‘I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture... and kill them. I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill!’ Give Stanley Kubrick every award possible for giving us such a prescient scene in Full Metal Jacket. Private Joker’s bright smile contrasted with the nothingness of his bespectacled eyes, just like the “Communist” peace badge on his chest militated against his US military ‘Born To Kill’ helmet throughout.

Exactly 53 years ago, the Vietnam War officially ended with the departure of the last of the US combat troops. The war that elicited countless expressions of contradictions like Private Joker’s very persona. The war that gave the US its first unequivocal defeat. The war that failed to deter the US from making military interventions in different parts of the world. Today, we are again discussing the contradictions in yet another war being waged by the US — the one on Iran, which is already being predicted by some to become the next Vietnam for the American military.

Even before the first American boots sank into the mud of Vietnam, Graham Greene had already diagnosed the pathology of the aggressor’s contradictions in The Quiet American. His Alden........

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