On February 7, just a month before the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, President Joe Biden delivered his 2023 State of the Union address. He featured the PACT Act, which helps approximately 3.5 million U.S. veterans who have suffered from various medical conditions linked to military burn pits, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Biden celebrated bipartisan support for “the most significant law ever helping victims exposed to toxic burn pits.”
But there is a problem with the U.S. government’s declaration of something akin to “mission accomplished” regarding burn pits and other toxins in Iraq. It is similar to former President George W. Bush’s infamous 2003 declaration that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” while standing in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner, just six weeks into a war that, in fact, would not be over for many years. Iraqi civilians have been left to cope with health devastation linked to war toxins, abandoned and ignored by the U.S. government.
Following the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion and occupation, Iraqi infants have suffered from congenital anomalies that cause death or disability, fatal cancers, heart disease, and more.
Julie Jacobson/AP
An Iraqi boy walks through the streets carrying a gas mask left behind by an Iraqi soldier in Baghdad in April 2003.
Burn pits are open-air pits of military waste, sometimes as large as football fields, used to burn and destroy weapons, chemicals, plastics, and medical and human waste, typically including jet fuel. More than 780,000 rounds of depleted uranium were used in Iraq in 1991, and more than 300,000 rounds were used in 2003. As Iraqi writer and poet Sinan Antoon describes, depleted uranium munitions lie “in the sands of Iraq like a soldier lost in enemy territory. But a soldier that won’t die or be captured. It’ll keep breathing. What it exhales will settle in a lung or a womb.”
The PACT Act is the most significant law yet for victims of burn pits. Support for veterans is long overdue. But can a law that ignores Iraqis who have been saturated by these same toxins for decades be considered any sort of victory?
The choice to pretend that Iraqi illnesses and deaths are not an ongoing atrocity that the United States must take responsibility for is particularly eerie when viewed in historical context. This silence follows the same pattern as U.S. denial of illnesses linked to Agent Orange experienced by Vietnam War veterans, and the reluctance to address disabilities experienced by Vietnamese civilians. Nearly fifty years after that war’s end, children are still being born with congenital anomalies, and families are not being sufficiently compensated to provide lifetime care.
Viet Thanh Nguyen and Richard Hughes write about meeting some of these “forgotten victims” at a hospital in Vietnam. They explain how one young woman with an enlarged, hydrocephalic head turned away and did not wish to be photographed. Perhaps she “does not want strangers to stare at her. Perhaps she feels ashamed,” they write. “But if she does feel shame, why is it that those who should do not?”
Victims of war toxins are expected to document and display their vulnerability and victimhood, but to no avail. U.S. military veterans have been granted presumptive benefits. They are entitled to compensation according to dates and locations of service. They do not need to individually prove exposure—a much-needed provision because individual exposure can be impossible to prove, especially in the short term.
International law, such as the Environmental Modification Convention and the Geneva Conventions, is full of obligations that forbid civilian exposure to war toxins and suggest that the United States must provide reparations. International law is also full of commitments to the sanctity of “human dignity.” The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a backbone of contemporary human rights protections, recognizes “the inherent dignity” of “all members of the human family.”
What dignity is there in celebrating overdue recognition for one group—veterans who are U.S. citizens—while another group, Iraqis, faces a harrowing struggle that will continue for generations? The U.S. government must acknowledge the destruction from war toxins in Iraq. A fraction of the $800 billion annual U.S. military budget would begin to cover the compensation needed.