Portside

The US Department of Defense will work on compensating the families of the victims killed in a deadly American airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The strike “mistakenly” killed 22 people.

Today we are fighting back for the respect of the Geneva Conventions. As a medical humanitarian organization, we are fighting back for the sake of our patients. We need you, as members of the public, to stand with us to insist that even wars have rules. This was not just an attack on our hospital-it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions. This cannot be tolerated. These Conventions govern the rules of war and were established to protect civilians in conflicts...

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The refugee influx struck a strong emotional chord with me, as a Hungarian-American visiting my parents' homeland. I had arrived in Hungary on August 25 with my wife Debi, to visit my late Catholic mother's relatives, and retrace the stories of my Jewish father who had survived the genocide of World War II.

Washington helped create the conditions with its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The numbers keep on growing. The authorities are overwhelmed, as are the solidarity networks. The refugee crisis has revealed a different rift: between thousands of ordinary citizens, from Greece to Germany to Britain, ready to share their bread their homes, and governments determined to fortify their borders and protect their power, backed by both the anxious and the frankly xenophobic.

Physicians for Social Responsibility recently calculated that since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. wars have killed at least 1.3 million and quite possibly more than 2 million civilians. Their report chides U.S. political elites for attributing on-going violence in Afghanistan and Iraq to various types of internecine conflicts as if the resurgence and brutality of such conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization caused by decades of military intervention.

The wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan have left nearly 150,000 soldiers and civilians dead since 2001, a new US study estimates. Another 162,000 have been wounded since the US-led offensive that toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, says the study by the Costs of War Project, at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. And, according to the study, “the war in Afghanistan is not ending. It is getting worse."

This Memorial Day, let us remember the men and women soldiers who have suffered and died from war-caused conditions called variably soldier's heart in the Civil War, shell shock in the First World War, PTSD in the Vietnam War, and moral injury in the Iraq War...Let us not forget those who died from the nightmares of war - at their own hand.

April 30 is the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The end of that war - a time of devastating defeat for the United States and relief for the Vietnamese - has been rebranded and offers a hint of what may come when our crash-and-burn policy in the Middle East ends. That war had a lasting impact on American foreign policy, culture, and national identity and draws attention to the lessons it offers for today and the many tomorrows to come.