Delay and Its High Cost

The Pentagon’s insistence that it has always taken seriously reports of possible U.S. troop exposure to chemical agents during the Persian Gulf War continues to be shredded. This week two military chemical weapons specialists told a House subcommittee that their units detected nerve agents in Kuwait during the war and, after confirming their findings, reported them up through the chain of command. But no action was taken on these discoveries nor have they since been acknowledged by the Pentagon. The official word instead is that throughout the Gulf War chemical weapons detectors gave what were in every case evaluated as false positive readings. That claim, repeated this week, prompted several amazed congressmen to ask a reasonable question: How could it be that all of the U.S. military’s costly equipment proved to be faulty?

It appears that the real fault lay not so much in the equipment or the personnel operating it as in the disinclination of higher authorities to believe the reports they were getting from the field. There was a conviction that Iraq didn’t launch any of its chemical weapons during the war, and that may be true. But stocks of those weapons were deployed in Kuwait and southern Iraq, and it’s now undeniable that low-level releases of toxic agents did for one reason or another occur.

The Defense Department believes that 20,000 American troops could have been exposed to these agents after one ammunition dump, near Kamisiyah in southern Iraq, was blown up just after the war.

From the very beginning of complaints about unusual illnesses by Gulf War veterans the Pentagon was too quick to dismiss possible exposure to Iraqi weapons as the cause, too hasty in denying that it was withholding any relevant reports, too slow or slipshod in following up on new information as it developed. One consequence, as subcommittee member Rep. Bernard Sanders puts it, is that five years may have been wasted in finding treatments for ailing veterans. That is a grave accusation, and perhaps a somewhat exaggerated one. But it probably doesn’t miss the mark by much.