President Bush probably remembers Kanan Makiya. It was in the company of Mr. Makiya that Mr. Bush spent perhaps the most exhilarating and historic moment of his presidency — watching on television as Baghdad was liberated and the now-famous statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled.

Now, Mr. Makiya, in a phone interview from Baghdad with The New York Sun’s Eli Lake, is expressing dismay at the way things are going.”I am outraged at the behavior of the American soldiers,” Mr. Makiya said, noting that Wednesday was the third time that GIs had opened fire on a car carrying a member of the American-endorsed Governing Council of Iraq. The council voted Wednesday to stop having its meetings in the “green zone” surrounding the compound of the coalition provisional authority led by Mr. Bush’s appointee, L. Paul Bremer.

Mr. Makiya no doubt appreciates, as do we, the achievements of America in Iraq, not least of which is the toppling of that statue of Saddam and the tyranny that went along with it. These achievements are the result of individual American acts of kindness and bravery like those recounted by an assistant secretary in the department of Housing and Urban Development, Chris Spear, in an interview published in Monday’s Sun. Mr. Spear, who served for four months as an adviser in Iraq, told our Alyssa Watzman of how Americans used duct tape to mend the walker of an elderly Iraqi woman, and of how he — a civilian with no military background — grabbed a 9mm sidearm to fend off a crowd of looters.

Such is the tension that now attends America’s presence in Iraq, a heroic mission encumbered by execution that, because of human errors and cultural differences, is at times clumsy. “We want the Iraqis to be more involved in the governance of their country,” Mr. Bush said yesterday morning. One step in that direction would be to stop shooting at the Iraqis who are our friends so that they can meet peacefully and establish a government on the model we all admire.