One of the most striking statistics from the U.S. war in Vietnam doesn’t concern Vietnam at all, but its neighbor, Laos.  Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped over 2.5 million tons of ordnance on Laos.  This works out to the equivalent of one B-52 load of bombs every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. The sheer tonnage of explosives dropped on Laos makes the tiny, land-locked nation the most heavily-bombed country in history, with half a ton of bombs dropped for every inhabitant.

This dubious distinction carries a terrible legacy. According to U.S. estimates, approximately 30% of ordnance dropped over Laos failed to detonate upon impact. This unexploded ordnance, or UXO, remains scattered and buried throughout an area that covers one third of the country. In the past five decades over 50,000 Laotians – a fifth of them children – have been killed or maimed by American UXO. Currently, around 300 Laotians needlessly die every year from accidents involving UXO. Particularly deadly have been cluster bombs, which consist of sub-munitions that scatter over a wide area and are notorious for causing indiscriminate civilian casualties. Experts estimate that of the 260 million cluster bombs, or “bomblets” American forces dropped on Laos, 80 million remain unexploded.

This situation constitutes a severe humanitarian issue for which the U.S. is ultimately responsible. Due to the ubiquity of UXO, difficult economic conditions, and lack of education, reducing the damage by UXO has proved a formidable task for the Lao government. It is almost impossible for Laotians to avoid living and working in areas contaminated by UXO, making de-mining the only viable option for addressing the problem. Laos’s economy is heavily dependent on farming: 80% of the population is involved in agriculture, which makes up 30% of the national GDP. Unfortunately, UXO has rendered 37% of agricultural land unsafe for farming. Farmers who ignore or are unaware of UXO contamination are injured or killed by UXO that has sunk underground over time and is then detonated by digging.

In addition to farmers accidentally uncovering UXO, injuries and fatalities are caused when people actively seek out UXO for scrap metal.  Laos is an extremely poor country, ranking 133rd on the UNDP’s Human Development Index. The scrap metal of UXO and bomb shells are often seen as a valuable addition to low-income farmers, prompting many people to ignore the risks of UXO in favor of meager fiscal benefits.

Ironically, the UXO that some Laotians collect to relieve their personal poverty is also partially responsible for the poverty of the entire country. Besides constituting a severe humanitarian problem, UXO is also a significant impediment to Lao’s economic development. As the UNDP has reported,

“High levels of poverty in rural [Laotian] communities often correlate with high levels of UXO contamination. UXO/Mine Action is the absolute pre-condition for the socio-economic development of Lao PDR and for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and National Socio Economic Development Plan (NSEDP).”

In short, UXO directly inhibits the health and development of the Lao economy. Much of Laos’ economic development depends on its ability to exploit its abundant natural resources for mining, hydropower, forestry and tourism. The presence of UXO in over a third of the country renders efforts to grow these industries unsafe. Thus, clearing UXO is not only a humanitarian priority but an economic one.

The U.S. has recognized the terrible impact of UXO on Laos, most recently in an April 22, 2010 hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment.  However, American financial assistance in rectifying the problem has been less than satisfactory, to put it mildly.  The Lao government’s National Regulatory Authority (NRA), which is responsible for de-mining along with UXO Laos, has been spending between $12 and $14 million a year to clear UXO. Only a small part of that cost is covered by U.S. donations. According to a State Department representative, from 1993 to 2009 the U.S. contributed $25 million to de-mining efforts, or an average of $1.5 million a year. In 2009 that number rose slightly, to $3.7 million, and FY 2010 has seen the highest contribution so far, at $5 million. Unfortunately, the State Department’s proposed FY 2011 allotment for de-mining in Laos is significantly smaller at $1.9 million. As Channapha Khamvongsa, Executive Director of the nonprofit Legacies of War, has pointed out, the U.S. spent more money in three days of dropping bombs on Laos than it has in the past fifteen years cleaning those bombs up.

