The chief legacy of 9/11 is as obvious as it is tragic: a state of permanent warfare in the United States, both abroad and in the “homeland” (a term not used in normal discourse before the 9/11 attacks), with millions dead and displaced for no defensible reason.
If you’re 25 years old or younger in America, you’ve never known a time when your country wasn’t at war. “Peace” is no longer seen as desirable, let alone possible. War is seen as America’s natural state; a land of warriors are we, imbued with a “warrior ethos” that applauds kicking other countries when their down and beating the snot out of them just because we can.
Meanwhile, in the “homeland,” surveillance grows ever more intrusive by the day as agents of ICE kick down doors and haul people away to detention centers that are being rapidly expanded. Personal privacy is increasingly a thing of the past as the government wraps itself in a shroud of secrecy that makes oversight and accountability well-nigh impossible.
The global war on terror has become a war of terror. War begets more war, with no end in sight.
Re-reading the Atlantic Monthly 150th anniversary issue from November 2007, I came across this gem of a quote from America’s 9/11 mayor, Rudolph Giuliani:
We’ve got to be patient and committed [in Iraq], but we’ve got to multitask … We’ve got to talk about Iran—Iran is more dangerous than Iraq—and we have got to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
That was Giuliani in July of 2007 when he ran as a Republican presidential candidate. In America, that’s how you get treated as a “serious” candidate for the presidency—by urging for war not just with Iraq and Afghanistan but with Pakistan and Iran as well. We can “multitask” our wars! Truly a sign of American greatness.
Well, Giuliani’s dream has come true—we are talking a lot about Iran today.
Back in 2007, Ron Paul had a different take on 9/11 and America’s state of forever war, but he was roundly booed for asking Americans to exercise just a bit of empathy by asking why “they” hate us:
That “crazy” Ron Paul, talking about blowback for America’s wars in the Middle East. He obviously didn’t know about America’s peace-making bombs and freedom-bringing missiles. Didn’t he know as well that “they” hate us for our freedoms?
Wars are protean and dangerous beasts. Even when necessary, which is rare, it is well that we remember the horrifying costs of them.
The Russia-Ukraine War is in its fifth year with no clear end in sight. Suffering on both sides has been extreme. Trump’s war with Iran is in its sixth month with no clear end in sight. Hopes of a quick and low-cost regime-change war, encouraged by Israeli propaganda directed at Trump, have proven illusory. With Trump refusing to admit defeat, further escalation and dramatic economic consequences seem likely.
Certainly, Ukraine could not have sustained its military efforts without massive support from the U.S., NATO, and the EU. From the Russian perspective, they likely see this as a Ukraine/US/NATO/EU effort to weaken Russia. I blame Russia for invading. I blame the USA for exploiting that invasion for its own purposes (the Nordstream pipelines didn’t blow themselves up). I continue to worry that this war could widen leading to the use of nuclear weapons. I favor diplomatic efforts to end the war on terms Ukraine and Russia can accept.
The costs of war (Western Front, 1917)
I lament the costs of war, all the dead and wounded on both sides, and the continued destruction of Ukraine’s environment. I lament the damage war does to liberty, freedom, and truth. War always exacts a toll.
Whether the toll of the war is “worth it” for Ukraine or Russia to pay is not my decision. Only the people of Ukraine and Russia can say. Many have voted with their feet, leaving their respective countries, or the affluent pay bribes to avoid military service. This is hardly surprising. Affluent Americans paid bribes in the U.S. Civil War to avoid military service, or they hired substitutes to serve in their place.
Too often, wars are fought by the poor for the rich. Inequities in demands are obscured when wars are glorified as national wars of liberation.
Though not a pacifist, I’m strongly antiwar and very skeptical of justifications for the same, especially by “our” government. Just think of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and so on. I’m not an isolationist (an impossibility given how the world is interlinked, along with America’s 750-800 foreign military bases). But we’ve got to downsize the empire and make major cuts to Pentagon spending.
