Some civilian casualties are inevitable.
But without a system for keeping track of them, much less compensating their families or systematically trying to minimize casualties, it fell to individual soldiers to do what they could. There has been imaginative and effective work done by Soldiers and Marines acting on their own initiative.
So often in Iraq, success on the ground has been the work of a single soldier or group of soldiers, not executing a grand plan, there are none of those, but deciding independently to rebuild a school, mediate a feud, or distribute food and medicine.
-Senator Franken
On the Iraq War, 2010