Chemicals in Vietnam, Yemen

Yonah Jeremy Bob, in “Trump, Obama combo starts to enforce chemical weapons treaty” (April 16), writes: “During World War I, chemical weapons were used on a massive scale, resulting in more than 100,000 fatalities and a million casualties. The losses were so great on all sides and so horrific that by 1925, the world had endorsed a ban on chemical weapons use. From then until the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, chemical weapons were stockpiled, but were barely ever used on battlefields.”

Mr. Bob does not mention the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam by the US. It was a chemical herbicide that left a devastating impact long after the conflict ended. Similarly, he ignores the use of poison gas during Egypt’s intervention in Yemen’s civil war in the mid-1960s.

To quote from a report by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University (“Forgotten Gas Attacks in Yemen Haunt Syria Crisis): “As the frequency of Egypt’s attacks accelerated in early 1967, the International Red Cross brought its campaign to the floor of the UN to garner a response to the gassings in Yemen. It received only a shipment of gas masks. Over the course of the fiveyear civil war, bombing continued unaffected by international criticism, and Nasser’s military was essentially given free reign.

“Respite finally arrived for Yemeni civilians in June 1967, when the Egyptian forces were defeated by Israel in the Six Day War. Nasser had no choice but to pull his soldiers from Yemen to help secure the home front. Yet even as they withdrew, the Egyptians couldn’t resist inflicting several additional rounds of gas bombings.” DAVID WILK Ma’aleh Adumim