The lack of U.S. fiscal assistance to Laos is both embarrassing and wrong. Laos already receives very little in the form of generalized American foreign assistance- $5 million in 2009. Regionally, this is in comparison to Thailand’s $15 million, Burma’s $17 million, Cambodia’s $65 million, and Vietnam’s $102 million.  Since de-mining activities in Laos began in 1994, only 500,000 bomblets (out of an estimated 80 million) have been destroyed and only 1% of contaminated land cleared. A significant hindrance to progress is related to the lack of funding, particularly for equipment. Were the U.S. to commit to greater levels of funding, progress could be faster, thus reducing the unnecessary loss of life and stagnation of development in Laos.

The U.S. has no excuse for not taking full financial responsibility for clearing UXO in Laos. On the rather rare occasions when the problem of UXO Laos is discussed by the American government and media, it is done so in a way that fails to adequately accept responsibility for the problem. This is unacceptable. Secretary Clinton may have told Southeast Asia that “the U.S. is back,” but when it comes to Laos, that remains to be seen. Let’s hope she means it.

Related posts:

1. Will Senators Have the Midas Touch?

As you all know, the crisis in Burma is transforming from a natural disaster to a humanitarian catastrophe due to the xenophobia, incompetence, and malevolence of the Burmese government. With every day that passes, the situation of the up to tow million Burmese people affected by this crisis, almost three quarters of whom have reportedly not received any assistance, is becoming ever more precarious. It is clear that the time has come for bold international action.  My colleague, Brian Vogt, wrote an excellent piece detailing one strategy for getting aid through to those who need it earlier this week.  Brian is quite right to warn that we must not to allow our disgust for the Burmese junta lead us to political posturing rather than decisive action.

Although the Chinese government stated last week that they did not think it appropriate for the Burma crisis to be brought to the UN Security Council, it is becoming increasingly clear that stronger action by the UN and the international community will be required to break this deadly impasse. French Prime Minister Bernard Kouchner was among the first to call for aid drops in Burma, even against the wishes of the Burmese regime. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is now calling for a UN summit on aid to Burma. The United States must continue to take a lead in these efforts, and to build international consensus around a more aggressive assistance agenda with the greatest amount of international legitimacy possible. Clearly, food and aid drops will not be enough as water-borne diseases begin to take their toll over the coming days, particularly on the young and the elderly.  Specifically, the United States can actively support the provision of assistance under chapter 7 of the UN Charter, as was done for Somalia and other recent humanitarian crises.

No related posts.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: President Bush may be traveling through Latin America, but his focus is still on Iraq. He asked Congress yesterday to fund more than 4,000 new troops on top of the 21,500 he asked for in January. Democrats in Congress say it’s time to start bringing troops home. And we’re joined this morning by one of them, Senator James Webb of Virginia.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So is the president going to get this request?

WEBB: Well, you know, as long as he has the authority as commander-in-chief to conduct the war, he’s going to be able to control a lot of these sorts of things. I don’t think people are going to go against him in terms of cutting back the appropriations for more troops.   

So, Congress will pressure the White House to bring the troops home by giving it the funding it requests. Brilliant! Sen. Webb then clarified how a timetable is anything but.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you Senate Democrats are trying to put more pressure on the Maliki government and you’ve said, you’ve introduced legislation this week, Senator Reid, the majority leader has, calling for a goal of getting all combat forces out of Iraq by next March 31st. But this summer, you told Joe Klein of “Time” magazine, I want to show what you told Joe Klein. He was talking about a discussion you had and he said when he, Webb, talks about the war in Iraq, Jim Webb, the Democrat running for the U.S. Senate from Virginia likes to paraphrase Dwight Eisenhower on the war in Korea, “Anyone who tells you we can set a timetable for withdrawal, doesn’t understand war.” If a timetable was wrong then, why is it right now?

WEBB: Well, I don’t think that we should have a specific timetable for getting out. I’ve always said that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re against this legislation by Senator Reid?

WEBB: I think what, first of all, let’s say, let me clarify two things. The overt pressure on the Maliki government to solve the problem from within has not come from most of the Democrats. You’re hearing it, for instance, even from Senator McConnell yesterday and this is sort of an odd situation. It shows the unreality of a lot of this debate, and we’re now — the Republicans are saying this is Iraq’s last chance. This is their last chance. Maliki has to get it right.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Isn’t that true, though?

