Excellent article in this month's New Yorker magazine by George Packer entitled "Betrayed:  The Iraqis who trusted America the most"
The irony is that these people are the very ones which you hear all of the supporters of the war will focus on and they are the ones who at the end of the day have the highest risk, the most fatalities and the least supported and forgotten.

Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country’s religious and ethnic spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly young men and women who embraced America’s project so enthusiastically that they were prepared to risk their lives for it may constitute Iraq’s smallest minority. I came across them in every city: the young man in Mosul who loved Metallica and signed up to be a translator at a U.S. Army base; the DVD salesman in Najaf whose plans to study medicine were crushed by Baath Party favoritism, and who offered his services to the first American Humvee that entered his city.

The arc from hope to betrayal that traverses the Iraq war is nowhere more vivid than in the lives of these Iraqis. America’s failure to understand, trust, and protect its closest friends in Iraq is a small drama that contains the larger history of defeat.

The photo above taken by James Nachtwey is of an Iraqi interpreter who must wear a mask to conceal his identity while he assists a soldier delivering an invitation to an Imam for a meeting with an American colonel.