While reading this story about a new British documentary explaining the decision of the Iraqi insurgency to stop fighting the Americans and battle al-Qaeda instead in the years after the 2003 invasion, this quote is astounding:
As General Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the US Army, admitted in an interview at his office in downtown Washington DC: “[Until that point] we had made a conscious decision not to protect the [Iraqi] population. The security situation in Iraq by late 2006 was the worst it had ever been and it was getting worse by the day – that was the reality.”