Bomben auf Chemiewerk

Dirty Wars. From Vietnam Syndrome to Gulf Syndrome

by Marco Farano

The cluster bombs that injured some Italian fishermen during the recent war in Yugoslavia and were found in nets as late as mid-September can be considered the tip of an iceberg that appeared on the horizon of our coasts. The iceberg in question is a phenomenon of enormous magnitude constituted by the ecological consequences of war determined by the growing and systematic use of weapons and war strategies that destroy the environment, kill more and more civilians and continue to kill even long after the end of the conflict. This section of the festival [Cinemambiente 1999] intends to reflect on this phenomenon by showing three significant stages of its development: the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the recent one in Yugoslavia. Three cases that also illustrate well the logic that guides this evolution of war and explains the non-random links between its apparently increasingly transparent and real-time media representation, a war that seems to become increasingly aseptic, surgical, even humanitarian, and a very different reality.

"Will they let us win this time?" Rambo asked in 1985 before leaving for Vietnam to free the alleged American prisoners who were, in reality, the last pretext for maintaining the embargo imposed by the United States after the defeat. A question that expresses the opinion of those who believe that Vietnam was a war "lost in the living room" due to the anti-patriotic actions of journalists who had shown "too much blood on TV", destroying popular consensus for the war and forcing the United States to retreat [1]. Bush refers to this myth, also known as "Vietnam syndrome", shortly before the Gulf War, when he states that this will not be another war fought "with one hand tied behind the back". And at the end of the conflict he will be able to declare: "We have kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all, that is, we can finally wage war again, because now we are capable of waging war without American deaths and with the return of prisoners". The Gulf War ended with little more than a hundred American deaths, mostly victims of accidents, and it was certainly a different war: the first war experienced live on television and fought through a series of surgical interventions made possible by the use of intelligent weapons. However, its maximum media visibility coincided, paradoxically, with its maximum obscurity: the Pentagon imposed total censorship on all media, which could only broadcast images and news directly offered or strictly selected by the Pentagon itself. We thus saw mainly promotional videos from various US war industries, footage from cameras placed on the nose cones of missiles and images of bombings similar to fireworks. At the same time, the surgical nature of the war interventions coincided with one of the dirtiest wars, during which a quantity of explosives equal to 15 times that used by all the contenders during the Second World War was poured on Iraq, including 300 tons of radioactive projectiles; where nuclear reactors were bombed, an act that the UN had banned and which is considered a war crime, and the chemical weapons factories sold to Iraq, until a few months before, by the United States and Germany. And the number of American deaths, once the media spotlights were turned off, rose to 10,000, that is how many are currently deceased among the 100,000 veterans who have fallen ill with what has been defined as Gulf War Syndrome, a set of very serious diseases that has also caused congenital malformations in their children. Probable causes are the vaccine against biological weapons, the clouds of chemical weapons caused by the bombing of factories and the depleted uranium weapons used to make projectiles highly penetrating (including the smart Tomahawk missiles) or to armor tanks. In the video Metal of Dishonor one of the veterans defines Gulf War Syndrome as an "agent orange" of the nineties [2]. Agent Orange was the name of the defoliant used in Vietnam by the United States, highly carcinogenic due to the dioxin it contained. Tens of thousands of American soldiers were contaminated by it and fell ill, having to fight for years before their illnesses and those they passed on to their children were recognized and compensated. A great stir was caused in 1991, while the embargo against Vietnam was still in place, by the news that a Vietnamese farmer, having learned that an American helicopter was flying over his village in search of prisoners, had asked the authorities for permission to shoot it down [3]. This episode loses its anecdotal character if one considers that in those years, and the current situation has not changed much, there was an impressive number of victims in Vietnam (6 per day in the province of Quang Tri alone) of unexploded cluster bombs (285 million were dropped, 7 per capita) or of mines that the Americans had abandoned on the ground refusing to provide either maps or defusing procedures [4]. Currently in Vietnam the victims of Agent Orange alone are estimated at around two million and the third generation of those who were contaminated still suffer from very serious congenital malformations. In Iraq doctors are now registering a frightening increase in cases of cancer, abortions and congenital malformations that the continuation of the bombings [5] and the embargo, which has led to more than 1,500,000 victims overall, do not allow to quantify with precision and much less to cure.

