Disasters!

The Vietnam war has often been compared to the current conflict in Afghanistan, but perhaps never quite so bizarrely as by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal. In one op-ed he argued that "...an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by a partial or complete Taliban victory, would mean a humanitarian disaster for Afghans comparable to what happened in Southeast Asia after the Communist takeover in 1975."

Let's first go backwards from that 1975 date, and look at the decade before, and talk about humanitarian disaster. During those ten years the sheer number of dead Vietnamese on both sides of the DMZ climbed to genocidal heights, well over a million and possibly as many as 3 million. Many of the dead were armed combatants, to be sure, but many were civilians, the "collateral damage" caused by the 8 million tons of U.S. bombs dropped on Vietnam (three times as much tonnage as in WWII), plus bullets, rockets, missiles, artillery, napalm and other tools of war. Then there were the 12 million gallons of the carcinogenic herbicide known as Agent Orange and millions more gallons of Agent Blue that the U.S. sprayed on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Agent Orange defoliated the forests, Agent Blue killed crops, and a lot of both chemicals landed on people, including American troops. The U.S. government at the time claimed the chemicals were harmless to humans and short-lived in the environment, but the term "short-lived" should have been applied to the humans who came in contact with the defoliants. It is estimated that nearly 5 million Vietnamese were exposed to the chemicals, that a half-million Vietnamese died from their exposure, and that hundreds of thousands more suffered - and still suffer - from birth defects and chronic illnesses. Countless (because the U.S. government for years refused to acknowledge them) American veterans of the war also suffered, and continue to suffer and die, from exposure to Agent Orange.

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