Via The American Street, attention is drawn to an LA Times article which has some fascinating details and some appalling conclusions for the cynical:

Col. Ted Westhusing, a military ethicist who volunteered to go to Iraq, was upset by what he saw. His apparent suicide raises questions.

If you google the word “ethicist” or run it down in a dictionary you learn that there is a profession dedicated to teaching ‘right’ and wrong, and explaining why ‘right’ is better. In a sense, religious leaders and teachers once filled this function but that day seems to have sadly passed. All too many of Western religious organizations seem to have been overtaken by sectarian hatreds, sexual depravity, political advocacy, bigotry and all around general failure of their original intended goals. In a bit of historical serendipity the secular society has again discovered this field, and it is growing. There’s a degree of irony in finding an ethicist among the military. Who knew ethics could be applied to the killing of your fellow human?

But COL Westhusing seems to have been not just this odd duck in the Army, but apparently a valued member. He taught the subject of ethics at West Point. It's not easy to become a professor at the Point. The Army looks for the brightest, sharpest, most knowledgable because these are the men who create tomorrow's leaders. Those are the leaders who will be charged with the protection and succeess of the Army's future. Selection to the faculty is a high mark of approval. While these professors will never climb to the highest levels of command, it is understood they are training tomorrow's generals, and thereby influencing and shaping the future.

Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He 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.

In the new, streamlined 21st century America envisioned by Bu$hCo, PNAC, the Republican Party, which has been documented as evil and corrupt at many different levels, in many different jurisdictions, there is no place for quaint and outmoded concepts like “honor”. In a setting in which civilians are deliberately targeted, homes and places of religious worship intentionally destroyed, and ‘suspects’ rounded up in the thousands before transportation to hidden, secret corners all around the world for years of torture, with no word of them for grieving families, how can there be any honor?

A note found in his trailer seemed to offer clues. Written in what the Army determined was his handwriting, the colonel appeared to be struggling with a final question.

How is honor possible in a war like the one in Iraq?