Phil Donahue on the Iraq War: After Vietnam, ‘I thought we’d learned our lesson’

Phil Donahue, former TV talk show host and co-director and executive producer of “Body of War,” sits down with Current TV’s John Fugelsang to discuss the 2007 documentary and the impact of the Iraq War. “Body of War” profiles Tomas Young, a veteran who was shot and paralyzed while serving in Iraq in 2004. Nine years later, Young has decided to go on hospice care and is now dying at home.

Donahue describes the “spiritual experience” of telling Young’s story: “None of us had ever been this close to a catastrophic injury — an injury that turns the whole family upside down — and it’s happening behind the closed doors of thousands of homes in this country and nobody sees it.”

Fugelsang asks Donahue whether it will be “harder for the American people to get fooled again the next time they try and run a war like this on us?”

“I thought that would happen after Vietnam,” Donahue says. “I thought we’d learned our lesson.”

For more from Donahue, check out the Web exclusive outtakes from his one-on-one interview with John Fugelsang, in which he shares what it was like being a first-time filmmaker and how he feels about the fact that his MSNBC show was canceled because of his opposition to the Iraq War.