Well Jack Bauer, the problem is that you aren't always right as to whose head you chop off or torture. So many non coms and downright unlucky people get caught up in events. Every innocent person you hurt gives a whole family of resentment to act as a recruiting sergeant to the "insurgents". I do understand the anger and righteous indignation that makes us lash out. I've done it myself and I'm not even a soldier. But this is what military discipline is supposed to obviate. Iraq is not Stalingrad and US and UK soldiers are not being forced to fight at gunpoint by NKVD or Gestapo thugs.
Iraq is a civilised cultured society which has endured thirty years of dictatorship, injustice and war. Look where it finds its self now. If we had been "liberated" from a dictatorship and found ourselves being treated in this way how would we respond? I really must watch "Red Dawn" to see what the Yanks would have done.
Look, in the end, in the interests of "victory" we must be better than the people we fight or we simply either will not win or have to kill and destroy such a large area of the Middle East as to demoralise totally the entire region. We managed it in Germany by saturation bombing and leaving five hundred thousand US troops in addition to French, English and Russians to police the place for years after. Never mind the dead we left behind.
I would contend that the man who really won that war was General George Marshal who very early on in the war started planning for the rebuilding of Europe.
Learn the lessons of the past or just suffer the mistakes.