the new atheism:
The civilian toll of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands according to a study published in the Lancet, with a declining but substantial portion (from a third to a quarter over a three-year period) attributable directly to US military strikes. As Nick Turse has described, the public knows little about the regular attacks by the US Air Force in Iraqi population centers because of underreporting and Pentagon secrecy. In Afghanistan, even Hamid Karzai has denounced the regular NATO bombardment of civilian areas; the total dead is unknown, but five years ago various estimates were already in the thousands. Taking another known grievance in the Islamic world, the US was the aggressive and knowing driver of sanctions against Iraq which were a major factor in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children according to several studies.
(...) Americans who see good intentions in US interventions do so because they are Americans. If similar deeds are perpetrated by enemies, we don’t hesitate in our moral judgments: we didn’t wonder about good intentions of Iraq when it invaded Kuwait or the Soviet Union when it installed a puppet regime in Afghanistan, and rightly so. Likewise, those abroad often fail to see our benevolence. For example, a BBC News poll of January 2007 found that in 18 countries outside the US, only 29% of respondents thought the US played a mainly positive role in the world. In glamorizing ourselves (enabled by our media), we are no different than Russell’s Greek patriot.