Toxic violence: The politics of militarized toxicity in Iraq and Afghanistan

The scope of military toxicities in Iraq and Afghanistan

In Iraq, the US and UK militaries used munitions containing DU, ⁸ and the US military disposed of unexploded ordnances (UXO), spent munitions, and vehicles in the environment; used “burn pits” to dispose of waste through indiscriminate open-air incineration, including the burning of metals, chemicals, munitions, and human waste; improperly disposed and detonated chemical weapons and DU stockpiles; and used other internationally condemned weapons such as Mark-77, a napalm-type incendiary, and white phosphorous (Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), 2014b; Chivers, 2014a, 2014b; Chivers and Schmitt, 2015; Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, 2014; Zwijnenburg, 2012, 2013, 2014). ⁹ US-led coalition forces, the Iraqi military, and insurgent groups have also produced toxicities through their destruction of industrial sites and oil infrastructure, as well as urban bombing (Kellay, 2014: 94–98).

In Afghanistan, US-led forces relied heavily on burn pits for waste disposal (CCR, 2014b; Kurera, 2010); left unexploded ordnance, spent munitions, and other military materials in the environment without clean-up (Toxic Remnants of War Project, 2014); used white phosphorous (Chivers, 2009; Goose and Docherty, 2012; Graham-Harrison, 2009); and may have also used munitions containing DU, but this has not yet been confirmed.

These toxicities span the range of manifestations of toxic violence which are reflected in its definition. A toxic substance is weaponized for its nontoxic characteristics in the instance of DU. Toxins are used specifically for their incapacitating toxic effects, as a military tactic, in the case of napalm-type incendiaries and the illegal use of white phosphorous as an incendiary weapon against combatants. ¹⁰ And finally, much toxic exposure is produced as a by-product of everyday military practices, such as the use of burn pits, and the ongoing nonremediation of UXO and other military wastes left in the environment.

Such toxic munitions and military practices extend beyond US and UK activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the recurrent, long-term deployment of these munitions and practices in Iraq and Afghanistan is a particularly severe instance of this violence. DU munitions were used by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military (also partly US-led) in the former Yugoslavia in 1999, and tested without adequate remediation by the US military in Vieques, Puerto Rico, Okinawa, Japan, occupied Hawai’i, and at least 14 domestic military installations (DMZ Hawai’i, 2008; Kajihiro, 2007; Nuclear Policy Research Institute, 2003; Sarap et al., 2014; United States Army Installation Management Command (IMCOM), n.d.). While war wastes are commonly left to rot in battlefields, less often is this at such scale as in Iraq in 1991 and 2003–2011, ¹¹ and it remains largely unmeasured in Afghanistan, apart from the estimated 12,400 unexploded cluster bomblets from US bombardments in 2001–2002 (Human Rights Watch, 2002). The use of burn pits is not new, either. The US military burned the trash of its forward operating bases in Vietnam in burn pits; however, since then, much of the equipment for soldiers’ everyday lives in theater has been replaced by disposable equivalents such as plastic water bottles, Styrofoam dishware, and plastic utensils, all of which were burned in high volume in Iraq and Afghanistan. ¹² Although white phosphorous has been used illegally by the Israeli military in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as by the US military in Iraq (CCR, 2014b) and Syria (Human Rights Watch, 2017), its use is ill-documented elsewhere.

Each of these munitions and practices can cause toxic exposures which are either teratogenic (damaging to the fetus), carcinogenic (cancer-causing), genotoxic (DNA-damaging), or for certain munitions such as DU, all three (International Coalition to Ban Depleted Uranium Weapons, 2014). All of these toxicities, along with the psychological stress which their presence imparts, also pose other health risks. The recognition of even these facts has required significant contestation in the face of state denials.

Frames of toxicity in civilian life

Through exertions of US dominance in international relations and media, the contemporary US imaginary constructing toxicity in its domestic civilian life plays an important role in figuring militarized toxicity internationally, and thus warrants attention before one intervenes in military toxics discourses regarding Iraq and Afghanistan. The “rhetoric of pastoral betrayal” in 1960s environmental narratives marks a beginning of normative contemporary discourses of the toxic in the US (Buell, 1998: 649; Carson, 1962). This rhetoric draws up scenes of white bourgeois Americana, innocent of any connection with environmental degradation, and contrasts their innocent lifeways with a toxic threat from outside. The threatening toxicity is not militarized but industrial, and portrayed as a corrosive side effect of the otherwise benevolent and life-affirming capitalism which enables white middle-class life. Formative toxic events in the contemporary US were portrayed thusly in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the toxification of the suburb of Love Canal, New York, where residents suffered high rates of birth defects and other illnesses due to industrial toxicities. ¹⁷

