Weekday News Wrap: Thursday, August 9, 2012
by Jessica Dorsey
- According to the UN, Afghanistan civilan deaths are down for the first time since it started counting in 2007, though officials say that this is due to an extremely harsh winter rather than improved security. The United Nations also reports that targeted killings in Afghanistan have risen 53%.
- Ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair has expressed his deep concern that the UK will leave the European Union in a referendum.
- In other statements from former heads of state, France’s Nicholas Sarkozy has called for a humanitarian intervention in Syria.
- Syrian troops have pushed back rebel forces in Aleppo and as the conflict worsens, doubts arise as to who may replace Kofi Annan as peace envoy. Foreign Policy talks about the winners and losers of Syria’s civil war.
- Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has appointed a new prime minister after the defection of Riad Hijab earlier this week.
- Yesterday, leaders from central African states failed to reach an agreement about how best to structure a neutral force to battle the insurgency in eastern Congo.
- According to the UN, 655,000 people have been displaced as a result of fighting between government and rebel forces in the south of the country.
- In Vietnam, the United States has begun the first cleanup of Agent Orange, a toxic chemical used in the Vietnam War by the United States, killing or maiming an estimated 400,000 and causing approximately 500,000 children to be born with defects.
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The last news item is encouraging however terribly belated such action happens to be. Younger readers perhaps need to be reminded, in the words of Marilyn B. Young, that “Korea and Vietnam were, so to speak, living laboratories for the development of new weapons,” which in this case included (thus was not limited to) white-phosphorous enhanced napalm, toxic defoliants, and varieties of nerve gas. In Indochina, the United States dropped 8 million tons of bombs,
“with an explosive power equivalent to 640 Hiroshima-size bombs. Three million tons were dropped on Laos, exceeding the total for Germany and Japan by both the U.S. and Great Britain. For nine years, an average of one planeload of bombs fell on Laos every eight minutes. In addition, 150,000 acres of forest were destroyed through the chemical warfare known as defoliation. For South Vietnam, the figure is 19 million gallons of defoliant [and herbicides] dropped on an area comprising 20 percent of South Vietnam—some 6 million acres.” From Young’s essay in the volume she edited with Yuki Tanaka, Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: The New Press, 2009)
Here’s a few relevant titles from my Vietnam War bibliography (available online at Ratio Juris):
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. The Indochina Story: A Fully Documented Account. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking, 2002.
Kiernan, Ben “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969-1973,” Vietnam Generation, 1, 1989 (Winter): 4-41.
Neilands, J.B., et al. Harvest of Death: Chemical Warfare in Vietnam and Cambodia. New York: The Free Press, 1972.
Shawcross, William.Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Wilcox, Fred A. Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011.
Wilcox, Fred A. Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2nd ed., 2011.
at 5:18 pm EST Patrick S. O'Donnell