In last month’s blitzkrieg tour of Central and Southeast Asia, two of the four stops made by United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton share the unfortunate bond of enduring an invasion by US air and ground forces. In the space of a few days, Clinton visited Vietnam and Afghanistan, thus physically linking what had once been and what has now become the United States’ longest war. One of the more insidious links that tie these conflicts together was highlighted in a few of the news stories about Clinton’s trip. That link, in a word, is agri-business.

The big news of Clinton’s visit to Vietnam was her reproach of the government’s human-rights record. As Jim Arkedis pointed out on ProgressiveFix, the secretary of state’s mention of human rights was more a talking point than anything else – something to be noted before moving on to bigger priorities of security agreements and trade relations.

Clinton’s invocation of human rights in Vietnam is nonetheless noteworthy, not simply for what it says about Vietnam, but also for what it says about the status of the US’s grim record of human-rights atrocities in the region. The destructive legacy of the US war in Vietnam is so vast that avoiding it would have left Clinton neck-deep in accusations of hypocrisy.

The State Department’s strategy for dealing with the sticky issue of human rights in the region was to beat us critics to the punch, underscoring US efforts to ameliorate the effects of one of the nastiest and longest-lasting forms of devastation forced on the Vietnamese during the war: the chemical dioxin, otherwise known as Agent Orange.

A deadly agent Between 1961 and 1971, an estimated 3 million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant that was primarily intended to make targets more visible, as well as destroy the agricultural infrastructure of the insurgency. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, as well as thousands of American soldiers, developed cancer and other illnesses as a result.

The damage of Agent Orange has been passed down to the children of these victims. At least 150,000 of them have been born with missing limbs, deformed faces, developmental disabilities, and other serious birth defects. Some areas around the military bases where dioxin was stored still have dangerous levels of Agent Orange in their soil, posing a continuing threat to the environment, animals, and people of those communities.