In the contemporary US, dominant frames of toxicity still center the white middle class as the population vulnerable to toxicity. Of course, this is not because bodies of color are any less vulnerable to toxicities, but rather reflective of the fact that they are constructed as “the less urgent population under threat” (Chen, 2011: 270). This plays out in the economy of attention and resources devoted to popular manifestations of toxicities (Agard-Jones, 2016; Pellow, 2016), as well as to bodies suffering militarized toxicities. With regard to the toxicities inflicted through military operations, media coverage, scientific research, and government hearing hours have all disproportionately (if reluctantly) attended to toxicities suffered by US veterans of post-2001 military action. ¹⁸ Although the toxic effects sustained by US service-members are themselves systematically obscured and downplayed (CCR, 2014b; Logan and Carpenter, 2014), the underlying contradiction remains. While the majority of veterans who encounter toxic munitions, materials, or practices do so during time-limited (even if multiple) deployments, international communities suffering similar exposures reside in the environments bearing those exposures continuously, and often across a lifetime, conveying a far greater potential intensity and frequency of exposure. Children and pregnant persons are also much more vulnerable to toxic health effects in general, and in particular to genotoxic and transgenerational effects.

Regarding popular manifestations of toxicities in the US, Mel Chen (2011) analyzes the recent uncovering of widespread lead toxicity in plastic children’s toys manufactured in China. The dominant image depicted as “under threat” in the surge of media coverage is a young white boy. Chen argues that black children’s vulnerability to lead did not necessitate as much attention as did white children’s because black children are constructed as already toxic in the dominant US imaginary. That is, black children’s proximity to lead is already established through the dominant white gaze which considers them, like their parents, as “already unruly, violent, contaminated, and mentally deficient,” which are common effects of lead toxicity in children, across race (p. 270). Although the racialization of black bodies in the US is singular in critical ways, I contend that a similar proximity to toxicity is involved in the racialization of brown and Muslim populations, whose “contamination” as potential terrorists figures their status as already toxic, and their environments as unworthy of remediation.

Frames of toxicity in military operations

Within these contemporary frames of toxicity, there is a dominant discourse deployed specifically in the narration of military toxicities, which I will trace through an array of international media stories, advocacy research reports, and scholarly literature. It is important to note at the outset that while a few of these sources may intend to confuse or downplay the phenomena, the overwhelming majority do not—on the contrary, their stated purpose is promoting public awareness and accountability. As a scholar-advocate, I have been a part of advocacy work mobilizing the discourses implicated in the following analysis, and it is in the spirit of bolstering possibilities for advocacy and solidarity with impacted communities that the analysis proceeds.

At its most abstract, the dominant discourse on military toxicities places them within the purview of “the human and environmental costs of war.” ¹⁹ This discourse is frequently employed in an effort to highlight the violence and other adverse consequences of military operations, as part of a political intervention into a dominant context which does not regard or reflect them. However, the metaphorical use of the discourse of “cost” also subsumes violent effects on bodies and environment into the discourse of monetary depletion conditioning war’s possibility and aftermath, in a context where the concerns of capitalism writ large reign supreme. That is, since financial cost-profit margins are already among the most powerful determinants of whether and how war is waged, and are integral to the production of toxic violence to begin with, recasting toxicity’s violence as cost serves to obscure its systemic production. It also falsely implies that adverse human and environmental effects are just as intrinsically detrimental to capitalist warfare as monetary loss.

The dominant discourses of toxicity produced through military operations presently inhabit the thematic domains of (a) the medical-epidemiological discourse of individual sickness and (b) the ecological-environmental discourse of hazard and contamination, and both acquire particular discursive characteristics in narrating radioactive toxicity. The medical-epidemiological discourse finds its locus in the individual, who is diseased, damaged, and defective. Its primary concerns are “contamination” and “contagion,” both between adult bodies and into new bodies in the reproductive process. Its analytic is statistical and scientific, in which the concerns of epidemiological “mortality” and “morbidity” are paramount. The medical-epidemiological discourse constructs Iraqis and Afghans enduring military toxicities as individual patients, subject to a sickness, whose needs should be met by the resources of medicine. What is inherently depoliticizing about this discourse is that it proceeds to completely displace the militarized context in which such medical concerns have arisen, thus effacing Iraqis and Afghans as victims of violence, individually and collectively, whose needs must also be met by the resources of political intervention.

