No, it isn't Vietnam but...

So we're moving into year three of Gulf War II, the one that all armchair generals and cheerleaders said would last a few weeks and end with the delighted Iraqis strewing flowers at our feet. I remember one of the many justifications BushCo gave for the invasion was Saddam's possession of chemical weapons etc, none of which have been found.

This fact of course is very interesting because we know where Saddam got the backing for his chemical weapons program originally: the U.S.A., which isn't a very happy fact for those of us who like to believe that the U.S. is a beacon of democracy and stands on higher ground than those we label "rogue nations." Well, as Hemingway said, "Isn't it pretty to think so." However, our history with chemical and biological weapons hasn't been so stellar. To go way back in time, you've got lovely Jeffrey Amherst (OK so technically we were still a British colony at the time...) giving away smallpox blankets to the Native Americans -- quite an inventive guy for his time. But in recent history, we need look no further back than our last major conflict, the Vietnam War, to understand that chemical and biological weapons don't always behave as we would like and that our government deployed these weapons indiscriminately across ten percent of Vietnam. That's a lot of country to render more or less useless and dangerous for decades to come.

And the damage isn't confined to the then-enemy, the civilians, and all their descendants in Vietnam -- our own veterans (yes, our own veterans) and their children continue to suffer from the U.S. government's decision to use chemical agents in Vietnam. Not that the U.S. government has been overly anxious to acknowledge this. The past weekend, incidentally, marked the fall of Saigon in 1975.

I'm in the unfortunate position that I do believe the United States should be an example of fair play and honesty -- a city on the hill etc. -- and therefore get overly pissed off when these obvious contradictions between theory and practice occur.