Here.

The rhetorical narrative of our war in Iraq has offered a number of bizarre rationales for our actions. None of which have put a burr under my saddle quite like the one that says we are liberating people, maintaining stability, and that the Iraqis should be grateful for our sacrifices on their behalf. The idea that hearts and minds are won via an occupying army.

The problem is that it doesn’t matter if we hand out cookies and candy 365 days a year, a single incident of marines pissing on corpses, or breaking into a neighbor’s home, raping the daughter, murdering the whole family and burning the house down kind of ruins it for good. I am unlikely to see the amped up, armed to the teeth soldiers as anything but a scary, dangerous, potentially lethal and emotionally unstable entity just because they gave me a chocolate bar one day and murdered and raped my cousin on another.

This is partly why opinion polls in Iraq have consistently found that a large majority of the native population sees us as creating chaos and violence and favor those who fight us. Very few of us can see this, predicting widespread chaos and instability as a predictable consequence of our exit rather than seeing the widespread chaos and instability as an existing condition of our presence.