A major problem with war is that it fosters authoritarianism and abridgments of liberty. Even wars allegedly for liberation can be contrary to liberty. War also fosters the most Orwellian language. I’ve run across “justifiable repression” to explain away the authoritarianism of the Zelensky government in Ukraine. Forced conscription in Ukraine is explained away as “a regrettable but justifiable limitation of personal freedom.”
War is intoxicating and a powerful disturber of clear thinking. It corrodes intellectual honesty — while killing lots of people and destroying the earth.
As a retired military officer, I come back to Ike and his charge that we must be alert and knowledgeable citizens committed to democracy and individual liberties. Yet we seem immersed in a system designed to keep us somnolent and ignorant, or, put more plainly, lazy and dumb.
Ike said he hated war as only a soldier could hate it with all its waste and brutality. We would all do well to hate war and find ways to settle differences through diplomacy. The problem is that too many powerful entities actually love war because it makes them money and because it supports authoritarian agendas and because there are always megalomaniacs willing to sacrifice others for power.
Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, often described as a prose-poem for its surprising brevity and deep meaning, is the most moving work of political discourse I’ve ever read. In that short speech, Lincoln captured the horrific nature of war and the terrible burdens of an American history built literally on the backs of slaves. In describing that great civil war, he did not mince words about its “mighty scourge,” nor on its connection to that so-called peculiar institution of slavery:
Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’
My dad’s old silver certificate featuring Abraham Lincoln
After that terrifyingly honest sentence, Lincoln then extended an olive branch to the defeated South and indeed to the entire nation:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
We should think of war as a scourge—the most sweeping and biting of whips, capable of inflicting the most horrendous of tortures to human flesh.
Lincoln’s speech is dated March 4, 1865. More than a century later, another politician of integrity would refer to the awful scourge of war: Tony Benn, a member of the British Parliament, here in 1998:
The words of Lincoln and Benn resonate with hard-won truths. How awful it is today that war is sold to us as noble and honorable and just, the province of warriors and warrior-states, as if that is something admirable.
U.S. leaders’ pride in military lethality and global prowess are sure signs of the death of reason and democracy in America.
In July 1776, courageous colonists came together to declare their independence from the perceived tyranny of King George III. “Rebels” like Thomas Jefferson urged the colonists to start down a new path, one of independence from the Crown, one that put life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness before fealty to a king. It was a long-shot effort, but the rebels somehow pulled it off.
Today, America has a new “king.” It’s the national security state, with all its threat inflation, its wars, and its appetite for more, always more. Combine that with President Trump and self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and their reckless pursuit of war irrespective of the Constitution and of international law, let alone Christian concepts of morality, and you have a form of tyranny that Americans must declare their independence from.
So, consistent with Jefferson, we need a new American revolution, or if you prefer a restoration of the republic, one that recognizes that immense imperial militaries are corrosive to democracy and individual liberty.
2026 can be a new 1776 if America rejects the tyranny of war and ever-higher Pentagon spending. America needs new sons and daughters of liberty, committed to diplomacy and peace, as fostered in a true participatory democracy that puts the needs of U.S. citizens first.
America’s Founders knew that persistent war is a most insidious and pernicious enemy to our freedoms. America today is a structure infested by the termites of war. If we fail to get rid of them, our house will collapse in a pile of dust.
Since 1776, many patriotic Americans have warned of the dangers of persistent warfare and steroidal military spending. Perhaps most famously, President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 spoke of the immense waste of weapons spending: how humanity would crucify itself on a cross of iron if wars endured and war budgets kept rising. He spoke again in 1961 of how America’s military-industrial complex was threatening the fundamental freedoms and liberty of Americans, especially if that complex was allowed to spread and grow. Ike’s warning went unheeded as America fought disastrous and unnecessary wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere.
Ike came to recognize the astonishing waste and dangers of militarism and war. So should we all. Let us on our nation’s 250th birthday declare our independence from persistent and pernicious militarism and warfare.
Several hundred people (428 people from 40 nations, to be precise) concerned about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza organized a flotilla to bring humanitarian aid to the region. Israel illegally intercepted that flotilla and is now abusing today’s equivalent to righteous gentiles.
