John Tirman's 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World. npr just

[rodeodance]

did a great segment with the author of this book. well worth the read. says he injects a bit of humor into it.

http://www.alternet.org/story/40175/

Three Ways (Out of 100) That America's Screwing Up the World

By John Tirman, AlterNet. Posted August 15, 2006.

From the lack of body counts in Iraq, to drug wars to torture, the United States is making the world a worse place to live in.


The following three subchapters are excerpted from John Tirman's 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World (Harper Perennial, 2006). Read another excerpt here.

Three ways America is screwing up the world:

1. "We Don't Do Body Counts"

When U.S. General Tommy Franks uttered those words in 2003, he was conveying the new sentiments of the American military and its civilian leadership, that counting the dead of "the enemy" was not necessary or useful. Franks, who may be remembered as the only general in the annals of American history to lose two wars, was simply repeating what his political handlers told him to say, as all active duty generals do. In this case, it was an attempt to deflect the moral consequences of a "war of choice," a lesson Frank's generation learned from Vietnam. But the "no body counts" policy reverberates around the Arab and Muslim world, to America's detriment.

The policy is an insult and a mistake for two reasons. First, it lends the impression -- or is it a fact? -- that the United States does not care about civilian casualties. In the autumn of 2005, in a fairly typical sequence, the military announced that a sweep of Anbar province in Iraq had resulted in the death of 120 "terrorists." No civilian casualties were reported by the U.S. government, or by the American press. Al Jazeera, the Arabic news organization, had firsthand accounts of dozens of casualties. And it is inconceivable that major military operations of that kind would not result in casualties of the innocent. This is an embittering legacy of the war: not merely the fact of large numbers of war dead, but the neglect of even acknowledging that this could be occurring or is important enough to investigate.........

[Ian David]

1. In 2000, Bush campaigned on a platform that said America...

should not be engaged in nation building.

Since he was "elected," he's been doing his best to prove it.