WEBB: No, let me be clear here. There’s only so much that a weak central government surrounded by armed factions can do. We saw that in Lebanon. I was there as a journalist. You had almost identical situation in microcosm but the rhetoric from the Republicans and other people who are saying that is almost counterintuitive. They’re saying, “This is your last chance” when you’re a weak government and you’re not able to basically control the factions that you’re responsible for.

Actually, Sen. Webb makes a good point here. Pressuring a weak, fragile, unstable government may be good rhetoric, but doesn’t actually accomplish anything.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But let me go back to this issue of a timetable. I understand this isn’t a timetable.    

WEBB: I want to get to that. But I think this is a very important point here. They’re saying, “This is your last chance, but what does that mean if the Maliki government cannot do it?” Are they going to favor a total withdrawal? We don’t know. I mean I think that’s an unrealistic thing to say.    

Now, with respect to timetables I’ve said over and over again the first thing — I mean for three years before I ever thought I’d run for office — that the first thing that must happen is a diplomatic umbrella. The sort of thing that we saw yesterday, and by the way I congratulated Secretary Rice on the Senate floor last Monday about this, and from there you can start withdrawing. What I’ve said is you can’t simply start withdrawing and then expect a diplomatic settlement to fall into place. That’s a sign of weakness.      

STEPHANOPOULOS: But this is still a timetable for withdrawal.    

WEBB: No, we now have, first of all, the beginnings of a true diplomatic process in place. This legislation, last time I read it, which was on Friday, basically says we will begin withdrawing combat troops from the streets of Iraq within four months, 120 days after the signing –    

STEPHANOPOULOS (Reading from text of bill): “With the goal of redeploying by March 31st, 2008, all United States combat forces from Iraq, except for a limited number for protecting U.S. personnel, training and equipping Iraqi forces or conducting counterterrorism.” But that is still a timetable for withdrawal.    

WEBB: Well, that’s — no, it’s a timetable to begin and to get our troops off the streets of Iraq, which, by the way, even the United States military, active duty military, I think, agrees with. Only 35% of the active duty military agrees with the Bush plan according to the “Service Times” poll. So it’s a way to push this administration, as we’ve been doing in these hearings, to couple military withdrawal with a diplomatic effort and that’s the way this should have gone. What I’ve been opposed to and I’m still opposed to, is the notion that we should be withdrawing militarily in the absence of rigorous diplomacy. 

And just how well is that diplomacy working? On MEET THE PRESS there was this interview with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad:

TIM RUSSERT:  Did you talk directly to the Iranians during the course of the day?   

KHALILZAD: I did talk to the Iranian across the table, and also I shook hands with him and talked two minutes or so with him. But most of exchanges were across the table dealing with Iraq issues.     

RUSSERT: The Iranian ambassador said there were no direct talks with the Americans. Is he correct?     

KHALILZAD: I think he’s correct in that sense we did not have direct, bilateral, substantive talks other than shaking hands, saying some words about their interest in discussions with the United States, but no substantive bilateral meeting, that is correct.      

Meanwhile, on the issue of veterans’ health care it is looking, once again, like the American public has not been getting the real truth. Back on This Week:  

STEPHANOPOULOS: Meanwhile, you’ve also been holding hearings, of course, on the scandal at Walter Reed and the rest of the V.A. medical system. You have a lot of experience with this.. A Vietnam veteran, wounded in Vietnam, also the former counsel to the House Veterans Affairs Committee. And one of the things that’s coming out about this is that we’re starting to learn that there’s been a dramatic undercounting of the number of wounded.   

STEPHANOPOULOS: We were talking last July and one of the things you said in the interview then was that go count the number of Purple Hearts that have been given in Iraq. It is going to be far more than the official number of wounded but you said then as a candidate you couldn’t get to the bottom of it because you didn’t have the power. Have you been able to find out more about the number of Purple Hearts and are you now convinced that the administration has been undercounting the number of wounded?     

WEBB: I think there has been an undercounting, not to the extent that you’re seeing in that clip, but the true problem here and I’m on the Veterans Committee, as well as the Armed Services Committee and we’ve had separate hearings. We’re going to hold joint hearings — is the step after people have served and after they have been treated.   