The “righteous gentiles” (or “the righteous among the nations”) who helped Jews escape the Holocaust during World War II are celebrated and honored at Yad Vashem in Israel. Perhaps the most famous (because Steven Spielberg made a movie about him) was Oskar Schindler.
It is one of history’s great ironies that Israel is abusing and punishing today’s version of the righteous gentiles who sacrificed so much to help Jews being persecuted and murdered by the Nazis in World War II.
The Israeli government naturally insists the flotilla is aiding “terrorists,” pretty much the same sentiment of the Nazis who punished and often killed those who helped the Jews during the Holocaust.
It’s all so profoundly sad and tragic because “never again” (never another Holocaust) has been shown yet again to be an empty sentiment.
Note to Readers: Here’s an article I wrote for the LA Progressive as America marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
When I look back at my old parchment from 1976, I see noble words written by courageous but deeply imperfect men. We remain imperfect as well.
This article is part of the series that addresses the question whether it was hypocrisy or hope when 250 years ago we stated in our Declaration of Independence that “All Men Are Created Equal.” Hypocrisy because more than half of the declaration signers were slaveholders. Plus, how about women, Native Americans, and the unpropertied? But also hopeful because sometime in the future those groups might (and would) be given the vote.
I was thirteen during our nation’s bicentennial in 1976. To celebrate, I had a parchment reproduction of the Declaration of Independence, something that meant a great deal to me at the time. I still remember John Hancock’s glorious signature—defiant, oversized, unmistakable. Take that, King George III.
Of course, declaring independence in 1776 didn’t make it so—history rarely bends simply because words demand it. The thirteen colonies had to fight a long, debilitating, and often brutal war for nearly six years. Even after Yorktown in 1781, George Washington and others struggled to keep the fragile new nation from collapsing into acrimonious division. True independence came only in 1783, when the British Empire formally recognized the former colonies through treaty. Even then, conflict lingered. The United States would fight Britain again in the War of 1812, a war that included the burning of Washington, D.C., underscoring how precarious American independence remained.
Rereading the Declaration later in life reminded me of the cleverness of its authors. They framed their cause in terms of noble ideals, which was smart, but they also personalized their grievances by casting blame on an allegedly tyrannical king, which was even smarter. By the standards of the eighteenth century, King George III was neither unusually cruel nor especially despotic. He expected obedience to the Crown, wanted the colonies to pay for their own defense, and sought order over disorder. If anything, he may not have been tyrannical enough to enforce compliance.
Still, the founders skillfully appealed to Parliament and to English citizens’ jealousy for their own rights—life, liberty, and property (or, as Thomas Jefferson famously revised it, the pursuit of happiness). This was the Age of Reason, after all, a time when the divine right of kings no longer went unquestioned. Even so, the Declaration often reads like a laundry list of complaints against the king—complaints that were not always fair or fully convincing.
Most colonists, at least early on, were not seeking a radical break with Britain. They wanted the traditional rights of Englishmen, especially as educated men who owned property. No matter how “enlightened” they considered themselves, these were men of their times: slaveholders like Jefferson, men who saw no reason to extend the right to vote to women, to enslaved Black people, or even to white men without property.
Yet embedded within the Declaration was a promise more radical than its authors likely intended. The assertion that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights planted a seed that women, Black Americans, and other marginalized groups would later seize upon. Like the colonists themselves, these groups had to fight for those rights. Power, as the saying goes, concedes nothing without a demand—and rarely concedes much without sustained struggle.
The same remains true today. Declaring America to be a democracy where all are equally respected does not make it so. Our country is more oligarchy than democracy, a land divided between the haves—and the have-mores—and the have-nots, rather than a nation that shares equitably in its collective bounty. We may have won independence from Britain, but we did not win freedom from the forces of history or from the imperfections of human nature.
