Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Editorial / Opinion / Op-ed / America's worst side in Iraq: "America is nearly two years into invasions in which we have killed more civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan than the number who died in the United States on 9/11. Yet we have no Osama, no Saddam, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons plants, no peace.
In the 2000 presidential debates, Bush said he would stop 'extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions.' Bush is now so obsessed with nation-building that he is blind to how killings of Iraqi civilians by US soldiers devalue Iraqis even as he claims to liberate them.
Witness the witless comments made last week by the American commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. Sanchez told The New York Times that he decided to scale back his self-described 'iron-fisted' raids in the search for loyalists to Saddam Hussein after the new Iraqi leaders told him that too many innocent families were brutalized by US soldiers.
'When you take a father in front of his family and put a bag over his head and put him on the ground, you have had a significant adverse effect on his dignity and respect in the eyes of his family,' Sanchez said."
- posted by geoff @ #