The Endless Wars of the US

I'm watching a 1983 documentary about the US destruction of Vietnam. There is one Marine interviewed who was smart enough to realize the insanity of what he was doing, and was able to explain it on camera, but the rest seem to think that invading a country and turning rainforest into desert, murdering millions of people and driving the rest into concentration camps, is a perfectly normal thing to do.

The logistical difference between the invasion of Vietnam and later US attacks on various countries stands out.
They sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to do the deed in Vietnam, and they didn't have air conditioning, or Taco Bell, or cell phones to call their families. They had to deal with the heat and mosquitoes and leeches and mud in Real Life.
The news media went out and filmed the action, without being embedded with the military, and put it on the TV news.

Yes, the fight was overwhelmingly unbalanced, with US air power, napalm, Agent Orange and massive bombs vs lightly armed farmers, but it still wasn't as unbalanced as later US attacks. It took 57,000 dead Americans to kill 3,000,000 Vietnamese, a far smaller percentage than more recent massacres.

One guy calmly talks about moving an entire village of 3,000 people out to a concentration camp, and how they then destroyed every house, burned or poisoned the stored foods, killed their animals, "defoliated" their fields and bulldozed the entire thing. Cause, you know, freedom.

At the time, 50 years ago, those of us who opposed the war believed that the total barbarity of the destruction of that country had ''turned the world against us''. But that clearly wasn't true. It all went down the Memory Hole.
And then, in the 80s, we thought that the barbarity of the attacks on the people of Central America had ''turned the world against us".
Also not true. Also down the Memory Hole.
And then we thought that the vicious destruction of Iraq and the torture centers we set up had ''turned the world against us''.

But, here we are now, replacing the elected leaders of sovereign countries, bombing the people of at least 7 countries, ordering the world to boycott targeted countries, threatening to start WW3....and ''the world'' seems to be going along with it.

We must really be Exceptional, like they tell us.