Clearly, the concrete medical needs of these communities are important realities which are not afforded adequate attention or resources. The dominant medical-epidemiological narration of the phenomena is, however, often at odds with the status of scientific terms and evidence within its own purported epistemology. In short, while this discourse speaks in terms of medicine and disease, the ways in which it is deployed do more to obscure medical and epidemiological conditions on the ground than to clarify them. This depoliticization and obfuscation is achieved through the discourse’s tone, as well as its disjuncture from the present status of epidemiological research. The affective register of the dominant epidemiological discourse is shock and awe, as it narrates a never-before quality—of toxicities “worse than after Hiroshima” (Simpson, 2010b), of “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied” (Christopher Busby, quoted in Caputi, 2012; Jamail, 2013a, 2013b), of some defects “never seen before” (Savabieasfahani et al., 2016: 505). Infant bodies suffering birth defects which “there are not even medical terms to describe” (Samira Alani, quoted in Jamail, 2013a) are shown in photographs portraying that which words claim to fail. ²⁰

This is a medical-epidemiological discourse at odds with its own science. For, emergent research does find classifications for the kinds of birth defects rising in Iraq. Iraqi doctors and their research partners, working to document congenital malformations and cancers across Iraq, have found that many of the prominent birth defects can be classified as neural tube defects and heart defects, which can be caused by heavy metals depleting the mother’s folate levels during pregnancy (Al-Sabbak et al., 2012). These and other birth defects occurring in Iraq include hydrocephalus, anencephaly, spina bifida, limb deformity, omphalocele, short extremities, and other conditions combining multiple birth defects. ²¹ Thus, at times, the dominant medical-epidemiological discourse on militarized toxicities departs from the course of emergent research to proclaim a public health catastrophe and crisis in the tone of shock. This is not to say that the toxicities suffered in Iraqi communities are not severe. The point is that the dominant register of shock and the medicalized crisis narrative deployed in this frame actually assist in the erasure of phenomena for which they claim to advocate.

The discourse of environmental hazard and contamination pairs with the medical-epidemiological to dominate narratives of military toxicities. Such talk portrays Iraq as a scene of “widespread environmental destruction” (Tavares and Lahoud, 2013: 3); a “dystopian environmental future” (Jones, 2014: 797); as well as “environmental threats” (Jones, 2014: 797; United Nations Environment program, 2003: 5; United States Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, 2006: 20–21); “conflict pollutants” (Ghalaieny, 2013: 5; Kellay, 2014; Wexler, 2018; Zwijnenburg, 2014: 11–12); and as generally damaged due to the “detritus of war” (Howard, 2003) and the “toxic remnants of America’s technological approach to modern war” (Jones, 2014: 797). The metaphorical approximation of toxicity figures highly in this frame: standing in for the toxins specific to military operations, or their classifications, are the categories of waste, pollutants, detritus, and remnants. The environmental contamination frame, especially in its description of radioactive toxicities, is often dominated by language of the spectral and ephemeral. “The most dangerous being the hidden” toxins “deep in its landscape” (Jones, 2014: 797), a haunting, evasive presence spreading through invisible drifts (Fisk, 2003; Mesler, 2001; Peterson, 2000). The portrayal of radioactive effects as ephemera likewise informs the categorization of associated medical conditions as syndromes—which defines them as “medically unexplained illnesses” or patterns of symptoms occurring together (United States Department of Veterans Affairs, 2018b), instead of as a recognized disease etiology—notably Gulf War Syndrome and Balkans Syndrome. ²²

This portrayal of abstraction and ephemera is in starkest contrast to the acute material specificity of the effects of these toxicities on bodies and environments. And if such discourse is most widely deployed to narrate radioactive toxicity, much of which may be due to DU exposure in Iraq and potentially Afghanistan, the discursive terms fail to capture the manner and scope in which such toxification is rendered and lived. DU is a toxic substance that is weaponized for its extremely high density as a metal; a DU “penetrator” built into the head of a missile or other munition enables it to pierce through the heavy armor of a tank or the thick concrete of a structure below ground, incinerating upon impact (Zwijnenburg, 2013: 9–10). The scene of destruction left in the wake of a DU penetrator is stark and obvious in its visibility. Yet, the description of its aftermath is saturated with the vague and ephemeral.

Considered together, this discursive repertoire, comprising the medical-epidemiological discourse and the environmental-hazard discourse, has decisive effects on how militarized toxicities live in the public sphere. First, it deweaponizes the toxins it describes as efficacious on body, population, and environment, even while the toxicities it narrates are predominantly those specific in kind and intensity to military operations and war. It thereby erases the violence inherent in weaponized toxicities and ordinary military practices alike. The toxic phenomena under scrutiny are portrayed as an aftermath without a cause. Second, both dominant paradigms remove the phenomena of militarized toxicities from the realm of the political, inserting them instead into the disciplines of medicine and ecology, in which notions of violence become relatively inaccessible. Third, this dominant repertoire helps to legitimate claims of uncertainty and doubt regarding the capacity of military toxins to cause the environmental and health effects lived in their wake. ²³

Rhetorics of doubt and uncertainty are particularly fueled by the linguistic erasure and vagueness of the dominant discourse on militarized toxicities, and are especially pernicious. This discursive mystification has been deployed effectively in the midst of other large-scale toxicities, such as after the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, when both scientific and public conversations were dominated by assertions that diffuse “psychological stress” was the actual cause of exposed residents’ acute illnesses after their exposure to radiation (Petryna, 2013). This rhetoric of uncertainty bolsters a vicious cycle of denialism in public debate, which features copious government denials, as well as proliferating citations to potential confounding causes of the purported effects of military toxins. Taken together, the holistic effect of these dominant discourses is to depoliticize the scene of the toxic and lift it out of its militarized history.

