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The actual quote is: 1963-1975 American military kills 4 million civilians in Southeast Asia.
Don’t ask me for a cite on that figure, 'cause Moore doesn’t give one. I know there were massacres of civilains during the Vietnam War, but 4,000,000 people?
Any Dopers out there have access to info that would either corraborate or discredit that statement?
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, estimates of Vietnamese casualties are, for the ARVN (South Vietnamese army), between 185,000 to 225,000 killed (and another 500,000 to 570,000 wounded); for the NVA and Viet Cong, 900,000 killed and an unknown number wounded; and “more than 1,000,000” civilians killed in the North and South. And of course, not all civilian casualties were inflicted by the American military; some were inflicted by our South Vietnamese allies, and some were inflicted by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces.
I don’t know how many Laotians died when the war spilled over into that country, but Laos only has under 6 million people, so I really doubt we killed 3,000,000 people there, however destructive our bombing campaigns might have been.
The Khmer Rouge killed as many as 2.4 million people in Cambodia; however, while our behavior towards the Khmer Rouge wasn’t always what it should have been (we sort-of-supported-or-didn’t-really-oppose them, based on the mutual antipathy between the Maoist Khmer Rouge and the Soviet-backed Vietnamese Communists), I don’t think you can just flatly say the “American military” was responsible for those deaths.
4,000,000 does seem high, but there are persistent stories of the CIA fingering half a million communists in Indonesia during 1965. If you highball that, and add in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines etc. the figure might barely be possible.
During the 1970’s the Church committee examined and documented many of the CIA’s covert operations. The reports don’t seem to be available online, but if you’re willing to brave the odor of scorched tinfoil there are plenty of unofficial summaries.