The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [89]
To begin with it is problematic for ailing veterans themselves. Elaine Showalter, a professor of humanities at Princeton, observes in a discussion of GWS in her book Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media that thousands of Gulf War vets have undergone countless medical exams rather than getting the psychological counseling they needed. Convinced they have a unique organic illness, veterans “tend not to see psychotherapists even when their stories make clear that anxiety, fear, and anger are among their symptoms,” Showalter writes.17
Using GWS to critique the military is problematic on logical grounds as well. Any pronouncements the Pentagon made about veterans’ health became fair game for more fear mongering about GWS and further criticism of the military. When the Pentagon released studies showing that Gulf veterans were no more ill than would be expected by chance and that their ailments were similar to those that afflicted veterans of previous wars, the news media quoted “leading critics” saying “no one’s going to accept these studies,” and veterans claiming the Pentagon “lied ... every step of the way.” Yet when the Pentagon admitted that, contrary to its own earlier claims, more than 20,000 American soldiers may have been exposed to chemical agents and given experimental drugs, such admissions were greeted with ever greater condemnation and suspicion. Some in Congress, extending the analogy Bush had used against Saddam Hussein during the war, made comparisons to gas chamber experiments on U.S. troops in the 1940s. Senator Jay Rockefeller accused the Pentagon of “reckless disregard for the health and well-being of U.S. servicemembers.”18
Some studies do suggest that some veterans’ ailments resulted partly from the numerous inoculations they received against a half dozen diseases ranging from cholera to anthrax, as well as insect repellents they wore. These studies too have been discredited by prominent medical authorities, and in any event, the Pentagon administered the drugs out of regard for the soldiers, in hopes of safeguarding them, not to harm them.19
Not until well into the twenty-first century are medical scientists likely to have sufficient long-term studies to reach a definitive conclusion about the causes of Gulf War Syndrome. Yet the nation’s journalists, happy to recast the Gulf War Syndrome story as “a good old-fashioned cover-up” rather than a “complicated ... medical mystery,” as an analysis in the American,journalism Review put it, poured forth with non sequiturs of their own. “Whether or not there is a coverup, the case represents the Pentagon’s self-protective culture at its worst,” declared a Washington Post story in 1996 on possible causes of GWS. Wrote New York Times reporter Philip Shenon around the same time: “Although there is no convincing evidence that American troops were made ill from exposure to Iraqi chemical or biological weapons during the war, the silence of major government figures from the war has added to the suspicion of ailing veterans that the Pentagon is withholding evidence that might explain their health problems.”20
It fell to seasoned skeptics at these same newspapers to question their colleagues’ innuendos of a governmental conspiracy against our troops. Gina Kolata of the New York Times consulted prominent scientists at medical schools, who suggested that, whether or not veterans were exposed to chemical weapons, such exposure could not explain GWS. For one thing, if toxic exposure had been great, large numbers of veterans should have been hospitalized. Instead, their hospitalization and death rates were about the same as those of their peers who did not serve in the war. The range