"When your ethicists start killing themselves, you know your military has some serious problems."

Robert Lindsay, a free-lance journalist who's written about the suspicious death of Colonel Theodore Westhusing in Iraq, has an entry on his blog that that considers and finally rejects the rumors that Colonel Westhusing was not a suicide, but murdered by military contractors. There are more than enough unusual circumstances as described by The Texas Observer and Los Angeles Times to cause suspicion, but Lindsay believes these are unhappy coincidence and not proof of murder. Hardly the first suicide connected with the Iraq invasion, certainly not the last. What's missing is public outrage at the situation, some "hook" like Teapot Dome or Nixon's Saturday NIght Massacre that will focus the lazy mind. No one seems surprised that we've spent twice as much "rebuilding" Iraq as we spent on Japan, and that was after two atomic bombs. Baghdad still doesn't have reliable electricity or running water.

Westhusing's commander, General Petreus, wears four stars now, and $14 billion dollars have been spent on training programs in Iraq. The GAO can't find 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor, and 115,000 helmets that were bought for Iraq; maybe, like the Sixth Avenue El, someone's saving it for a surprise. Six billion dollars' worth of expenditures are being investigated for the fraud Colonel Westhusing complained about, and the $9 billion that Paul Bremer lost has been shrugged away.