“The bad guys shoot us in the head and we shoot ourselves in the foot,” that’s how one senior Bush administration official responded to the recently revealed Pentagon practice of surreptitiously paying Iraqi newspapers to print stories written by the U.S. military. The attempt to plant “good news” has had just the opposite affect; it’s created another “bad news” story about America.

Here’s the deal: people in Iraq and other Muslim countries suspect that the United States invaded the region to occupy it, to get rid of Saddam Hussein and capture the oil. President Bush keeps telling them, and us, that instead America sought to liberate those oppressed by a tyrant and bring democracy to the beleaguered nations of the Middle East. The people should understand that the American military is there to help.