America remains a place of contention, where the meaning of the American Revolution is still argued over and fought about. Yet there is enduring, aspirational nobility in the idea that we are all in this together, still striving to form a more perfect union. That goal is not achieved through declarations alone, no matter how brave or eloquent. It must be pursued, defended, and renewed every day—against tyrants large and petty, foreign and domestic.
When I look back at my old parchment from 1976, I see noble words written by courageous but deeply imperfect men. We remain imperfect as well. The question is whether we can regain the courage, fortitude, and commitment of the founders—not to idolize them, but to continue the unfinished work they began. I believe we can. To believe otherwise is to abandon the very spirit of America’s declaration in 1776. Why not work to make it so?
Who the hell wants to talk about genocide and man’s inhumanity to man?
I taught courses on the Holocaust, where I came across a two-volume encyclopedia of genocide (see list of references at the end). We humans have a remarkable record of killing each other (usually couched as killing the “other,” the “bad” people). That a two-volume encyclopedia of genocide exists says something truly horrendous about the human condition.
Far too often, a chosen people, a “master race,” decides to eliminate barbarians, inferiors, primitives, race enemies, whatever words are used to demonize other humans. Often, it’s said we must kill them before they kill us, so mass murder is defined and defended in terms of safety and security. The “bad” people force us to kill them. We don’t want to do it—they make us! And we hate them all the more for making us kill.
At the same time, mass murder is often quite profitable for the killers. In the Holocaust, the Nazis systematically stole everything from the Jews they were killing. They stole their houses and apartments, their businesses, their furniture, their jewelry, their clothing: everything they could get their greedy murderous hands on. In Gaza today and on the West Bank, we see Israel stealing land and most everything else from murdered and displaced Palestinians. The Israeli government justifies mass theft and mass death as a defensive war against barbaric terrorists, just as the Nazis saw themselves as being at war with inferior Jews and other racial undesirables like the gypsies.
The Nazis claimed the Jews were an existential threat to the “master race,” thus all Jews had to be killed, even women, children, and babies. The Israeli government claims Hamas is an existential threat to Jews and that all Palestinians are, more or less, members or supporters of Hamas and therefore must be eliminated (murdered or expelled). Women, children, babies: they’re all Hamas.
America has its own history of genocide. Various Native American peoples were murdered, shunted aside onto reservations, sent to “civilizing” schools that denied them their history and identity, most of their land stolen from them. This had to be done, the white man claimed, because the Indians were brutal savages, demonically so.
Today, there is great resistance (certainly among U.S. politicians) to the idea that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza. Most U.S. politicians prefer to think of it as a morally justifiable war against Hamas, and even if they don’t completely buy that, they give Israel everything it wants, weapons and money, to facilitate that genocide. Like Pontius Pilate, they wash their hands of blood shed in Gaza, blaming Hamas (or, perhaps for a few, quietly blaming Israel without daring to say it).
Anyhow, these musings came to me as I contemplated a short encyclopedia article I wrote on genocide about 25 years ago. What follows is that article.
GENOCIDE: Legal term coined in 1944 initially to define and condemn Nazi efforts to destroy, deliberately and systematically, Jews as well as Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) in the Holocaust. The term encompasses not only ethnic- and racially-motivated extermination but also cultural, national, and political. Although the term is fairly recent, genocidal practices are nearly as old as recorded history. Witness the Roman annihilation of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War. Yet genocide as a category is usually applied to events of more recent history, with the Turkish persecution of Armenians during World War I providing a paradigm of ruthless and wholesale murder to extirpate an entire people. Accusing Armenians of being pro-Russian and envying their domination of eastern Anatolia, Turkish officials forced them to emigrate east across mountains in winter. Hundreds of thousands died of exposure, starvation, or in massacres; perhaps 1.5 million died in total from 1915 to 1923.
