Greg Pak has written a column for BrokenFrontier.com about the creative decisions behind “War Machine” #1. Here he talks about the scene on page 1:

… Santo Marco is a fictional country found only in the Marvel Universe. Every atrocity in “War Machine” has real world antecedents and we’re striving for immediacy and realism in both the storylines and Leo Manco’s brilliant art — the image of anguished UN peacekeepers standing by while people are murdered because their mandate prevents them from intervention is based on horrific accounts of the genocide in Rwanda, for example.
But I always planned to use fictional countries because for better or for worse, War Machine’s actions will have a transformative, long-term impact on the nations he visits. Magneto’s history in the real world events of the Holocaust works because the history informs the character rather than the other way around. But the stories we’re telling in “War Machine” require the character to change the course of history for the nations he deals with. It just didn’t sit well with me to use real world human beings who are suffering unbelievably horrific atrocities even as we speak as characters in a story that would require outcomes that ultimately contradict real world events.

Click here to read the whole thing.
And click here to read the first six pages of “War Machine” #2, which hits comic book stores on January 21.