Robert Jay Lifton is the author of Superpower Syndrome: America’s
Apocalyptic Confrontation With the World and Home From the War:
Learning From Vietnam Veterans, recently reissued in paperback with
a new preface on Iraq. He is also an editor of Crimes of War: Iraq, forthcoming from Nation Books.
Even before the Congressional hearings on the criminal abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, Colin Powell brought up My Lai, the Vietnamese village where, in 1968, American troops slau