But when people are leaving and transitioning into the veterans system, we’ve got a couple sets of problems.     

First is the backlog, when these people are stuck in these outpatient areas in terms of evaluating their claims, trying to get disability assignments for them. The other is the ability of the V.A. to absorb them. We’ve got a 400,000 claim backlog in the V.A. right now.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what do you think the number of wounded is?

WEBB: I can’t give you that number. I think I could clearly see at the very beginning of this war when I was first talking about this to my friend Chuck Hagel that they were — it appeared that they were counting only those people who had been evacuated out of theater as casualties in the official reports. But it’s not — the number of wounded is not the number of people who have been treated in the V.A. Wounded is a term meaning wounded on the battlefield. Those are people who have had medical problems and that’s where we need to focus on. We need to focus on this threshold and also the threshold from having served your country and then how do you move back into the rest of your life? 

Finally, this refreshing exchange over at FACE THE NATION: 

SCHIEFFER: We’re back now with Senator Claire McCaskill, freshman senator from Missouri. She is joining us from St. Louis today.     

And Senator, we asked you because you were one of the first senators, when this story broke about the trouble going on at Walter Reed Hospital, to recognize the seriousness of what was happening. You moved quickly to try to introduce legislation. I just wanted to check in with you this morning to see what’s been going on. How do you think things are moving on this?     

SEN. CLAIRE MCCASKILL [D-MO]: Well, I’m a little worried, Bob, because what happens in Washington when there’s a scandal is everybody appoints a commission. The president has done a commission, and Secretary Gates has done a commission. And I’m sure all the people that will serve on those commissions are good people. But you know, we need to act. You know, a commission is just another way of delaying and contributing to the bureaucracy, and that’s a huge part of the problem. This is going to take a lot more than a coat of paint on the walls of, frankly, a bad motel which Building 18 really is. 

I suggest that everyone in Washington spend some time talking to the soldiers at Walter Reed. That’s what I’ve been doing, and it’s very easy to see where the problems are. And frankly, some of this is just as simple as fixing a morass of paperwork that is freezing families into a level of stress that just is unacceptable for our wounded and the people who love them.  

SCHIEFFER: Well, so what should they do? Do we need to just get more people out there assigned on temporary duty to help these people? What would be some of the things you would suggest?

MCCASKILL: Well, as we say in the bill — and a lot of the things that we do in the legislation that Senator Obama and I introduced — a lot of that can be done without legislation. But they need to combine the physical evaluation and the medical evaluation into one process. Right now, you have two silos of bureaucracies. And as a wounded soldier tries to figure out where they’re going to end up after they leave Walter Reed, they get caught up in this tangle. Those need to be combined — those bureaucracies.

I met Sergeant Rutter (ph), a wonderful man from Missouri, who lost both of his legs in Iraq, who’s been at Walter Reed for 10 months. He told me that after the doctor signed his narrative summary, which is very important to these soldiers, it took the report two and a half weeks to go across the hall. Now, come on, we can do better than that. And we need more social workers. They need more caseworkers. They need more legal advisers. And they need a change in the culture of command.

General Kiley needs to be removed from his duty as surgeon general of the Army. Because it’s that culture of command — and by the way, General Kiley — I’ve documented in the Armed Services hearing this week — he knew of these problems. He’s known of them for several years, and he was in the position to do something about it. And he needs to change, he needs to go, we need a new commander over the Medical Command of the U.S. Army and a new culture of command.   

SCHIEFFER: Now, one of the things we found out over the past couple of weeks that these problems go beyond Walter Reed. They go to some of the other military hospitals, and they also extend into the Veterans Administration where we’ve seen the secretary of the Veterans Administration — at least two television appearances that I have seen him — where he seemed unfamiliar with the services that were being offered by his own agency. How serious is the problem there?

MCCASKILL: Well, the Walter Reed syndrome spreads to other military hospitals around our country and also into the VA. And frankly, the VA is really a problem. The president has cut the budget in Veterans Administration for the past five years. In the budget that he just submitted to Congress, he went into veteran’s pockets for another $5 billion for the health care they were promised for free. And with all due respect to the head of the Veterans Administration, this is a man that was chairman of the Republican National Committee. The appearance isn’t right. You know, this looks like a “Brownie” situation. Let’s put somebody –

SCHIEFFER: “Brownie” as in FEMA.

