I'm writing in response to Matt Valkovic's grossly misguided column ("Liberals need to end comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam" Thurs., Dec. 9) about comparisons between the Vietnam and Iraq wars. There are actually many similarities between the two.

Both conflicts led to terrible war crimes committed by all factions, but the grandest were unquestionably the U.S. crimes.

Perhaps the worst of these -- aside from the unprovoked aggression in both cases -- is the large-scale killing of innocent civilians. Over the two-decade course of the Vietnam war, there were between 3 to 4 million civilians killed, and over the past 21 months in Iraq, there have been at least 100,000 civilians killed. The My Lai massacre was merely the tip of the iceberg in Vietnam - those soldiers simply happened to get caught, but it was well-known that such horrifying atrocities were routinely being committed by U.S. forces.

Likewise, allegations of torture are widespread in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we happen to know more about Abu Ghraib because it was unavoidably made public.

Another similarity was the use of what are arguably weapons of mass destruction by the United States. In Vietnam, it was the toxic defoliant Agent Orange, and in Iraq, it's radioactive depleted uranium (DU), of which 4 million pounds have been used so far. Both are silent, long-term killers that lead to mass suffering of innocent people. Agent Orange is still causing terrible birth defects, and DU has led to a dramatic spike in cancer rates.

The soldiers themselves are only partly to blame.

The real criminals are the policymakers who train them to dehumanize the people that they are fighting.

As a result, the soldiers become victims as well -- in the process of dehumanizing another human being, one loses one's own humanity.