Treat Gulf War condition
Study concludes symptoms are real, and government help should follow
The desire to tell the world that it could fight a clean war has left the United States with another dirty secret. Gulf War Illness is real.
After years of foot-dragging and denial by the American government, a congressionally chartered panel of experts has concluded that the collection of frightening symptoms suffered by an estimated 170,000 veterans of the 1990-91 Gulf War was not all in their heads. It is a genuine illness, manifesting itself in chronic headaches and other pains, memory and concentration problems, digestive disorders, respiratory symptoms and skin rashes.
Not only have a great many combat veterans been partially or fully disabled by these ailments, they have also had to fight a bureaucracy that has devoted its time and your money to trying to deny any link to the victims’ military service, or to dismiss it all as psychological problems.
The panel of medical experts — sent out by Congress to get to the truth that the executive branch so strongly resisted — has concluded that the cluster of illnesses is almost certain to have two main causes. Neither was caused by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Troops sent to Kuwait to expel Saddam’s seizure of that oil-rich monarchy were widely exposed, on purpose, by us, to two kinds of chemicals. One was a devil’s soup of pesticides applied to everything from airstrips to uniforms. The other was a medication, pyridostigmine bromide, that lacked FDA approval but was still forced down battle-bound soldiers as a protection against the nerve gas that the Iraqi army probably had but, in that war, didn’t use.
The association of serious symptoms with exposure to those two chemicals — more exposure, more illness — was so great that the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses has now sent the Department of Veterans Affairs a 450-page report concluding that the syndrome is real and that the American people now owe their veterans serious medical care instead of another 17 years of bureaucratic run-arounds.
In the meantime, genuinely ill veterans have not been helped and research that might have contributed to effective treatments has not been done.
It’s another dirty page in the history of how U. S. veterans are mistreated by the nation they served. Our government previously denied that its experiments exposing people to open-air nuclear weapons tests, or its widespread use of plant poisoning chemicals in Vietnam, were to blame for serious illnesses. Now, we know they were.
Clearly, the desire of the Pentagon and its masters to put an end to the Vietnam Syndrome — the fear of the American people to commit to any real war — led to Gulf War Syndrome. The Gulf War was, as wars go, very quick, very successful and, we thought, fought with a minimum of sacrifice on our part.
There can be little question that the desire to maintain that take-away from the Gulf War, the foolish idea that there is such a thing as a no-muss, no-fuss war, was a major motivation for the denial practiced by officials of the Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations.
No more. Even as the system is straining under the weight of a new round of physically wounded and emotionally damaged veterans, it is time to look back to those who are still suffering the unseen wounds of the first Gulf War and, as best we can, see to their needs.
To do otherwise would be criminal, because we can no longer claim ignorance.
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