MCCASKILL: As in FEMA — you know, this is a political appointment. This is somebody who has spent a whole lot of the last few years defending everything about the White House. Really, that’s not the right person to be leading the agency that’s supposed to protect our veterans. And I really think it’s time we put somebody in charge of the Veterans Administration whose first priority are the veterans and not the politics surrounding the agency.

No related posts.

Consider what Sen. Joe ‘stay the course” Lieberman, (D-CT) said on MEET THE PRESS:

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN I’m afraid, Bob, that it’s the tip of the iceberg. And I think ultimately we’re going to look back and say that that extraordinary Washington Post investigative series which drew all of our attention because of the mold on the wall and the rodents on the floor at that one Building 18 at Walter Reed, did something much larger. You can fix the wall and get rid of the rodents. But what that series has uncovered, I believe, is that we are not keeping the moral responsibility we have for the men and women who are fighting for us in the war on terrorism, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. We never have made the national commitment commensurate with going to war to give our soldiers the best medical care they can receive from the battlefield to back home. In fact, we are giving them the best possible care on the battlefield and in a lot of the inpatient services at places like Walter Reed. But there’s too much paperwork. And the Veterans Administration, when the handoff from the Department of Defense to the VA occurs, the VA is just overwhelmed an not giving the kind of first-rate treatment to our veterans when they get home that they need, including particularly those who are suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome, psychiatric effects of war, and traumatic brain injury.

Are things going to get worse? Count on it. The reason is that the numbers are larger than we think, as this excerpt illustrates:

SCHIEFFER: You know, Senator Levin, it is clear now that the government is keeping two sets of books, it seems, on the number of nonfatal casualties. What is it? The Department of Defense says about 25,000 something, 30,000 — that range — have been wounded. Now we have the head of the Veterans Administration admitting that 200,000 have come there for treatment. He tried to play it down by saying — I think his quote was, “Some of them just to get dental work.” But I think he may want to rethink that a little bit. What’s going on?
 
LEVIN: Well, what’s going on is that there are two different standards — one by the Department of Defense, one by the Veterans Administration — for what represents a disability, what represents a sufficient situation which is difficult for a soldier or a veteran so that they’re not prepared to return to duty. There is bureaucratic snafus. You know, the administration tried to cut the Veterans Administration budget by a couple billion dollars a few years ago, and it took Congress to restore that needed money. It’s just been, I think, a fiasco in terms of the way this administration has dealt with this war. And part of it has been the lack of planning and preparation for the casualties of war.

Even Republicans are distancing themselves on this: Consider this exchange on THIS WEEK ON ABC:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me begin, though, with these revelations about Walter Reed and our wounded veterans. Senator Lott, the first revelations broke in The Washington Post about two weeks ago. Now, we’re seeing some action. Are you confident that the president and the administration acted quickly enough and have gone far enough?
 
SEN. TRENT LOTT [R-MS]: I think that the president and the Congress have got to do everything that we possibly can to fix this problem. It is indefensible and appalling. I hope that the situation there was not being revealed to various people that went out there. My understanding is that the president gave direction that the problem be fixed and that it be done quickly. I think Gates followed up on what he said during his confirmation hearings when situations like this develop, he is going to act and act aggressively, and he should. We can’t have a situation like this. And I think it’s incumbent on the Congress, also. Why didn’t we know more and do more?

Meanwhile, the Democrats signal that this will be an issue that they will be taking national:

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER [D-NY]: I will say one thing, George, that I’m worried about. I’m worried about if it’s this bad at the outpatient facilities at Walter Reed, how is it in the rest of the country? Because Walter Reed is crown jewel. So I’m actually sending the Secretary of Defense a letter today asking that there be an independent commission, an independent group, maybe headed by someone like Colin Powell, to look at all of these facilities where the soldiers who are on their way to some other destination, how they’re treated.

