I found this article about the ethics of our Army and USMC in the combat zones very worrisome. Since Iraq is effectively not under any sense of control, do you think that a pistol-packin' Peace Corps would be doing any better? Or would we have the same mess, just different players? Or did Bush & Co. bring this on by failing to plan for the nation-building? And what does this bode for future actions (such as Somalia/Darfur, Iran, etc)? Thanks and keep up the good work

Ethics are a function of danger: less danger, expect higher ethics, and more danger, expect less ethics (more or less being very relative concepts, in this regard--as in, those who've been there can tell you about it and those who haven't, can't really describe it fairly). Those who find that basic relationship hard to wrap their mind around I would guess have never spent any time in a combat zone. I mean, there's like and there's love. There's peace and there's war. There's basketball and there's football. In some venues, what's considered "fair" is considered pretty bad in others. You want better ethics, you make the better venue happen. We have not done that in Iraq, and we've done that huge misdeed to both ourselves and the Iraqi people. Danger is clearly related to nature of presence: more overwhelming the presence, far less the danger. Compare the Balkans to Iraq. So I don't find these numbers particularly troubling or conclusive regarding any future nation-building effort. They simply reflect the difficult tactical, operational and strategic conditions under which this administration has forced our military to engage postwar Iraq. You want it bad, you get it bad.