The Wars

"Many people will probably disagree strongly in the United States when I say that ISIS is a relative of a Western intervention. ISIS, as it developed, developed after the 19th of March, 2003. Not to acknowledge that, I think, is pursuing an ostrich policy. It was the way an occupation force behaves that created the first seeds of an ISIS."

Hans Von Sponeck
Former U.N. assistant secretary-general and former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq

In a similar way to what our collective experience has been with the reporting in the Vietnam War, a real distancing of the impacts on the people over there. We have certainly accounted for the dead and wounded within—in terms of the numbers of U.S. troops and NATO forces in the various conflicts, but these deaths, this destruction, is, for variety of reasons, very deliberately or through self-censorship, kept from the American people so we don’t see these real costs.

The thing that you discovered about Vietnam was, there was no such thing as a war crime. It just didn’t exist. The idea of a war crime didn’t exist. There were violations of rules and things you did wrong. And one of things that emerged in Vietnam—a defense to, let’s say,the MGR, the Mere Gook Rule: It was just a gook. It was that terrible, that racist. You talk about number of deaths in Iraq, and the number staggering, but we usually talk in Vietnam—we don’t get within—we talk—is it one or two or three million civilians and innocents killed between the North and the South.

Ted Rudow III, MA