Meanwhile, what are the Democrats doing about Iraq, the leading cause of all these wounded? Here is Rep. John Murtha [D-PA] on MEET THE PRESS:

REP. JOHN MURTHA: But let me talk about what I think needs to be done. The other day General Pace said, Chief of the Joint Chiefs — said “Look, you’re going to hurt the troops’ deployment if you do what Murtha wants to do, what he’s recommended to the committee.” And I said what he didn’t talk about was our strategic reserve; what he didn’t talk about we’re sending troops back without a year at home; what he didn’t talk about was the fact they’re going in without the equipment they need to fight in combat. That’s unconscionable, and the Congress is going to stop that.
 
The White House is finally beginning to recognize they don’t have the troops, as I predicted they wouldn’t have, to sustain this deployment. They certainly don’t have the troops to increase and to have a surge without breaking every rule that they set, Tim..
 
…
 
RUSSERT: Do you think most Democrats support bringing home the troops in six months?
 
MURTHA: I think most of the Democrats do, I think most of the public support that. The public spoke in the election. They said, “We want this thing to end. It’s not working.” There’s been too much rhetoric, there’s too much optimist (sp) about this whole thing. We need to get this thing out of the way. And this next election, if they don’t get it over with it’s going to be all about what’s going on in Iraq, and I’m convinced only the Iraqi can do it. We’re finally talking to Syria, we’re finally talking to Iran. Those are the type things they should have been doing a long time ago — direct talks with North Korea. This is international. This is more important to the Europeans, and you saw the British pulled their troops out..
 
Tim, the British pulled their troops out at a time when we’re surging? Does that make any sense at all? And they’re putting more troops in Afghanistan? Well, I think we need to pay attention to Afghanistan. That’s where this whole thing started and where we should have kept our attention.

The following excerpt is noteworthy, because it is one of those rare moments of candor on the actual overall impact of Iraq on the U.S. military:

RUSSERT: Besides setting the deadline of six months and bringing troops home, you’ve also said that a U.S. soldier should not spend more than a year in Iraq; this whole notion of the stop loss where young men and women are kept in the service after they serve in Iraq. You also talked about the level of preparation that a soldier should have before they’re sent to Iraq, and you referred to Peter Pace.
 
He responded to you, and this is what he said before the committee on Tuesday, “If the one-year rest at home, no extensions on the battlefield and no stop loss are implemented, we’ve done our homework on that. If those are the rules, then instead of being able to have the 20 brigades on the ground in Iraq that we require, we would have somewhere between 14 and 19 brigades at most. It would have enormous effect on the battlefield with regard to what’s required versus what’s available. I can simply tell you what the effect is, and the effect is damaging on the battlefield.” He’s saying that you are going to damage our ability on the battlefield.
 
MURTHA: Yeah, yeah. What he’s saying in answer to a leading question by a Republican senator. They kept badgering him to answer this question.
 
Now, what is he doing? He’s violating every rule — every rule they set up for themselves. The troops have to be home for a year — is it wrong to insist they have equipment? Is it wrong to insist they have training before they go into Iraq? And the other thing that I’ve said and everybody’s lost sight of — we’ve lost our strategic reserve.. We could not respond to a threat to our national security — China or Iran or any other country that were to threaten us, we couldn’t respond because we’ve completely depleted the readiness.
 
You saw an article in The Washington Post the other day — National Guard, 90 percent of the units are below the rightness level to be deployed. It’s almost exactly the same in the regular forces. We have no active reserve, no ground forces that can be deployed. So he’s breaking all his rules by reducing the standards, taking people and keeping people in, and then sending them back without equipment. The public agrees with me. We should not send troops into combat if they don’t have equipment and if they don’t have the training they need.
 
 

No related posts.

Nearly 100 VA clinics provided virtually no mental-health care in 2005, Adams found, and the average veteran with psychiatric troubles gets about a third fewer visits with specialists today than he would have received a decade ago.
 
Just last weekend an American Psychological Association task force warned that the U.S. military is not fully addressing the needs of troops and family members traumatized by war.

