A sixth opinion - Gulf War Syndrome

Reason, Feb, 1998 by Michael Fumento

Unimpeded by science, a presidential panel will declare that Gulf War Syndrome is real.

This whole nasty Gulf War Syndrome thing just won't go away. But President Clinton is about to solve the problem.

The problem is that medical and scientific authorities refuse to ratify popular beliefs about GWS. Five expert panels - Clinton's own Presidential Advisory Committee, a panel set up by the National Institutes of Health, another by the Institute of Medicine, and two by the Department of Defense (one of them chaired by Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg) - have studied volumes of medical evidence and found no evidence that GWS is real. The solution, so quintessentially Clintonesque, is to replace these authorities with political appointees. In November the president announced that he would appoint yet another GWS panel.

Clinton wants a political rather than a scientific evaluation of GWS because studies published in major medical journals have repeatedly shown that Gulf War vets have no more deaths, cancers, birth defects, miscarriages, or hospitalizations than vets who didn't deploy to the Persian Gulf. This isn't to say that they never have health problems. One researcher who claims GWS is real said he had identified no fewer than 123 symptoms. These range from the utterly mundane, such as hair loss, graying hair, and weight gain, to the utterly preposterous, such as semen that burns flesh like napalm, vomit that glows in the dark, and claims by two vets that they are literally shrinking.

In short, this "syndrome" consists of the same illnesses occurring at the same rate we would expect for any group of 700,000 Americans, their spouses, and their children. Throw in an element of hysteria and it's easy to account for both the outlandish complaints and psychosomatic symptoms such as labored breathing, aching joints, and stomach pains. (See "Gulf Lore Syndrome," March 1997.)

The list of alleged causes for GWS is almost as long as the list of symptoms. Among them: nerve gas, anthrax, pills, vaccinations, depleted uranium in shells and tank armor, burning oil, burning kerosene from lamps, fresh lead paint applied to vehicles, a bacterium that is normally harmless, insecticides, and even Scud missile fuel. New theories keep popping up because the old ones never pan out. No one can find a cause for GWS or a conspiracy to cover it up any more than they can find a cause for George Bush's assassination and its subsequent cover-up, the reason being that Bush is alive and well.

For politicians, this science stuff just won't do, because the news media and activist groups have convinced the American public that GWS is real. Every congressional committee that has considered the issue has stuck its finger in the wind and concluded either that GWS exists or that, at the very least, the Pentagon has failed to investigate it properly.

The latter was the conclusion of the most recent inquisition, that of the House Subcommittee on Government Oversight, which held GWS hearings on eight occasions over the past two years. The committee is headed by Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), who has gone out of his way to sensationalize the GWS issue. It was Shays's committee that invited Pfc. Brian Martin, who has claimed that he emitted glowing vomit and burning semen, to testify not once but twice. When Martin talked about the vomit, which he said happened every day for 10 months during training after he returned from the war, no one on Shays's committee thought to question it. Shays also invited Navy Seabee Nick Roberts to testify, even though his staff knew Roberts would relate his medically impossible story about contracting cancer of the lymph glands within three weeks of chemical exposure in the Gulf and even though Roberts had falsely reported that 11 of 33 men in his unit had developed such lymphomas.

Instead of refuting this sort of GWS nonsense, the Pentagon, apparently in an effort at appeasement, has foolishly abetted it. For example, it has said that as many as 100,000 troops may have been exposed to sarin nerve gas emitted from a demolished Iraqi bunker. Any expert on sarin could (and many did) tell the Pentagon that this gas begins to dissipate within seconds. The closest soldiers to the bunker blast were at least three miles away, and there were just a few hundred of them. The rest of the 100,000 were hundreds of miles away, giving the sarin days to dissipate into nothingness. To say these troops were "exposed" to nerve gas is like saying that anyone who has ever eaten a peach was "exposed" to cyanide, a tiny component of peach pits.

And now it has come to light that the Pentagon bypassed its normal bidding procedure by awarding a hefty $3 million research grant to Dr. Robert Haley of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Haley has long been a proponent of GWS, and when he finally published a study on it, in the January 15, 1997 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, he said the results supported his position.