Agent of influence: the realpolitik case for compensating Vietnam.

• Author: Cain, Geoffrey
• Position: A SPECIAL REPORT

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Anh Nguyen Khanh, a motorbike driver in the mountains outside Da Nang, a city in southern Vietnam, is only fifty-three, but he looks much older. His fourteen-year-old son was born with severe spina bifida and cannot walk; his seventeen-year-old daughter has Down's syndrome. His wife, shattered by her two children's hardships, has become so mentally unstable she must be restrained at times. "Life is the hardest thing," says Anh Khanh, who supports his family by transporting vegetables between villages, earning about $100 per month. "This [life] is truly a curse."

As a child during the Vietnam War, Anh Khanh remembers watching as American forces sprayed the area around his home with Agent Orange, a defoliant containing the chemical dioxin and used by U.S. forces to kill plants and expose enemy movement. "I remember seeing the American warplanes dropping some sort of chemical on the jungles," he says. "We thought everything was okay, because they weren't dropping bombs ... It wasn't until the 1980s, when our generation started having children, that we learned the horrible effects of war would follow us our entire lives." Today, Anh Khanh, like many Vietnamese, is convinced that the remnants of dioxin, a poison, in his village's soil have destroyed his family, causing his children's birth defects, which then ruined his wife's mental health. The local government, he says, has little money to help him, and offers just $15 per month in benefits, only enough to cover a portion of the food and health care costs of one of his two children. "God is watching over us," he says. "That's our only hope."

During the Vietnam War, the United States sprayed as much as 18 million gallons of Agent Orange on the country, according to a Government Accountability Office study. Decades later, the long-acting toxin continues to exact a terrible toll on the people of Vietnam. While the U.S. insists that there is not enough evidence to link the spraying of the defoliant to any illnesses in Vietnam, the government in Hanoi estimates that as many as 400,000 Vietnamese have died early from ailments related to exposure to dioxin and that 500,000 children have birth defects because of exposure to the chemicals leeching into water and soil.

Until recently, the lingering effects of Agent Orange were not something the Vietnamese government talked much about. After normalizing relations with Washington in 1995, Hanoi's overwhelming goal was to win favorable trade deals with the United States and admission into global bodies like the World Trade Organization; bringing up unpleasant subjects like Agent Orange worked against that strategy. But having attained those goals a few years ago, the government is now becoming more aggressive in pressing its claims. "Vietnam feels more confident in where it stands with the U.S., so now it can go back to some of these war issues," says Edmund Malesky, a Vietnam expert at the University of California, San Diego. At the annual meeting of Vietnamese and American government representatives to an Agent Orange task force, held last September, Vietnam's deputy minister of natural resources and environment, Nguyen Xuan Cuong, declared that U.S. assistance in Agent Orange cleanup thus far "has not met our expectations."

Despite pressure from Vietnam, the U.S. has steadfastly refused to acknowledge any American responsibility for tragedies like the family of Anh Khanh. In part this is because the United States is under no compelling legal obligation to compensate Vietnam. Attempts by Vietnamese plaintiffs to win damages in American courts have repeatedly failed; international laws and treaties regarding the environmental and health consequences of war are weak and largely unenforceable. And while there is sound medical evidence linking dioxin exposure to an ever-wider variety of illnesses, proving causation in individual cases in Vietnam is nearly impossible. But the biggest reason why the U.S. refuses to take responsibility for the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam is one of precedent: doing so, defense officials insist, would open Washington up to claims from Koreans, Filipinos, Iraqis, and anyone else impacted by the actions of U.S. armed forces.

Yet for all these difficulties, Washington should help pay for the damage done by Agent Orange in Vietnam, because in this case our moral concerns coincide with our strategic ones. Though most Americas still see...