America has no moral authority to intervene in Syria

During the Vietnam war, the US military sprayed millions of gallons of chemical defoliants on Vietnamese soil and people. One of these highly toxic chemicals was known as Agent Orange. Vietnam estimates that over 400,000 people were killed or maimed and over 500,000 children were born with birth defects due to health problems associated with Agent Orange. The effects of Agent Orange continue to plague third and fourth generation children to this day.

The most damning indictment of the US military’s use of Agent Orange was revealed in a letter written by Dr James Clary (a former US government scientist) to a member of Congress in which he admitted that “when we initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide…However, because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned.”

Chemical weapons have now been unleashed on the Syrian people; but the question that must be answered irrefutably is who carried out these horrific acts. The Syrian government denies it and the UN inspectors’ report remains unreleased. Yet, an aggressive White House was considering military options, until Russia seized upon the opportunity to suggest neutralisation of Syria’s chemical arsenal under UN supervision. But there are still hawkish elements within the White House who are either not willing to give the UN option a chance or are sceptical about its chances of success. Thus the open question still remains whether the Syrian government was responsible for the recent chemical weapons attack on its people? As Peter Oborne writing recently in The Telegraph said, “It is important to remember that Assad has been accused of using poison gas against civilians before. But on that occasion, Carla del Ponte, a UN commissioner on Syria, concluded that the rebels, not Assad, were probably responsible.” There are very credible reports that Syrian rebels are in possession of chemical weapons supplied to them by external forces opposed to the Assad regime.

Hence, instead of threatening to go it alone, the United States government should wait and create further international consensus and obtain irrefutable evidence of the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. The British government has already returned the deputy sheriff badge to the US by refusing to take part.

Without UN Security Council backing, any strike on Syria would be illegal under international law and the US government lacks moral authority to go it alone without international consensus. We are reminded of the horrors of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein the day after the first public announcement that Iraq had used chemical weapons against the Iranians.

The US has never apologised to the Vietnamese people for the use of Agent Orange. In the Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, there is an eerie sense of calm in a research facility that carries hundreds of bottles containing deformed foetuses floating in formaldehyde. However, in the Peace Village at the Tu Du hospital, there is never any silence. Here, those babies who survived their miserable births cry out continuously for they do not understand their own misfortune and have to be restrained in their beds to keep them from hurting themselves.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 16^th, 2013.

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