Josef Stalin’s persecution of Ukrainians in the 1930s also constituted genocide, as Stalin distrusted their political loyalty. By confiscating crops and seed grain and preventing emigration, Stalin consigned five million Ukrainians to early graves. Nazi extermination policies were more racially oriented, as Adolf Hitler considered Jews and Gypsies to be irredeemable biological menaces to the purity of Aryan blood. The machinery of death employed by Nazis—railroads and cattle cars, gas chambers and ovens—and the systematic pillaging and gleeful humiliation of victims set a despicably new standard for human barbarity. Six million Jews and half a million Gypsies died at the hands of this evil regime. The post-war Nuremberg Trials prosecuted a few of the more prominent architects of the so-called Final Solution, but many others escaped judgment.
Although the United Nations’ Genocide Convention (1951) made genocide a crime under international law, lack of military forces and international criminal courts to enforce the convention has crippled efforts to deter or punish perpetrators. Acts of genocide continued, whether by the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian “killing fields” in the 1970s, where one million perished, or by Hutu extremists in 1994, who massacred 800,000 Tutsis in a matter of months as the international community wrung its hands. Events closer to Europe that endangered Western stability drew greater scrutiny. Thus in 1993 the UN created a War Crimes Tribunal to prosecute practitioners of “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia. Despite a handful of convictions, prosecution and prevention of genocidal crimes remain serious challenges facing the international community in the twenty-first century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bartov, Omer. Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, Oxford, 2000.
Charny, Israel W. Encyclopedia of Genocide, 2 vols, Santa Barbara, CA, 1999.
Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, New York, 2002.
Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed. Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, Boulder, CO, 1998.
I’m a Mutt-American. I’m half Italian, 3/8th English, and 1/8th Swedish. But I’ve never thought of myself as other than 100% American.
Ancestors on my mother’s side go back to the 1630s when they came across the Atlantic to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surnames like Wilder, Bird, and Hayward. I’ve been able to trace them back to England and to specific regions, even to ship’s names that they took in emigrating to the New World. At least one of my mother’s ancestors fought in the American Revolutionary War. Take that, J.D. Vance.
Another ancestor on my mother’s side, surname of Johnson, came from Sweden in the 19th century. He was a janitor. Other ancestors were reverends, clockmakers, and tanners, among other occupations. Again, typically American.
On my father’s side, his parents came from Italy in 1902 and 1913, so in that sense my American pedigree is more recent. That said, my father and his two brothers all served in World War II, my dad staying stateside as his two brothers served overseas, one in Europe, the other in the Pacific.
I think my family background is about as typical, as unexceptional, about as “normal” as they come. Unless you are of Native American ancestry, your roots here in America are fairly shallow, relatively speaking. A few centuries at best—not much on the cosmic timescale.
I mention all this because of the Trump administration’s vilification of immigrants, notably so-called illegals. Yes, I think people should immigrate legally to this country, but I don’t think anyone should be demonized.
Ilhan Omar, American (official portrait, 2019)
Trump in particular likes to attack Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is a Somali-American. His harsh rhetoric against her is dangerously irresponsible as well as hateful. I see Omar as akin to my Italian grandmother, who proudly became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945.
Trump is a remarkably puny man—a man who thinks he can puff himself up by belittling others. It’s shameful behavior. He should be impeached by Congress and removed for his un-American attacks that endanger other lawmakers—that demean others, that sow discord.
So many immigrants came (and come) to this country seeking a better life, a fresh start, a land where you really could be judged by the content of your character. In its attacks on immigrants, the Trump administration has shown itself to be characterless and wanting of the true American spirit.
Unless you’re Cheyenne or Pawnee or Iroquois or some other kinship group drawn from indigenous peoples, you’re a recent American, and probably a Mutt-American like me. As Americans, we’re all in this together—all equal under the law, all striving to form a more perfect union.
Well, except for Trump and his tribe of dividers. It’s high time they left America. Perhaps Elon Musk has a few rockets ready to send them to the Moon and beyond.
Next year we celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. There’s going to be the usual fight over what that anniversary should mean to Americans, and what lessons we should draw. For example, the Ken Burns series on “The American Revolution” starts this Sunday night on PBS. I’ll be watching it. If it comes close to his series on the U.S. Civil War, it should be interesting and informative.
