Are wars based on racism?

...Former Marine John Musgrave’s explanation of how racism helped him deal with the brutality of the war in Vietnam by obscuring the humanity of the people he was killing.

...You begin to realize the war business, but also the very, very essential ingredient, as he says, is Racism 101, which is what you need in order to keep your young people sane going about their business, right? Fighting your wars.

...Racism helped make combat more abstract and thus more manageable for some American soldiers. But did bigotry play a role in larger policy miscalculations?

Did it make Americans underestimate the severity of the Buddhist crisis, for example? Or did racism prevent Lyndon Johnson from understanding his enemy? After all, he once said, “Foreigners are not like the folks I’m used to.”

It’s one thing to miss the complicated internal dynamics of another country. It’s another to misunderstand because your ideas about race prevent you from seeing any complexity at all. When it came to Vietnam, American policymakers were definitely ignorant. But whether they made important decisions out of racism is a more complicated question.

This come from a documentary by Ken Burns. What are your thoughts?