Then consider what happens when U.S. military personnel go from the military medical system over to the Veterans Administration. Newsweek reports that a jump in disability claims in recent years has created a bottleneck. The VA confirms it is coping with a backlog of 400,000 applications and appeals; 75 percent of them were still within a “reasonable” reviewing time frame, he says. Yet, most of those claims were filed by veterans of previous wars (a veteran can file or appeal a claim even decades after discharge). As more servicemen and women return from Iraq, the backlog is likely to increase.

None of this is going to be fixed anytime soon. We’ll be hearing horror stories for decades to come. That would explain why, according to Army Times, soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told that they must not speak to the media. The Pentagon also clamped down on media coverage of any and all Defense Department medical facilities, to include suspending planned projects by CNN and the Discovery Channel.

Oh, one last thought. What does it say about President Bush that he can not only carry on, but actually reinforce a policy, i.e., the Baghdad surge, which will have the effect of producing even greater number of American military wounded?

As the knowledgeable Peter Galbraith writes in the New York Review of Books:

President Bush’s plan has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference. US troops are ill prepared to do the policing that is needed to secure Baghdad. They lack police training, knowledge of the city, and requisite Arabic skills. The Iraqi troops meant to assist the effort are primarily Kurdish peshmerga from two brigades nominally part of the Iraqi army. These troops will have the same problems as the Americans, including an inability to communicate in Arabic.

Bush’s strategy assumes that Iraq’s Shiite-led government can become a force for national unity and that Iraqi security forces can, once trained, be neutral guarantors of public safety. There is no convincing basis for either proposition. The Bush administration’s inability to grasp the realities of Iraq is, in no small measure, owing to its unwillingness to acknowledge that Iraq is in the middle of a civil war.

No related posts.

The current conflagration in the Middle East has understandably diverted attention from less conspicuous security issues.  In quieter times, the re-emergence of a truly stateless enemy of civilized nations – potentially pandemic influenza – in Southeast Asia might have attracted a headline or two.  Less than a year ago, President Bush identified pandemic influenza as a serious threat to national security demanding billions of dollars and real international collaboration.  Avian influenza joined HIV as the second disease to acquire its own U.S. ambassador. 

After the H5N1 strain of avian influenza moved from Southeast Asia into Europe in late 2005 without the catastrophic plague presaged in 24-hour non-news coverage, experts deployed by the U.S. and the World Health Organization to avian influenza hotspots settled down to a Herculean task: building capacity to detect and contain emerging disease threats in regions hobbled by desperately uneven resources.  Their relative anonymity brings respite from the political pressures that shape U.S. efforts to confront the 20th century’s great failure of disease surveillance, the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the realistic fear that their fledgling disease-fighting programs will starve if an outbreak stubbornly refuses to hew to election-driven deadlines.

In his July 25th blog, Eugene Gholz identified altruism and self-interest as the dual bases of President Bush’s “vision for transforming the world.”  The same imperatives underlie U.S. motivations for sustaining bilateral and multilateral global health partnerships.  Historically, global public health advocates have appealed mainly to altruism (the moral obligation of affluent nations to remedy disparities in health and life expectancy in developing nations).  Security and foreign policy debates framing global public health as a matter of self-interest (the desire to contain devastating disease threats before they affect American economic security directly) have emerged more recently. 

Public health – protecting the population, rather than treating the individual – requires a sustained commitment of decades to build human resources and laboratory capabilities, inimical to the U.S. focus on specific short-term health threats (tuberculosis in immigrants, SARS in airports, avian flu in poultry).  A slew of Congressional hearings on avian influenza this year acknowledged the profound economic and human consequences of disease anywhere in the world on U.S. interests, an epiphany that would have been more impressive if we hadn’t experienced it collectively in the wake of the 2001 anthrax assaults.  Last week, G8 leaders renewed their pledge to combat the top three scourges – tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV – that undermine stability in the developing world.  Past experiences suggest that commitments to fighting these amorphous enemies dwindle quickly during lean economic times.

Congressional debates on global public health issues have previously broken down into predictable partisan lines (bilateral or multilateral aid? abstention or safe sex?).  Now is the time, before the next epidemic emerges, to discuss the larger question:  is global public health a matter of foreign aid, national security, or both?  

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