There are so many lessons we could take from the American revolution (or war of independence). Speaking as a retired military officer, I might stress the citizen-soldier tradition, the ideal of the Minuteman, the rejection of tyranny, the suspicion of large standing armies, the desire for independence and liberty, the courage to affix one’s name to a declaration that could end with your head swinging in the air.
I don’t know what lessons Trump & Crew will be selling, but something tells me they won’t be salutary. Lots of flag-waving, of course, along with American exceptionalism.
We know America was founded as an imperfect union. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness wasn’t granted to slaves. Or indigenous peoples. Or women for that matter. (Let’s not forget women couldn’t vote for president until 1920.) The founders were mostly white men of property, with some holding “property” in slaves. For African-Americans, the “revolution of 1776” certainly didn’t prove revolutionary for them.
I would stress the idea of striving toward a more perfect union, recognizing the early republic was, in so many ways, imperfect. And that’s putting it gently. I’d stress as well what Benjamin Franklin said. As a form of government, a representative republic is better than most but also difficult to keep. And there’s the rub: today our representatives, our public servants, serve the owners and donors, the power brokers, rather than the people. A revival of the republic isn’t going to come from either major political party—they’re both beholden to money.
So how can we end this “tyranny” without a bloody revolution? Is a national revival possible without years and years of domestic conflict and strife? Meanwhile, can America reject its embrace of militarism and imperialism? Can it advance the rule of law as represented by the U.S. Constitution? Can we be touched, as Abraham Lincoln wrote, by the better angels of our nature?
1776-2026. 250 years of glorious imperfection. We can be better. We can do better. Let’s strive to live up to the promise of America.
To them, the right lessons; to everyone else, the wrong ones
We just marked the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Did American officials learn anything from the disastrous Vietnam War?
Saigon, April 1975
Of course they did. Just not the lessons you’d have wished they’d learned.
So, what did they learn?
They learned that wars can indeed last forever, but that Vietnam wasn’t the best “forever war” for the military-industrial complex because it became deeply unpopular and was disrupting cohesion within the military itself. The best forever wars are open-ended “wars” like the global war on terror. And perhaps a “new Cold War” with Russia and/or China. Wars that don’t involve the deployment of over half a million men (unless that “new” Cold War turns hot).
They learned to control the narrative. No more journalists traveling freely in war zones as in the 1960s in Vietnam. Journalists are now most often embedded in U.S. military units. Embedded reporters, dependent on the military for access and protection, know what they can and can’t say, even as they tend to sympathize with the troops they’re with.
They learned that forced conscription via a draft doesn’t work well for unpopular wars. So they transformed the military into an “all-volunteer” force. Draftees may well be resentful, rightly so, but volunteers? Too bad—they volunteered for this.
Along with “volunteers,” they learned to indoctrinate U.S. troops to be “warriors” and “warfighters” rather than citizen-soldiers. Warriors exist to fight wars, so shut up and blast away.
They learned to keep the American people isolated from war and its deadly effects. Recall that under Bush/Cheney, Americans weren’t even allowed to see flag-draped caskets. During Vietnam, war was in America’s living rooms during dinner, complete with body counts. Coverage of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere was sanitized, almost bloodlessly so.
They learned never to talk of sacrifice (except by those volunteer warriors) by the American people. Taxes aren’t raised in the name of war. There are no war bond drives. America’s leaders tell the rest of us to enjoy life, to visit Disney and to go shopping, while “our” warriors fight overseas.
Together with those “lessons,” they continue to preach “peace through strength,” attacking those who truly seek peace as misguided (at best) and treasonous (at worst). As ever, they tend to attack those who’d dare criticize the U.S. military as ungrateful backstabbers. And of course they consistently obscure the truth of how poorly wars like Iraq and Afghanistan were going while holding no one in the upper echelons responsible and accountable for rampant corruption and disastrous endings.
All these “lessons” ensured that Vietnam wouldn’t be the last example of hubris, folly, and atrocity, and indeed it hasn’t been. Until the right lessons are learned, expect future repeats, tragic variations on a theme of Vietnam.
Bracing Views 