Ominous parallels: is Iraq the Boomer Vietnam?

"Military psychiatrists who have studied what makes a soldier's moral compass go haywire in battle look first for a weak chain of command. That was a factor in the March 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when U.S. soldiers, including members of an Army platoon led by Lieut. William Calley, killed some 500 Vietnamese. Says a retired Army Green Beret colonel who fought in Vietnam: 'Somebody has failed to say, "No, that's not right." 'No one, apparently, was delivering that message last November in Haditha."' "The Shame of Kilo Company" Time .com Related Story: Twilight of the "War President" "But the common thread from the bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003 through Abu Ghraib to Haditha is that Bush cavalierly sent young Americans into a complex and frightening conflict with false and alarmist rhetoric ringing in their ears. Through clever juxtaposition, Bush’s speeches linked Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and later blurred the distinctions between Iraq’s home-grown insurgency and the relatively small number of al-Qaeda terrorists operating in Iraq." "Bush's My Lai" Consortium News