Let's go back to the living room, where with the recent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the war has finally become humanitarian. But how can we reconcile this attribute with a war strategy that, as the documentary Bomben auf Chemiewerke shows, is punishable by international law for war crimes: not only for the systematic air attacks on civilian targets and the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium [6], but above all for having intentionally and repeatedly bombed chemical plants, thus violating the conventions on the banning of chemical and ecological warfare? For a solution to this enigma, which is equivalent to asking how one could have believed in the deception of humanitarian ends, a topic too complex to be adequately examined here, we refer to a couple of readings or films, from which we can get an idea of ​​how environmental and media pollution have proceeded hand in hand in this latest war [7]. The history of the relationship between war and the environment obviously does not begin with Vietnam nor is it limited to these examples [8]. Particularly worrying are some projects started under the Reagan presidency, which despite the hoped for fall of the Evil Empire, continue undaunted. Such as the development of biological weapons, to which genetic engineering has given enormous impetus and greater danger [9]. Or such as the relaunch of the "Star Wars" program, for which Clinton has allocated 6.5 billion dollars this year and which on September 29 of this year will see a first test of interception and shooting down of ballistic missiles in space, at an altitude of 120 km, violating the 1972 ABM treaty [10]. These disturbing aspects of war and its environmental impacts, involving genetics and space, must not make us forget other wars, less spectacular but no less dirty, such as the "low intensity conflicts" fought by the armies of third world dictatorships against those popular movements that oppose an economic development that determines, for example, 220,000 deaths per year due to pesticides banned in rich countries. One example among many is Guatemala, where the world record for DDT in breast milk was recorded with a dose 185 times higher than the limit set by the WHO and a concurrent increase of 100% in military spending. Finally, we must remember the phenomenon of third-worldization, within rich countries, which sees welfare replaced by warfare, as is exemplarily the case in the United States, where one worker in ten depends on the military-industrial complex, which absorbs 15% of the federal budget and places uranium mines, military ranges and open-air radioactive waste dumps in the poorest areas of the country. The image of a billboard placed along a highway in New Mexico that reads "New Mexico: number 1 in poverty, number 1 in atomic weapons", goes well with that of some special police squads serving in the poorest neighborhoods of the country who, after the Gulf War, wore a T-shirt with the words "Operation Ghetto Storm".

[1] On the media representation of the Vietnam and Gulf wars see B. Cumings, Guerra e televisione, Baskerville, 1993 and C. Fracassi, Sotto la notizia niente, Avvenimenti, 1994.

[2] On the Gulf War Syndrome and the issue of depleted uranium see also VV.AA., Metal of Dishonor, International Action Center, 1997. The book is also partly available, along with much other information, on the site http://www.facenter.org

[3] Chomsky, Anno 501, la conquista continua, Gamberetti, 1993, also useful for framing the theme addressed in this text in a broader political context. For this purpose see also http://www.zmag.org

[4] Every 20 minutes in the world a person is the victim of an anti-personnel mine. In March 1999, an international treaty came into force to ban them, which the US did not sign, in good company with China and Russia.

[5] More than 600 missions recorded in the first two weeks of March while the bombing of Yugoslavia was taking place.

[6] Previously used by NATO in Yugoslavia already in the 1995 bombing of the Serbian part of Bosnia.

[7] On the role of public relations companies and the media in the Balkan crisis, see VV.AA., La Nato nei Balcani, Editori Riuniti, 1999; VV.AA.., Dal Medio Oriente ai Balcani, La città del sole, 1999; Paolo Rumiz, Maschere per un massacro, Editori Riuniti, 1998; C. Fracassi, Le notizie hanno le gambe corte, Rizzoli, 1996. The films in question are The Second American Civil War by J. Dante and Sex and Power by B. Levinson. The latter tells the story of a fake war against Albania started by the president of the United States to save himself from a sex scandal. It was shown in American cinemas in the days when, after the declarations on the Lewinsky case, impeachment was expected. Clinton had a factory in Sudan bombed that was accused of producing chemical weapons, which later turned out to be the pharmaceutical factory that supplied half the country. During the last NATO attacks, Yugoslav television broadcast it continuously, before being bombed. In the fiction, however, the author of the fake film on Albanian refugees will not be allowed to publicly claim his deeds like the director of Ruder Finn, the public relations company that took care of the image of Croatia, Bosnia and Albanian Kosovars. 

[8] In France, the reclamation of the territories where the fighting of the First World War took place continues today; every year, an average of 900 tons of unexploded howitzers are recovered in two million acres that are still inaccessible and, in 1991 alone, 36 farmers were killed and 51 seriously injured by unexploded ordnance. See D. Webster, Le terre di Caino. Quel che resta della guerra, Corbaccio, 1999. On nuclear power, see VV.AA., 10 d.C. (dopo Cernobyl) Cinema e nucleare, Pervisione, 1996.

[9] On biotechnology see J. Rifkin, II secolo biotech, Baldini&Castoldi, 1998. On biological weapons see the SIPRI annuals and http://cbw.sipri.se

[10] On August 17 of this year the Cassini spacecraft, launched in 1997 with 42.5 pounds of plutonium on board, performed an approach maneuver to about 750 kilometers from the earth, in assisted gravity, to gain speed in the direction of Saturn. The protests of those who for two years have reported that a maneuver error that would have determined its reentry into the atmosphere would have entailed a risk of contamination for all humanity have been totally ignored by the media. Nothing happened, but it is known that one such error is enough.