Rose-tinted lens: would Iraqis greet us with flowers? I made sure of it.

Five years into the War, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 4,000 Americans have died. The proud and educated Iraqi middle class has been eviscerated. And America, the birthplace of rock and roll and Marilyn Monroe, the conqueror of the Nazis and the Soviets, for generations a benevolent and powerful force in the world, has been revealed as impotent and petty. The goals of transforming the Middle East, establishing hegemony over the oil fields of Iraq, and demonstrating the invincible powers of the American military have faded. Most of us, except the likes of Norman Podhoretz and Christopher Hitchens, realize the invasion was a disaster. Whom shall we blame?

Blame me. On Feb. 13, 2003, a few weeks before the invasion, I was working as a cameraman for a network news bureau in Kuwait. Our fixer told us that his cousin, a florist, planned to donate 10,000 flowers to children's charities for the youngsters to give to American soldiers to show gratitude for saving them from Saddam. It was a perfect scene: friendly Arabs, cute kids, our brave men about to go into battle. We pitched the story to our bosses in New York.

The boys at the morning show loved it--light and happy, a Valentine's Day bonbon that could still pretend to be a serious look at the impending war. The next morning, we drove to the flower shop and soon realized that we had been duped. No children's charities were involved; the florist had just mobilized his relatives' kids. Had we not agreed to film, he probably would have called the whole thing off. But we didn't care. We had promised New York this story.

I filmed the shop, the flowers, the smiling kids. As we drove to the U.S. Army base, the florist led his nieces and nephews in chants of "We love Bush." (This did not air. Our producers thought it a little "over the top.")

The response when we pulled up was not what we had planned, not at all what the network expected. The military police, seeing three vans filled with flowers, children, and an American TV crew, incomprehensibly assumed we were terrorists intent on breaching security. They pointed their guns at us, ordered us out of the cars, and told me to stop filming.

This was not what we had promised the morning news. American soldiers terrified of flower-bearing nine-year-olds wasn't the image New York producers wanted to project, not something likely to raise our ratings. It did not matter that this story of fear and misunderstanding and the Army's preoccupation with "force protection" was more interesting, important, and real than the sappy tale we had sold.

Since the florist and his kids had an articulate TV crew with them, they were not arrested, but we were all kicked off the base. The children were disappointed, but that was not our primary concern. We had offered our bosses a Valentine's Day card, and our job was to deliver it. The setup was in the can, but we still needed our punchline: grateful soldiers receiving flowers from happy Arab children. Without that payoff, we didn't have a story.

Our producer proposed that we take our gaggle to a road near the base, and when an American jeep stopped at the red light, the kids could hand out their flowers. No one need know of the mix-up that made American soldiers point their weapons at little girls armed with begonias chanting, "We love Bush, down with Saddam."

Many have argued that our failure in Iraq was due to the inadequate number of troops sent to police the aftermath of Saddam's fall or the absurd disenfranchisement of the Ba'ath Party (that is to say, Iraq's educated elite) or the dismantling of the army, which left armed men with no way to feed their families. These explanations are all true, but our disaster can also be attributed to the things I saw that February day at Camp Doha.

There are two lessons I want my country to learn from this misadventure. The first is that war involves death, and we shouldn't go in unless we believe the cause deserves our children's lives. If it is not worth putting the Bush twins on point in Sadr City, don't invade. Unfortunately--and probably inaccurately--our military took as the lesson of Vietnam that the American people will accept anything in war except the death of our boys. American soldiers in Iraq were thus told that any time they feared for their lives, or the lives of their comrades, they should reply with deadly force. If a car approached a checkpoint just a little too fast, and one soldier thought he just might be at risk, he was within his rights to wipe out the family inside.

This attitude taught Iraqis that to the U.S., only American life is truly human--scarcely the point of view best suited to winning the hearts and minds of an occupied people. Establishing security in the Green Zone and ignoring it in the rest of the country, refusing to allow our soldiers to mix with a population that was at least initially thankful for the end of Saddam's tyranny, and not hiring Iraqi truck drivers to convoy supplies are aspects of the same culture of fear that impelled U.S. soldiers to point their guns at children bearing gifts.

