> The US has gone a long way in improving how it operates to minimize civilian deaths.

Thats debatable. Check out a documentry called "The Panama Deception". It won best documentry at the academy awards in '92. It has a bias but the pictures are pretty convincing. To sum it up, the american military killed and displaced thousands of panamanian civilians with out much of a reason other then they where poor and upset with the pupet goverment that the US wanted to install. Many of the refugees where still stuck in military refugee camps when the film was made, 3 years after the military action.

-Jack