering of the many. Put an end to it. How many boys must come home in a box before we acknowledge the utter futility of attempting to suppress human nature by force? Force can no more stop people from getting high than it can stop them from singing, dancing, and screwing. All it does is make them hide. People get high. Get used to it. Stop letting a few greedy men destroy the peace and liberty of all so that they may make a profit from this basic fact of life.

Or don't. Either way, it's up to you. But don't say I didn't warn you. If you ignore what I'm saying and let your government drag us into another Vietnam, then we'll really see this society tear itself apart. And in the long run, maybe that wouldn't be so bad after all. Because this time, we'll go all the way. If enough American bodies come home in boxes, the Colombian War will be the straw that will break the Prohibition's back. It will break it in the streets. Or we could take another route and settle this peaceably. Either way, it's up to you.