Seeking to defuse this feigned uncertainty, Toby Craig Jones (2014) turns away from the dominant frames of militarized toxicities in Iraq and instead uses the term “toxic war.” In doing so, Jones aims to highlight the specific toxicities employed by the US military, distinguishing them from “routine” wartime violence. He sketches a history of the weaponization of DU by the US, which “fashioned its stockpiles of nuclear waste into its preferred weapons of war in the late twentieth century” (p. 797). The term “toxic war” follows Omar Dewachi’s (2013) article, “The Toxicity of Everyday Survival in Iraq,” in which Dewachi writes that Iraq has been subjected to a “toxic warfare experiment.” Certainly, the appellation “toxic war” is a productive divergence from dominant narratives examined here, as it effectively reinscribes some of Iraq’s present toxicities with the deliberate violence of their infliction, as well as their origins in warfare. The problem is that the category “toxic war” is simultaneously too broad and too narrow. “Toxic war” invokes war writ large, inscribing the totality of the war with the tactic of toxicity. Furthermore, Jones’s usage of the term solely focuses on the toxicity of munitions which are engineered to contain known toxins—such as those containing DU. Hidden from view remain the toxicity of munitions generally, left to waste into the environment. Likewise, the significant toxicity rendered through everyday military practices—apart from outright “acts of war”—also remains untouched by Jones’s category, omitting attention to the insidious, ongoing, and less eventful forms of militarized toxicity.

Toxic violence

The phrase toxic violence proposes a discursive intervention into a rhetorical context dominated by terms that mystify and depoliticize. Toxic violence names deliberate violence which employs or produces toxic exposure as weaponry, tactic, or by-product—attended to in the present article in its production as a form of state violence enacted through military operations and warfare. Notably, this intervention enters into an era of the “notional expansion of toxicity,” as Chen (2011) writes, in which “toxins—toxic figures—populate increasing ranges of environmental, social, and political discourses. Indeed, figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion” (p. 266). As a result, today we can easily speak of “toxic masculinity,” or declare an intimate relationship “toxic,” but ironically, still struggle to adequately represent or theorize literal toxicities. This gap in the conceptual availability of toxicity is especially marked in the context of state violence. Sahakian (2017) recently characterized the relationship between the US and Iraq as “toxic,” but not as an indicator of the literal toxicities involved.

A database search for the phrase “toxic violence” yields 20 instances of the term, only one of which refers to literal toxicities. ²⁴ But what, if anything, can these diverse deployments of the phrase tell us about what toxicity “does” as a metaphorical descriptor of violence? It is notable that most usages do not define what they mean by a violence being metaphorically “toxic,” which attests to toxicity’s status as a commonplace metaphor, functioning as if it can “speak for itself.” ²⁵ Scratching below this surface reveals that the use of “toxic” to modify instances of violence calls up a number of emphases which are implied in the presence of violence itself, unqualified, but are critically inflected via the rhetoric of toxicity.

First, that a violence is “toxic” names its viscosity. The violence sticks—it stays with the subject and object, and it works not only in terms of a destructive originating event, but also in an aftermath, in an implied ongoingness made possible by that very viscosity. That is, the violence is perpetrated originally, perhaps as event, and then in a slow ongoing life, remaining present to the subject and/or object in a more or less constant, or punctuated and stuttering, affective and physical time–space of its own. Second, naming a violence as “toxic” marks its spreading or “contaminating” capacities—beyond its originating instance, in time, space, or person, it is a violence which can be passed on interpersonally, across family and generation as well as across physical proximities. The spread of this violence may be less experienced in terms of “event,” or in terms less apt to eventalization (Foucault, 1991). Rather, it works in ongoing, silent, or unseen ways. Thus, the term “toxic” marks violence which has not simply been done, but has been unleashed into a social, political, and historical environment, growing and spreading beyond its original intent or power to affect.

