Foolhardy and Ill-Advised?

Here is Rolling Stone's coverage of the "ill-advised" and "foolhardy" US intervention in Afghanistan, as Nick Dyrenfurth called it, while accusing the Left for bringing progressives into disrepute.

(WARNING: A separate link in the page linked below leads to a photo gallery. Before the reader gets the idea of seeing those photographs, I advise to take Rolling Stone's warning seriously.)

Mark Boal. The Kill Team. 27/03/2011. Rolling Stone.

I am sure equally gruesome photographs can be presented as genuine evidence of the Taliban/Al Qaeda savagery and barbarism against innocent people, committed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

But I haven't seen those photographs, yet. If the reader has, do as I did: post a link to them.

However, unlike the Taliban and Al Qaeda, aren't we supposed to be the "good guys", the civilized ones, in this movie? If "we", too, perpetrate the same kind of atrocities, what makes "us" different from the "bad guys"?

Can we dismiss this as just a matter of being "foolhardy" or "ill-advised", as Mr. Dyrenfurth seems to do? Is this just a matter of creating suitably neutral-sounding euphemisms? "Collateral damage" instead of "victim of murder", "police action/pre-emptive strike" instead of "war of aggression", "captured enemy combatant" instead of "prisoner of war"?

No, Mr. Dyrenfurth, and I say this with regret, it is "progressives" like you who bring the Left into disrepute.


Update:

After posting this message, I remembered the particularly gruesome murder of the American/Israeli journalist Daniel Pearl, by Al Qaida terrorists.

Mr. Pearl, reporting for The Wall Street Journal, was abducted in Iraq and beheaded in 2002.

Although I haven't seen the video, it can be easily found on Google videos.

Incidentally, that search also points to other beheading incidents.