The Ugly Face of War That Casualty Numbers Don’t Reveal

I am walking near the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. My friends who are showing me the area point into the fields that surround it and say that this land has been so poisoned by the United States dropping Agent Orange that they do not think food can be produced here for generations. The US dropped at least 74 million litres of chemicals, mostly Agent Orange, on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, with the focus for many years being this supply line that ran from the north to the south. The campaign was known as Operation Ranch Hand because Agent Orange had been developed as a herbicide for industrial agriculture. In Vietnam it was used to tear through the vegetation in the forests and along the coastline of the Mekong Delta to remove the cover used by the Vietnamese guerrillas. The spray of these chemicals struck the bodies of at least five million Vietnamese and mutilated the land. A Vietnamese journalist Trân Tô Nga published Ma Terre Empoisonnée (My Poisoned Land) in 2016 to call attention to the atrocity that has continued to impact Vietnam over four decades after the US lost the war. In her book, Trân Tô Nga describes how, as a journalist in 1966, she was sprayed by a US Air Force Fairchild C-123 with a strange chemical. She wiped it off and went ahead through the jungle, inhaling the poisons dropped from the sky. When her daughter was born two years later, she died in infancy of the impact of Agent Orange on Trân Tô Nga.

“The people from that village over there,” they tell me, naming the village, “birth children with severe defects generation after generation.” When we walk through the village later, it becomes apparent through the sight of all manner of deformities—including large numbers of people with hydrocephalus or swollen heads—that the poison continues to have its deadly impact generation after generation.

These memories come back in the context of Gaza.

Of course, the genocide has taken so many lives: nearly 50,000 dead by the last official count. But there are other enduring parts of modern warfare that are hard to calculate. There is the immense sound of war, the noise of bombardment and of cries, the noises that go deep into the consciousness of young children and mark them for their entire lives. There are children in Gaza, for example, who were born in 2006 and are now eighteen, who have seen wars at their birth in 2006, then in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and now, in 2023-24. The gaps between these major bombardments have been punctuated by smaller bombardments, as noisy and as deadly. A survey of the children in Gaza by War Child Alliance found that death feels imminent for 96 per cent of them—traumatised by the murder of their family members and terrorised by the sound and ferocity of the bombings. “The psychological toll on children was severe, with high levels of stress manifested in symptoms such as fear, anxiety, sleep disturbances, nightmares, nail biting, difficulty concentrating and social withdrawal,” the report noted. This is a child mental health catastrophe.

The Illusions of 2024

Then there is the dust. Modern construction uses a range of toxic materials. Indeed, in 1982, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recognised a phenomenon called ‘sick building syndrome’, which is when a person falls ill due to the toxic material used to construct modern buildings. Imagine now that a 2,000-pound MK84 bomb lands on a building and imagine the toxic dust that flies about and lingers both in the air and on the ground. This is precisely what the children of Gaza are now breathing as the Israelis drop hundreds of these deadly bombs on residential neighbourhoods. There is now over 42 million tons of debris in Gaza, large sections of it filled with toxic substances.

In 2021, the Israeli bombing of highly urbanised Gaza left 12,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. A World Bank study at that time found that these buildings generated 1 million tonnes of rubble and debris, and that within this debris existed 30,000 tonnes of hazardous waste that includes asbestos and medical waste. An interim assessment of the damage done by the Israeli bombing from 2023-24 shows that 88,868 buildings have been destroyed in Gaza. There is yet no account of the volume of hazardous waste, but it is thought to be enormous. The World Bank estimates that the cost of the damage is around $18.5 billion, which is 97 per cent of the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank) in 2022. The United Nations (UN) says that it will take a minimum of 15 years to clear the debris, which means that regardless of the circumstances of a peace agreement, the Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed from Gaza for a generation. But, living in tents here and there, they will continue to breathe in the toxic materials that will generate health hazards for multiple generations to come.

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US President George W. Bush’s adventure in Iraq was not an aberration in the War on Terror; it was its highest point, its defining action. Reason went out of the window and in its place came a jumble of anxieties mixed in with older currents of racism—hatred of Arabs who were seen to be inherently duplicitous and only able to learn their lessons through violence. Unforgivable bombardment of Baghdad and Fallujah fixed the outlines, which were then coloured in by lesser actions up and down the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. Iraq lingers despite every effort to erase it from the map. The immensity of the tragedy of Iraq—the cause of great destabilisation in West Asia and North Africa to this day, including Syria—has been utterly forgotten.

A few years ago, I was in Sabha, in southern Libya, where a battle had been raging between two rival—and unofficial—armies, the forces of the city of Misrata and the Libyan National Army (led by General Khalifa Haftar). Earnest protests by residents of the city for the war to go elsewhere had been ignored. Moth-eaten military bases and lucrative checkpoints were the targets of this war. Sabha sits at a strategic point in the Sahara Desert, linking the trafficking from Agadez (Niger), Darfur (Sudan), Zouar (Chad), Kidal, Gao, and Menaka (Mali) and Ghat (Algeria). It is through Sabha that human traffickers cart people to the Libyan coastline to become refugees to Europe or extremists for the wars in Libya and Syria as well as back to Boko Haram in Nigeria. Africa’s central region has been wracked by war, driven not merely by terrorism but by International Monetary Fund-induced economic collapse, Western-backed kleptocracy, and the wars of Africa’s Great Lakes for resources—including those that run our cellphones—that have spilled out of the Congo region. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s regime change war in Libya, the French military intervention in Libya and the presence of US Special Forces in 33 of the 54 African states did little to settle an already disturbed situation. There was little to choose between the wars in Libya and in the eastern Congo—both catastrophic for the future of Africa, both fuelled by the capillaries of economic polices driven by the West and by an arms industry buoyed by Western arms sales. There are trillions to be made by these arms companies and their associates in the blood spilt across the Global South and in the terror inflicted on the minds of young children.

Anisa and Yusuf do not have any children. Their apartment is modest. There are not many photographs on the walls. There are a few prints of paintings, where I first learned of the work of Layla Ali Sadiq Al-Attar (1944-1993), who had been the director of Iraq’s National Art Museum. The print from al-Attar on the wall of the modest living room was of the painting called “Mother Earth” (1980) that depicts a woman’s back emerging from ploughed fields. The painting is both comforting and disturbing. Al-Attar was killed on 27 June 1993 when US President Bill Clinton authorised an attack on the office of Iraq’s General Intelligence Directorate. Of the 23 cruise missiles fired at Baghdad, two struck Al-Attar’s house and killed her, her husband (Abd al-Khaleq Jeridan), and their housekeeper, as well as blinded her daughter (Reem). Anisa collects these kinds of stories.

On the mantelplace, there is a small Palestinian flag. Next to it is a little piece of shrapnel. I ask them about it. Anisa says that it is the shrapnel that was removed from Yusuf’s left eye socket, where he now wears a jaunty patch. Then she smiles. I wonder if she is pulling my leg. But it is unlikely. Horror must be laughed at directly or survival is impossible.