In describing the literal toxicities of military operations and war, toxic violence brings forth these and other characteristics. It is a physical violence which is also metaphysical—a material phenomenon that also saturates its scene with nonphysical effects. Toxic violence presents a fundamental disturbance of some of our most normative, seemingly ordinary, received categories. This includes the disturbance of the category of “violence” to begin with—to which the hegemony of violence-effacing discourse in its realm is testament. Toxic violence troubles the normative Western binary of violence and nonviolence as mutually exclusive. ²⁶ While the state has deliberately utilized toxins through its military force, this violence seems all too easily to recede into a diffuse ground of “nonviolence” even as the toxins continue to wreck harm on body, population, and environment.

While it is important to center the state as a perpetrator of toxic violence, how its harm is done on the ground complicates the possibility of cleanly categorizing the individuals involved as victims and perpetrators. It is usually the case that for the perpetration of toxic violence, the state deploys proxies—military service-members—who fire the weapon or churn the burning trash. These service-members stand in as the “perpetrators” of the state’s toxic materialities on the ground, yet simultaneously fall victim to the same toxicities they disperse. Their exposures are usually more circumscribed than vulnerable civilian populations, but are also often lethal (see CCR, 2014b). Furthermore, the soldier-intermediaries of toxic violence are often unaware of the toxins their actions help release, or if aware, are powerless to effect cessation. In this complex aftermath, the state’s typical ritual of displacing blame for its systemic violence onto individuals is an impossibility. The individual soldiers who fire DU munitions, stir burn pits, or order others to do so, are also themselves victims to the very same toxic violence they are forced to perpetrate. The US thus refuses to adequately acknowledge its toxic consequences to its own service-members, for doing so would nudge the door open onto a wider acknowledgment of the toxicities its soldiers simultaneously helped to perpetrate on civilians.

Closely related to the disturbance of victim-perpetrator categories, toxic violence works in a deterritorializing logic, which troubles the effort to find us–them and here–there distinctions. While toxic violence is perpetrated onto one population initially, due to the uncontrollable nature of toxic exposure, its inherent viscosity and drift mean that what violence is unleashed is unlimited in nature. Barring immediate and complete remediation, which is in most cases prohibitively expensive, and in many cases, impossible, there can be no boundary to its potential territory or population. While in theory there could be an effort to map probable flows of toxicity through wind, water, food, exposed materials, or human reproduction, it would inevitably be a crude approximation—one always behind the curve of toxic flows.

The categories of inside–outside and visible–invisible are likewise called into question by toxic violence. Unlike many forms of physical violence, the toxic often impresses upon the body invisibly, without sign, and without notice, while crossing the outside–inside threshold which we so vigilantly protect. Only after a period of latency within the body, for some toxins longer than others, do visible or perceptible signs materialize. Toxic violence does some of its most acute work in this fashion before birth. Iraqis carrying children in pregnancy often do not display visible signs of toxic exposures, but their infants are born with severe, often pervasive birth defects of the most visible kind. After babies are born, it is now common for people in Iraq to ask, not “[I]s it a boy or a girl?” but rather, “[I]s it healthy?” ²⁷

Toxic violence troubles notions of aftermath and remedy, for if the originating events of its violence generate toxicities whose violence spreads across bodies, generations, and geographies, how then might a kind of approximation of damages be assessed, in order to inform appropriate remediation, reparation, and accountability by responsible parties? Nixon (2011) attempts to grasp the impact of war toxicities in his concept of slow violence, which he defines as “a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all… its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (p. 2). Toxic violence generally fits this definition, but its status as a militarized—and in part, weaponized—form of violence in the present examination imparts different inflections for accountability than those called for by slow violence as a whole. Although Nixon includes war toxicities in his examples of slow violence, they remain a form of “aftermath,” as he overlooks the causal power specific to toxicity’s logic as a form of long-ongoing, self-multiplying violence. Not simply an aftermath or remnant, toxicity enlivens new violence unleashed from its originating event—it lives on, as both effect and cause. This self-replicative quality of toxicity’s violence describes both its reproduction across space and time. Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence represents toxicity’s temporal spread, but unduly neglects its spatiality. The spatial and temporal dimensions of toxic violence do not function in isolation, but rather, are interwoven and synergistic. Its long-durée temporality permits toxic violence to spread far wider across geographies, and populations, a fact which is greatly exacerbated by its general nonremediation. This replication across space, in turn, seeds toxicities which pose harmful exposure potential across generations in these widespread localities.

