Worth remembering...

[pynchonoid]

...when reading about the chemical industry in GR:

[...] Despite Colin Powell saying Saddam Hussein was
the biggest user of chemical weapons since the First
World War, the greater culprit was in fact the United
States. From 1961 to 1974, the United States admits
that it dropped 72 million litres of chemicals on
Vietnam, most of it Agent Orange with a super-toxic
strain of dioxin called TCCD. U.S. soldiers dumped an
additional 260,000 gallons of herbicide just to empty
their tanks. The Guardian reports that one soldier
regularly dumped his poison into a central drinking
water reservoir. He doesn't want his name used, at
which one can only smile hollowly. 

[...] The poison has blossomed through three
generations of Vietnamese so far. It appears it will
continue. Its toxicity is difficult to describe. When
General Powell held up his tiny vial of what he said
were scary anthrax spores, it hardly compared to a
small 80-gram tin of TCCD. That tin would destroy New
York City. The United States dropped 170 kilograms of
it. 

[...] And there you have it. Agent Orange was the
second time the United States used a WMD, the first
being Hiroshima, but its effects were worse. It fits
the Bush-Rumsfeld-Powell definition because poison is
still flowing now.

U.S. politicians rarely think long-term. Whether we
support or oppose their efforts in Afghanistan and
Iraq, those were mere social calls by comparison. In
Vietnam, the war is still being fought by proxy, via
an American liquid that came in orange cans.

<http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030607/FCMALL/National/Idx> 

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