How can Republicans say they support the military when they don't know the meaning of honor?

Answer: They'll say it anyway. You can trust Repubublicans--to be Republicans. Of course, not everyone is going to find fighting a dirty war easy to live with.

Except for the chickenhawks and Yellow Elephants, of course. LA Times:

[Col. Ted] Westhusing, 44 was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

Read on for Col. Westhusing's story, and its implications.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. ... Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.

In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops.

Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based [Caryle Group-owned] USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.

in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.

The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis. [Hmmm; reminds me of CACI]

In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."

Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.

U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," an Army spokesman said.

No, probably not. After a meeting with the contractors, this:

About 1 p.m., a USIS manager went looking for Westhusing because he was scheduled for a ride back to the Green Zone. After getting no answer, the manager returned about 15 minutes later. Another USIS employee peeked through a window. He saw Westhusing lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

The manager rushed into the trailer and tried to revive Westhusing. The manager told investigators that he picked up the pistol at Westhusing's feet and tossed it onto the bed.

"I knew people would show up," that manager said later in attempting to explain why he had handled the weapon. "With 30 years from military and law enforcement training, I did not want the weapon to get bumped and go off."

Right.

After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands. A shell casing in the room bore markings indicating it had been fired from his service revolver.

Then there was the note.

Investigators found it lying on Westhusing's bed. The handwriting matched his.

Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land.

"I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.

"Death before being dishonored any more."

Connecting a few dots and reading between the lines:

1. Bush has been running a dirty war in the Muslim world (we called this back in January). After all, that's what Negroponte was in Iraq to give the green light to, eh?

2. "Training the Iraqis"--what USIS was doing--includes training them in School of Americans-style torture. That's why there are secret prisons to torture Sunnis.

3. All that the "pullout" from Iraq (see earlier post) means is that the Beltway consensus has changed: Rummy's conventional war has failed, and so Negroponte's dirty war needs to be tried. Joe Biden (D-MBNA's) "broad consensus" WaPo Op-Ed was the signal here; the tip-off that "pullout" is in no sense withdrawal is that nobody's talking about what's going to happen to our 14 "permanent bases" in Iraq.

4. The dirty war depends on mercenaries (contractors, "staffing agencies"). Mercenaries are cut outs: they provide Bush "plausible deniability," so he can avoid accountability for the murder and torture that a dirty war demands. Mercenaries are also extremely profitable operations run by large Republican campaign contributors, so its a two-fer. And, naturally, the skills acquired through mercenary operations abroad may be of use domestically.

5. Connecting dots, Westhusing ran into the unholy nexus of "training the Iraqis," (USIS) a dirty war, and the murder of civilians (two, that we know of). No wonder he felt he would rather die than be dishonored; honorable soldiers don't torture, and a country that claims to be on the side of the good guys don't tolerate it--let alone (putatively) legalize it.

6. And come on. A mercenary discovers Westhusing's body, and tampers with the evidence?? WTF?

Considerations of honor aside, there's no indication that the dirty war in the Muslim world is going to make the country safer; the Iraq conventional war certainly didn't. And, unlike the dirty wars we sponsored in Latin America, the potential for blowback here is huge: Start with oil, continue on to more terrorists, and then throw Pakistan's nuclear weapons into the mix...

NOTE Interestingly, USIS has domestic security contracts as well.

UPDATE Via Kevin Drum, this from the Observer:

Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record, according to the country's first Prime Minister after the fall of Saddam's regime.

'People are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse,' Ayad Allawi told The Observer. 'It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.'

In a damning and wide-ranging indictment of Iraq's escalating human rights catastrophe, Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police, he said.

Ayad Allawi, the guy we sponsored... What was that phrase I kept hearing? "Free..." "Freedom on the..." Damn. On the what? On the march? Was that it? Freedom on the march? Damn.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum just can't bring himself to say the words "dirty war." "This does not sound good," he does say. Dirty war. Say it!