Toxic violence produces population-level attritional effects in contexts of intense militarized toxicities such as Iraq. ²⁸ The larger project, which this article introduces, will further develop an analysis of militarized toxicities in their distribution of life- and death-forms across populations. Berlant’s (2007) notion of slow death characterizes a portion of this terrain, and gestures toward what lies beyond it. Slow death describes “the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence” (p. 754). The racialization of this condition is, in the case of toxic violence, paramount. As Berlant writes, slow death is distributed to populations who are “marked for wearing out” (p. 761). I have argued that the Iraqi population is marked for such attrition through US-led global distributions of racist enemy-other constructions involving the “terrorist” threat—a contemporary relation of enmity which builds on much longer Orientalist and Islamophobic legacies toward the peoples of the Middle East and beyond (see Asad, 1997; Said, 1979).

The condition of slow death describes the zone of ordinariness, of chronic living-on while wearing-out, which toxic violence effects in the population. Although sometimes brought to bear in the form of an event, in military encounters, militarized toxicities are lived overwhelmingly in a continuing, and nondiscretely framed, temporality. Similarly, spatial proximity to immediate military action sometimes causes toxic exposures, but the ongoing nonremediation of contaminated spaces represents a much wider scope of the everyday environs in which civilian populations continue to live. While in Iraq and Afghanistan, toxic violence is endured both slowly and in scenes of crisis, it is undoubtedly the slowness and the ordinary which pervades, and which characterizes toxic violence as a structural phenomenon.

A departure from dominant frames which unduly individualize and efface the violence of toxic state assemblages, the concept of toxic violence articulates the collective and indeed structural conditions of the damage wrought. As a form of state violence, it seeks cover through proxy agents—military personnel, whose agency does not figure in its perpetration, and whose bodies are doubly exploited, both in the deployment of toxicities and in their direct victimization to the very same toxins to which they expose others. Toxic violence is done both in event and in the everyday, operating in an ongoingness punctuated by points of more acute vulnerability, bringing forth yet other new events of exposure—and new lives born through, and into, toxicities. While certain lives endure the slow lurk and stutter of toxic effects, other lives are born immediately unlivable, or barred from the fullness of life by incipient genotoxicity, as many militarized toxicities damage DNA. Once toxicity affects genetic material, each new life produced is born potentially exposed and, in part, constituted by the toxic.

Reversal

The basic evidentiary disposition of the US and UK with regard to military toxicities and their potential linkage to civilian illnesses constitutes a reversal of the burden of proof. This begins with states’ use of known and regulated toxic munitions and practices in total secrecy, which afforded Iraqi and Afghan civilians no opportunity to avoid known health hazards from the beginning of military operations. As it has become clear to civilians and monitoring organizations that these munitions and practices have been used, state perpetrators have continued to ignore calls for transparency on their location and intensity data (see CCR, 2014a). Only when pushed through litigation (Kurera, 2010) and Freedom of Information Act requests (Zwijnenburg and Weir, 2016) have perpetrating states released small fractions of the data they record on their toxic operations. This opacity is a primary barrier to research seeking linkages between military-origin toxicities and illnesses in civilian communities internationally.

Furthermore, states’ denials that their munitions and practices are harmful to Iraqis and Afghans cite research which refutes their toxic health effects as a whole. Yet, perpetrating states have not conducted any research on Iraqi or Afghan civilian health in the wake of exposures. These government denials attempt to end debate on their practices causing illnesses, claiming that there is not enough supporting evidence by citing (a) research conducted in settings which are nothing like that of civilians living in long-term exposure hazard conditions (e.g. Livengood, 1996; McDiarmid et al., 2001; Parkhurst et al., 2004) and (b) the lack of research conducted in these zones of conflict which could show a linkage between military toxicities and illnesses (see white, 2008: 40). As states deny even the need for basic exposure research, civilian communities and nongovernmental organizations attempt to fill the gap without funding adequate to the scale of public health concerns. Community and nongovernmental research efforts are simultaneously further hindered by the need to rely on woefully incomplete data disclosed by states regarding which toxins were exposed and their location data. When such research turns up partial or inconclusive evidence, states in turn cite this as a lack of proof (see also Ghalaieny, 2013; white, 2008).

The antitransparency work of perpetrating states reverses the burden of proof which is squarely their responsibility. Neither civilian communities nor nongovernmental organizations are responsible for the deployment of these toxic munitions and practices. The substances introduced into the Iraqi and Afghan environments by perpetrating militaries are known carcinogens, genotoxins, and teratogens, and by this fact alone, states should bear the responsibility of (a) funding independent research at a geographical and longitudinal scale necessary to diagnose the extent of population health effects and (b) enabling the effectiveness of this research by engaging in full disclosure of all information pertaining to their deployment of toxicities.

