But in that time we have killed 10's of thousands of Iraqis, created a civil war that seems to have no resolution, and it looks like Iraq will become a haven of terrorists- all based on lies/bad intelligence.

I thought the issue was atrocities and hearts and minds, not the war.

I didn't say murder or rape were not problems. The fact that these people are on trial indicates that it is a problem to our society and our military. My issue is with painting our entire effort over there with this kind of incident, particularly when everything positive is studiously ignored.

Our troops have not "killed tens of thousands of Iraqis." The bastards we are trying to stop have accounted for almost all of the civilian casualties since the May of 2003, and if we leave, it will get worse.

The fact still remains that for every Iraqi family who has lost someone to this war, there are twenty to thirty (depending on number source) who lost someone to Saddam's wars and terror. That isn't an alternate universe. That happened.

In the most recent poll I have, sometime last fall, over 60 percent of Iraqis polled still believed that getting rid of Saddam was worth it.

My apologies for the poorly worded sentence at the end. The remarks about hating the military were directed specifically toward the media, but on rereading it, that wasn't clear.

Incidentally, actual numbers for convictions for crimes over there showed up in a NYT article today. 665 prosecutions from 2002 to 2006 in both Afghanistan and Iraq, of which 73 were serious crimes like murder, rape, robbery or assault (this includes attacks on other Americans). Given the situation and the overall numbers, it's still pretty low.