I came across this video today. It's shows the pernicious continuing long-term effects of the war our country waged on the people of Vietnam. The misery it reveals is not a thing of the past, it is continuing to happen today. Warning, the video is rather graphic.

For anyone who couldn't bear to watch the video (and I wouldn't blame anyone who couldn't watch) it documents the continuing mutations and birth defects of children born in Vietnam whose parents bodies are still being contaminated by Agent Orange, a herbicide containing dioxin that was used in mass quantities to destroy vegetation and make it easier for American forces to find and kill people, sometimes people who were combatants but just as often innocent civilians, including children. And these long term birth defects are not the only issue with Agent Orange. It has also been implicated in a number of other diseases for which our military veterans of that war are finally considered eligible for VA benefits, including, without limitation, many cancers.

And though the US Military claims it doesn't target civilians in any of our current conflicts, we know that this is an outright canard, as the numerous drone attacks on wedding parties, and villages in the Middle east demonstrate, as well as hospitals bombed by US forces that were run by NGOs such as the Kunduz hospital in Afghanistan operated by Medicins Sans Frontieres (i.e., Doctors Without Borders a/k/a MSF). Read the reaction of MSF to the official investigation by the US military into the attack that killed forty-two people, patients and staff alike on October 3, 2015:

“Today’s briefing amounts to an admission of an uncontrolled military operation in a densely populated urban area, during which U.S. forces failed to follow the basic laws of war,” said Meinie Nicolai, MSF President. “It is incomprehensible that, under the circumstances described by the U.S., the attack was not called off.” The hospital was fully functioning at the time of the airstrikes. The U.S. investigation acknowledges that there were no armed combatants within – and no fire from – the hospital compound. “The threshold that must be crossed for this deadly incident to amount to a grave breach of international humanitarian law is not whether it was intentional or not,” said Nicolai. “With multinational coalitions fighting with different rules of engagement across a wide spectrum of wars today, whether in Afghanistan, Syria, or Yemen, armed groups cannot escape their responsibilities on the battlefield simply by ruling out the intent to attack a protected structure such as a hospital.” [...] The administrative punishments announced by the U.S. today are out of proportion to the destruction of a protected medical facility, the deaths of 42 people, the wounding of dozens of others, and the total loss of vital medical services to hundreds of thousands of people. The lack of meaningful accountability sends a worrying signal to warring parties, and is unlikely to act as a deterrent against future violations of the rules of war.

The US military admitted using high explosive white phosphorus rounds in Iraq ( a violation of the Geneva Conventions as well as too many depleted uranium rounds to count during our wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Use of depleted uranium shells has led to unmitigated environmental and public health disasters for our soldiers and civilian populations wherever it has been employed.

Iraq’s Minister of Human Rights, Wijdan Mikhail Salim, reportedly told the Assabah newspaper that the lawsuit will be based on reports from the Iraqi ministries of science and the environment. These reports allege that the U.S. and the U.K. used nearly 2,000 tons of depleted uranium bombs during the early years of the the Iraq war. In fact, one official Iraqi study has found that more than 40 sites across Iraq are currently contaminated with high levels of radiation and dioxins. [...] In areas where depleted uranium use was the highest, Iraqi doctors have reported a massive rise in the number of babies born with birth defects and they have seen the number of cancer cases among Iraqi citizens absolutely skyrocket. In fact, what is happening to babies in the city of Fallujah is beyond horrifying. Back in November, one major U.K. newspaper described the situation this way…. In September [2010], say campaigners, 170 children were born at Fallujah General Hospital, 24 per cent of whom died within seven days. Three-quarters of these exhibited deformities, including “children born with two heads, no heads, a single eye in their foreheads, or missing limbs”. The comparable data for August 2002 – before the invasion – records 530 births, of whom six died and only one of whom was deformed. [...] Depleted uranium is both chemically toxic and highly radioactive. In laboratory tests it severely damages human cells, causes DNA mutations and has other carcinogenic effects. Depleted uranium poisoning has been linked to a vast array of illnesses and diseases including severe skin rashes, intense muscle and joint pain, major birth defects, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, brain tumors and just about every type of cancer. Depleted uranium also replaces calcium in the body, thus destroying both teeth and bones. As a result of the massive depleted uranium contamination in Iraq and Afghanistan, severe birth defects and cancer have dramatically increased not only among civilians living in the affected areas, but also among U.S. troops who served in areas where depleted uranium munitions were used. Depleted uranium munitions are classified by the United Nations as illegal weapons of mass destruction, and yet the U.S. and the U.K. continue to use them.

The United States is responsible for these atrocities committed in wars our leaders chose to pursue, wars of aggression, which are universally acknowledged under International Law as war crimes. Indeed, our participation in the re-fueling of Saudi warplanes bombing Yemen civilian populations has led Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) to send a letter to the Obama administration warning that U.S. military personnel could be prosecuted for war crimes as a result of those actions. Ironic, as no one in the US leadership in either the Bush or Obama administrations, has been held responsible for the atrocities committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the other conflicts around the globe in which US military personnel or intelligence agents were involved. Atrocities including rape, torture, the use of chemical weapons, and the prosecution of those wars themselves. No one of any significance has been indicted for war crimes or violations of the US Military Code of Justice. We are apparently a country too big to hold accountable for mass slaughter.

And who has been the most adamant pro-war, pro-use of American military forces candidate in this election? Hillary Clinton. It's not even a close call.