Perpetrating states’ conduct surrounding the deployment of toxic munitions and practices in the post-2001 era also represents an inversion of what would be ethical adherence to the precautionary principle. In the growing body of International Environmental Law, the precautionary principle recommends preventive recourse to stop potential harm to the environment, in particular “where scientific data do not permit a complete evaluation of the risk” (Kellay, 2014: 43). Given the difficulties of conducting effective, large-scale, longitudinal health research on potentially exposed civilian populations in post-conflict zones (Ghalaieny, 2013; Kellay, 2014), and the impossibility of conducting effective research where military operations continue, the precautionary principle would dictate that states simply should not risk potentially exposing civilian populations to military toxicities, rather than create an exposure context to which adequate response would be near impossible.

Polarization

The antitransparency stance of perpetrating states, which reverses the burden of proof, is an extreme stance of evidentiary obfuscation. This disposition animates a complementary polarity in debates over evidence linking military toxicities to health effects: overstatement (of research conclusions) and sensationalization (of representations of evidence). Each polarity viciously feeds the other. Abdication of the burden of proof leaves impacted communities and under-resourced research projects with an impossible task—in the midst of ongoing wars, surface scientifically rigorous, large-scale, longitudinal exposure studies matching military-origin toxicities with population-level illnesses to verify a causal link. Facing the impossible, community assessments and small-scale epidemiology and toxicology studies have found preliminary evidence linking some toxicities (some linked to military uses) to certain illnesses in Iraq (Al-Sabbak et al., 2012; Al-Sadoon et al., 1999; Alaani et al., 2011a, 2011b; Busby et al., 2010; Fasy, 2003; Hagopian et al., 2010; Savabieasfahani et al., 2015, 2016). Knowing the larger scale research is impossible amid war and scarce resources; observing the scale of devastation to health and the environment; and enduring the ongoing antitransparency stance by perpetrating states, these preliminary studies have tended to overstate their conclusions to bring attention to an oppressive situation (see meta-analyses in Al-Hadithi et al., 2012; Ghalaieny, 2013: 6–7). Likewise, the scant international media coverage of their evidence has tended to proclaim an apocalypse to counter the black hole of state denial.

Overstated research conclusions—“the highest rate of genetic damage” ever found (Busby, quoted in Caputi, 2012)—and sensationalist narratives—the damage is “worse than after Hiroshima” (Simpson, 2010b)—provide an unfortunate fuel for further denials by perpetrating states, which easily discredit these studies and stories for a lack of hard evidence commensurate with their stated claims. These denials effectively shut down debate by citing faulty claims as a sheer lack of evidence linking military toxicities to illnesses, even while it is the responsibility of the deniers themselves to facilitate independent research into the consequences of their actions in the face of known hazards.

Physician reports and hospital records analyses have revealed a significant rise in birth defect and cancer incidence after the 1991 US-led military action in Iraq as well as another significant rise during and after the US-led 2003–2011 war and occupation (Al-Sabbak et al., 2012; Alaani et al., 2011a, 2011b; Alborz, 2013; Chulov, 2010; Peterson, 1999; Simpson, 2010a). Small-scale exposure studies of affected populations have been conducted in Iraq, but these have not tested for the full range of toxins implicated in the aforementioned military practices. Larger scale follow-up research is in dire need in order to confirm these increases, their causes, and scale. Cancer and birth defect prevalence research is hampered by a lack of adequate pre-conflict monitoring and recordkeeping in Iraq’s health systems—disease rate increases found in post-conflict monitoring are without comparable prior data (Zwijnenburg, 2014: 43–46). In addition, factors confounding research on cancer rates include population aging, tobacco consumption, and other environmental hazards such as industrial pollution (WHO, 2013a: 9; Zwijnenburg, 2014: 16–17). Factors confounding research on birth defects are found at the nexus of environmental and genetic factors, with confounding environmental factors including nutrition, quality of prenatal care, use of tobacco and alcohol, maternal age, and health stressors pursuant to socioeconomic disparities (Al-Hadithi et al., 2012: 1–2).

Doctors and officials in the Ministry of Public Health in Afghanistan describe a 20% increase in congenital birth defects nationwide, including a marked increase in babies born with “holes in the heart,” or atrio-ventricular septal defect (AVSD; Manduca et al., 2014; Salehi, 2011; Sediqee, 2016; Tolo News, 2010). This could be linked to military toxicities, but epidemiological research has not yet begun.

Exclusion

The evidentiary disposition of perpetrating states to the civilian consequences of their militarized toxins is further characterized by a threefold exclusion. The first aspect of exclusion is evidentiary compartmentalization. Although perpetrating states recognize the laws of physics and biology as standard across the globe, they nevertheless treat certain substances and practices as toxic (and regulated) in one environment, while claiming they are not toxic, and can be used indiscriminately elsewhere. Second, the division between where and for whom certain military toxicities are recognized as harmful and regulated is governed by environmental racism, with uneven regulation at play in its racialization. States’ own regulations on toxic substances and practices for their service-members, or within their homeland—even while indigenous communities and people of color on those lands bear far disproportionate toxic burdens—switch to blatant denial of toxic potential, absence of regulation, indiscriminate usage, and evidentiary obfuscation once the same toxicities are applied to civilians internationally. The third aspect of evidentiary exclusion is environmental closure. In order to sustain this truth regime, perpetrating states proclaim closed environments where there are none. Their assertion that something is toxic here but inconsequential and unworthy of study elsewhere relies on environmental borders that do not exist, and which toxicity never obeys.

