How can the United States afford to keep proving that it's
bad at bringing peace to conflict-ridden Middle Eastern countries?
We’re at it again.
After months of
commendable restraint, President Barack Obama has decided to send weapons to
the besieged Syrian rebels. This is either a bid to overthrow a friend of Iran
or a ploy to capture Syria’s oil. Or both.
Sound familiar? It
should.
Back in the 1980s,
Uncle Sam armed Osama bin Laden and other besieged rebels in Afghanistan.
Apparently, our leaders think that bid to drive out the Russians in a region
with key energy interests was a big success. And, they want to try it
again.
The tipping point this time involves poison gas — Obama says he’s got evidence that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad used it on his own people.
Perhaps.
Regardless of the
rationale, we must first reckon with the horrific results of our
other wars in the Middle East.
Consider the fate of
Fallujah, a former target of U.S. military attention in Iraq. After the city
was leveled, its birth-defect and miscarriage rates skyrocketed, the Environmental Contamination and Toxicology Bulletin
found.
Experts estimate that
some 1 million Iraqis died from combat, malnutrition, and pollution during the
course of the Gulf and Iraq wars. Many millions more were driven from their
homes. And an alarming percentage of the people who remain there are getting cancer.
The cause of this huge
toll on Iraqi lives and well-being is no great mystery. War is a dirty
business.
Those millions of
exploded munitions we detonated in Iraq contained lead and mercury. Hundreds of
thousands more (the Pentagon won’t say how many) released depleted uranium, a
toxin now dispersed in fine dust all over Iraq and Afghanistan. Others featured
white phosphorus.
President George W.
Bush’s Iraq War didn’t begin the U.S. assault on Iraq’s public health. His
father, President George H. W. Bush, oversaw the bombing of Iraq’s water purification plants during the 1991 Gulf War. This brutal
tactic has caused countless deaths over the past two decades.
The Iraqi people
weren’t the only ones poisoned. Our men and women in uniform have suffered too.
Around 200,000 Gulf War veterans suffer from medically unexplained but chronic
symptoms known as Gulf
War syndrome. They include fatigue, headaches, joint pain, indigestion,
insomnia, dizziness, respiratory disorders, and memory problems.
A new wave of illness
is gripping Afghanistan and Iraq War vets. In many cases, these ailments are
tied to the military’s environmentally irresponsible “burn pits.”
The Veterans Administration notes that those pits
routinely torched “chemicals,
paint, medical and human waste, metal/aluminum cans, munitions and other
unexploded ordnance, petroleum and lubricant products, plastics and Styrofoam,
rubber, wood, and discarded food.” Plus some other stuff you can’t legally
incinerate in your fireplace.
Getting to the bottom
of the burn pit problem will take time and money. Representative Tim Bishop, a
New York Democrat, recently introduced the Helping Veterans Exposed to Toxic Chemicals Act. His bill would get the much-needed research
done to find out whether burn pits harmed the health of our men and women in
uniform.
Until the research is
done, vets can file disability claims the VA will decide “on a case-by-case
basis.”
There are many costs
of war. In monetary terms, Americans are likely to pay more than $1 trillion just on caring for the many
veterans of the
Afghanistan War, according to Nobel-Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and
Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes.
Before Washington
really ramps up the U.S. role in Syria, let’s contemplate the price tag for the
quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. It could reach $6 trillion, according to Bilmes — who served as the
Commerce Department’s CFO during the Clinton administration.
Just as it’s now
impossible to make a rational argument that our armed forces can bring peace to
Middle East conflicts, it’s mind-boggling to argue that we can afford to try
this again.
Back to that aid Obama
pledged weeks ago. Apparently, it hasn’t shown up in Syria yet.
Reuters reports that
those funds have “been temporarily frozen” after the House and Senate
intelligence committees expressed doubts about how this all-too-familiar plan
would keep weapons away from militants aligned with al-Qaeda.
Sometimes our
do-nothing Congress does something right by doing what it does best.
Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit
national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords columnist
William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of
Norwalk, Connecticut. OtherWords.org