Agent Orange: Suddenly There’s Action

As 475,000 American troops in the Persian Gulf War nervously face the threat of chemical poisoning by Iraq, Congress, with curious timing, suddenly found the political will to attend to victims of chemical poisoning in America’s last major war. By passing the Agent Orange Act this week, Congress ended years of bitter debate about whether the defoliant used in Vietnam caused disease by, in effect, declaring that it did.

The bill orders the Veterans Administration to make disability payments to Vietnam vets with any one of three diseases now presumed to result from exposure to Agent Orange. The bill also directs the National Academy of Sciences to review any new evidence that toxic chemicals used in Vietnam caused cancer or other diseases. President Bush is expected to sign the legislation quickly; we urge him to do so.

Nonetheless, this bill breaks little new ground. The VA has been under relentless pressure from veterans since the 1970s to conduct research on the dangers of dioxin, the most noxious ingredient in Agent Orange, and to compensate Vietnam vets stricken with a horrific array of diseases. Consistently dismissing any association between exposure and disease, the VA long denied disability for Agent Orange-related injuries.

Unable to gain compensation from the government, veterans sued the chemical companies who produced Agent Orange under government contracts. The settlement of that litigation resulted in the paltry payment of up to $13,000 to 23,000 veterans totally disabled as a result of dioxin poisoning or to the survivors of those who had already died. Not until last year, prodded by the federal courts and the ceaseless criticism by veterans, did the VA declare the three diseases “service-connected,” thus making veterans eligible for disability. Last week’s bill turns the VA’s administrative declaration into a congressional mandate.

But the unanimity of the vote in both the House and the Senate and its timing, after years when the government callously stonewalled sick and dying veterans, smacks of the worst sort of expediency. One wonders if Congress would have acted with such resolve in the absence of Iraq’s chemical threat.

The government has yet to acknowledge its deliberate failure to warn tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians injured during World War II of the dangers of asbestos exposure. And only last fall, more than 40 years late, did Congress acknowledge it had knowingly exposed “downwinders” to radiation fall-out from open-air bomb testing.

In this light, the Agent Orange Act is more symbol than substance. And the symbol is of a government that still cares too little and too late about the lives and health of its citizens.