Examples of evidentiary exclusion abound. With regard to DU, the US government continues to deny the toxic health effects of DU exposure, but munitions containing DU have been used elsewhere with documented toxic health effects, including most prominently by NATO in the former Yugoslavia in 1999. Furthermore, both the US and UK militaries have had training and regulations in place specifying that (UK) service-members should wear radiation protection clothing and (US) service-members should wear respiratory masks if working near any target potentially contaminated by DU, along with other contamination-limiting regulations (Zwijnenburg, 2012: 12). These military field procedures amount to an implicit acknowledgment by perpetrating states of the health risks posed by weaponized DU. These regulations stand as evidence even though many service-members were not aware of nor trained on DU hazards in their operations, let alone provided with protection or remediation opportunities. In 1993, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (2018a) began a “screening” program for service-members exposed to DU, but it denies any causal link between DU and health issues, and provides no clear follow-up mechanism or associated benefits to veterans who register for its limited screening regimen. The US still does not acknowledge any need to register or monitor exposed Iraqi civilians.

Evidentiary exclusion is also at work in the US assertion that DU poses no threat to civilians after it is scattered into the environment by military use, while both within the US and internationally, DU must be stored as Low or Intermediate Level Radioactive Waste. Domestic DU weaponry manufacturing sites have been shuttered after studies showed their toxic harm to local populations (Jones, 2014: 798). The UK maintains that it “has no long-term legal responsibility to clean-up DU from Iraq,” but that it will remove surface-lying contaminated materials and UXO from battlefields “as they are discovered” (United Kingdom Ministry of Defense, 2003, quoted in Zwijnenburg and Weir, 2016: 31). Some DU clean-up has also been conducted by the Iraqi government, with training assistance from UN agencies, with the government reporting between 300 and 350 known contaminated sites in remediation as of 2013 (Edwards, 2013). Despite its disproportionate responsibility for DU contamination in Iraq, the US has not acknowledged conducting any clean-up (CCR, 2014a).

US-led efforts to proffer denial of DU toxicity in Iraq have a much longer history. From 1990–2003, as well as during the occupation of 2003–2011, it was largely the US which determined the flow of scientific expertise and funding to Iraq. The US backed the IAEA’s blockage of Iraq’s import of radiology equipment to assess DU effects in Iraqi communities, on the grounds that it was “dual use,” meaning potentially applicable in the development of nuclear weaponry (white, 2008: 40). Yet the US State Department abdicates responsibility to the Iraqi government for the lack of DU exposure studies inside Iraq, shifting blame by stating that “since 1991, Iraq has refused to allow health inspectors [to] assess the alleged impact of depleted uranium” (quoted in white, 2008: 40). Similarly, attempts to fund research into birth defects and cancers in Southern Iraq through the Oil for Food program, a needed supplement to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Iraq budget, were all blocked by the United Nations Security Council (Mani, 2013).

Exclusion likewise extends to the US use of burn pits and Mark-77. Open-air waste incineration is prohibited in the US and its severe toxic health effects are recognized by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, 2003). Although napalm was widely recognized as an inhumane and toxic weapon after its conspicuous use by the US in Vietnam, the US reinvented “new napalm” for post-2001 use, and rebranded it Mark-77 (CCR, 2014b).

It is important to note that, at certain key junctures, this evidentiary regime extends to what some observers assert is covert political pressure suppressing and manipulating research results. A prime example is the largest scale study of birth defect prevalence across Iraq to date, conducted throughout 2012 by the WHO in partnership with the Iraqi Ministry of Health (MOH). A senior MOH official in Baghdad, Dr. Chaseb Ali, announced while it was in progress that the study had already found “damning evidence” of widespread birth defects and cancers across Iraq, due to factors connected with foreign military operations, including the use of DU (BBC News, 2013). Publication of the study’s final results was repeatedly delayed, under the pretense of newly discovered methodological flaws. Upon release in 2013, what began as “damning evidence” was recast in the study’s final results as “no clear evidence” of an increase in cancers and birth defects (Iraqi MOH, 2013; WHO, 2013b). Health and toxicology researchers, as well as Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary General, assert that the report was deliberately suppressed and discredited to eschew US accountability (Brittenden, 2013; Savabieasfahani, 2013; Webster, 2013).