In case there was still any uncertainty, Hillary Clinton banished all doubt in her second debate with Donald Trump. A vote for her is a vote not only for war, but for war on behalf of Al Qaeda. This is clear from her response to ABC reporter Martha Raddatz’s painfully loaded question about the Syrian conflict. With Raddatz going on about the hundreds killed by the evil twins, Bashar al-Assad and Putin and even tossing in the Holocaust for good measure, Clinton saw no reason to hold back: “Well, the situation in Syria is catastrophic and every day that goes by we see the results of the regime – by Assad in partnership with the Iranians on the ground, the Russians in the air – bombarding places, in particular Aleppo where there are hundreds of thousands of people, probably about 250,000 still left, and there is a determined effort by the Russian air force to destroy Aleppo in order to eliminate the last of the Syrian rebels who are really holding out against the Assad regime. “Russia hasn’t paid any attention to ISIS. They’re interested in keeping Assad in power. So I, when I was secretary of state, advocated, and I advocate today, a no-fly-zone and safe zones. … But I want to emphasize that what is at stake here is the ambitions and the aggressiveness of Russia. Russia has decided that it’s all in in Syria, and they’ve also decided who they want to see become president of the United States too, and it’s not me. I stood up to Russia, I’ve taken on Putin and others, and I would do that as president.”

As the Consortium news article goes on a great lengths to point out, these statements by Clinton were a gross distortion of the situation on the ground in Aleppo, where many of the over 1 million people living in the city are able to continue to function and carry on with their lives in relative safety. That is not the case on the suburban periphery of the city, where most of the fighting and bombing has occurred. And the military forces most responsible for the atrocities committed in Aleppo are not the Russians, but our putative allies, the so-called moderate rebels led by Al-Nusra and other extremist Sunni Muslim jihadist forces with ties to Al Qaida.

Despite Clinton’s claim that Russia is trying to “destroy Aleppo,” most of the city manages to carry on quite peacefully despite rebel “hell cannons” lobbing explosive-packed gas canisters into government-controlled areas at regular intervals. “One of the most striking things about Aleppo,” New York Times reporter Declan Walsh wrote last May, “is how much of the city appears to be functioning relatively normally. Much of the periphery has been reduced to rubble. But in the city center, I saw people on the sidewalks, traffic flowing, hotels and cafes with plenty of customers, and universities and schools open for students.” Not so in the rebel-held east, however. Juan Cole described the area as “a bombed-out slum,” a ghost town with a population conceivably as low as “a few tens of thousands.” Life under the rebels is “miserable,” he went on. “Some neighborhoods are controlled by Al-Qaeda, some by the hard line Salafi Jihadi ‘Freemen of Syria’ (Ahrar al-Sham), some by militias of, essentially, the Muslim Brotherhood.”

These "rebels" are being actively supplied and supported by Saudi Arabia and by the CIA. The same people whom threatened to kill American special ops forces if they participated in attacks against ISIS. The same people whose leaders were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

And this is consistent with Clinton's stated agenda to impose a no-fly zone over Syria that would threaten a wider conflict with Russia. A no fly zone that Clinton herself admitted in a private speech to Goldman Sachs in 2013 would would kill "a lot of people" and would be effectively an act of war as it would require the targeting and destruction of missile defense systems manned by Syrian and Russian troops.

There is no question, upon examination of her record, that Hillary Clinton is a war hawk. She believes in the neoconservative policies that have bankrupted our nation, destroyed a fragile stability in the Middle East and led to a resurgence of terrorism by the most radical Sunni sects. She supported the Iraq War, promoted the overthrow of the Libyan regime, pushed Obama to intervene in Syria and approved the sale of billions of dollars of more weapons to our "allies" in the Gulf states. The same allies who she knows are funding ISIS and other jihadist organizations.

But she doesn't give a damn. For her and her neocon supporters in the military industrial complex, and her backers on Wall Street and the fossil fuel companies, these wars are simply "business" opportunities.

Her rhetoric and that of her surrogates this year against Russia has been far in excess of what the facts support. She wants war, and she doesn't care what the consequences are for the millions of people's lives who will be lost or ruined, including the lives of our own active military and their families. She is the greatest single danger to a nuclear conflict since the end of the Cold War.

Now Trump is no bed of roses either when it comes to his often inflammatory rhetoric in the area of foreign relations, but he has been far less adamant regarding an escalation of the conflict in Syria with the Russians. I can't say what he would do once in office, as Trump has been quite ambiguous regarding his policies, but what he has said has been less confrontational, and one can safely say, less hawkish, than Clinton.

Hillary, on the other hand is a known quantity. By that I mean we know exactly what she will do. She's told us over and over. Both her public and private positions are in agreement when it comes to her promotion of a more "robust" use of military force to resolve foreign disputes and crises. Far more aggressive than President Obama, who has shown himself to be no angel when it comes to killing people using our all means at his disposal among our armed forces. Hillary Clinton is, by any measure, a clear and present danger, to the peace of the world.

So, for those of you who plan to vote for her, be aware that she is no diplomat but a long term warmonger committed to regime change around the world wherever she thinks it would benefit US interests (i.e., corporate interests). In short, she's a thug in a pantsuit. If she were the potential leader of Russia or Iran the US media would be up in arms about her pro-war stance. Instead, they meekly and passively follow their orders and claim she's the lesser evil. In the case of a greater risk of military conflicts using US forces, conflicts that could lead to WWIII, that simply isn't the truth.