Doomed to repeat the horror show Mexican policemen check a murder scene in La Paz, where the corpses had bullet wounds and signs of torture. THE diabolical crimes of Trevino Morales, a captured Mexican drug lord, made headlines when he was arrested. He tortured, decapitated, hanged and shot enemies, but would sometimes just beat them to death with planks. Occasionally, he would carve his name in to his victims' flesh and chop off hands and feet, but his preferred way of inflicting pain before death was to place bound victims in petrol-filled drums and set them ablaze. We might reassure ourselves that Mexico's insanely profitable cocaine trade is likely to attract just such uneducated, depraved barbarians for whom lives - even their own - come and go cheaply. It is almost beyond the capacity of those who boast a place in humanity to comprehend such cruelty. But plenty of apparently fine young men from conventional suburban backgrounds have committed just such evil: "They told the stories of times that they had personally raped, cut off the ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages . . . shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks . . ." That's evidence about Americans in Vietnam given to the US Senate in 1971 by today's US Secretary of State, John Kerry. Damning confirmation of this torture and murder, commonly of the South Vietnamese, on whose side we were, was compiled this year in historian Nick Turse's book, Kill Anything That Moves. A decade's research of Pentagon files alongside interviews with Americans and Vietnamese show such sadism - and a learned disdain for all Vietnamese civilians - were routine and pervasive, even unremarkable. The North Vietnamese soldiers and their Viet Cong sympathisers were equally capable of dreadful atrocities and there were many as the victorious north overran the south. It makes it all the more extraordinary that today's Vietnamese appear to harbour no hatred for Americans, nor the people of the countries that fought them, including us. Last week, Hanoi's narrow streets teemed with the world's tourists. And the locals don't lack pride: visitors could purchase old Ho Chi Minh propaganda posters - in US dollars. Not that long ago we were despised belligerents in a losing war that killed perhaps 2.5 million locals. But the Vietnamese are over it. After a period of isolation, the country is rejoining the international community and is rebuilding its economy in the hope that future generations will have jobs, health and security, even steering their children toward learning English and away from a Cold War preference for Russian. Perhaps it helps that most Vietnamese do not believe in God. But it also speaks of maturity. Vietnam was a proxy war over communism fought by the big Cold Warriors - the US, China and Russia. Smaller nations were involved depending on their alliances or need for them. There are obvious parallels between the situation today in Afghanistan and when we backed out of South Vietnam, leaving the locals we "trained" to take over, knowing they were doomed. Vietnamisation was the word used to describe training the South Vietnamese Army to be self-sufficient. Our well-intentioned nurturing of the Afghan National Army is, similarly, a joke. Among those local recruits who have not yet deserted are many drug addicts, some hell-bent on murdering Australia's soldiers. Everyone knows the Taliban is biding its time to revisit its special brand of Islam on their homeland. So, in years to come, you won't find Western tourists lining crowded marketplaces in Kabul and rubbing shoulders with men who were once our enemies. It's not war that brings out the worst in these fellows, like it did with both sides in Vietnam. It's a book. Just as the Bible was once used to justify the indefensible, the Koran in the hands of the Taliban, and others, is being used to condone primitive urges. The Taliban will execute girls who wish for an education. They'll whip and stone to death women who fail some servility test. That Syrian rebel who killed a soldier, cut open his chest, removed the dead man's heart and bit in to it, as his mates cheered him on with "Allahu akbar" (God is great) might soon be considered a Middle Eastern moderate. The gates of hell are about to open in Afghanistan. And there'll be no one left to push them shut.