The second lesson is that it is very difficult to occupy a nation when you don't speak the language or understand the culture and cannot tell the difference between friend and foe. According to military sources, up to 95 percent of the men we have arrested in Iraq are guilty of nothing, but since we can't speak Arabic, we can't identify the 5 percent who actually are our enemies. Thus we have managed to alienate Iraqis who might have supported our program because, to us, they all look the same.

Outside the base, we still had no luck. Soldiers saw the kids and either sped up or, if the light was red, stopped 50 yards up the road, just in case the tots were terrorists.

Eventually I got bored with waiting and strolled the 50 yards, explained that I was American, and asked if we could film our flower scene. One jeep full of soldiers finally did me the favor, stopped in front of the kids, and with impatience and little gratitude accepted their Valentine's Day gift. I told the producer we had the shot and headed back to our hotel.

Maybe you saw the story that aired the next morning as you were drinking your coffee, getting ready to go to work. It wasn't emblematic of what we observed, but it was the piece we had promised New York. It confirmed Americans' assumption that the war would turn out well, while the reality indicated potential disaster.

I remember, at dinner sometime that month in Kuwait, asking a table of journalists who among us believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Of the 12, only one did. Perhaps not coincidentally, he was the highest paid of the group. But reading our copy and watching our film clips, would anyone have guessed our doubts? The difference between what we said to each other sitting in the bar after work and what we filed would shock the American public.

Why didn't I do my moral duty to tell the truth? Why didn't I say to the producer that I would not be party to distorting what we had seen? In part, I can excuse my behavior because I just shot the pictures, I did not edit them. But this denies my culpability. I knew what the editor wanted, and I saw it as my job to give him those images. Refusing to film would have been unthinkable, unprofessional. I was just doing my job. So was the producer. So were the military police officers. So was President Bush.

After returning to New York, I told a friend about my experience. She said I should write it down. I laughed and said I couldn't. If I did, I might never work again. I joked that the only way a journalist can lose his job is to tell the truth.

But that's finally what I'm doing. My attack of conscience didn't come in a church but at the cinema. In the movie "Michael Clayton," George Clooney plays the eponymous fixer for a big law firm. He has been paying off witnesses and greasing the wheels of corrupt business for years, and it is beginning to wear him down. This might have been the story of my life, had I been a shyster lawyer instead of just a shyster cameraman. The most fascinating character in the movie is the chief counsel for a chemical firm who orders her minions to kill to protect her interests and her boss's reputation. In most movies she would be arrogant, confident, Satan in a suit. Here, she is simply doing her job-a job she doesn't enjoy very much. She is nervous and sad. Evil just became even more banal.

Michael Clayton called himself a janitor, cleaning up messes for those who could afford his services. In my little way, so am I. Years ago, laughing with bright and funny advertising people, I quipped, "What if we used our talents for good instead of evil?" We don't, of course, because evil pays better.

It is easy to blame the war in Iraq on Bush or Cheney or the neocons or the Israeli Lobby or Halliburton or Congress or the mainstream media. But that's not the whole story. Millions of us marched against the war but then went home and did our laundry or watched TV.

I am not so vain as to think that if I'd refused to film our soldier grunting as a smiling child handed him a bouquet, I would have dismantled all the preparations for war. Perhaps even Colin Powell, had he publicly resigned rather than supporting a policy he knew was misguided, could not have prevented this catastrophe. But if more journalists, State Department officials, and CIA agents had said in public what they believed in private, it might never have occurred. The American people were not enthusiastic about this war. They accepted it--as I did and as General Powell did--as somehow inevitable and therefore not our responsibility.

Would General Marshall have bitten his tongue as Powell did? Would George Kennan have decided that his career in the State Department was more important than telling the truth? Would Edward R. Morrow have praised the president on air while mocking him during late night drinking sessions? I think not. Back then people wrote novels about the temptations and tribulations of "selling out." They don't anymore because "selling out" is now our deepest aspiration.

Tom Steithorst has worked as a cameraman for 20 years. He is currently back in Iraq.