Spoken by someone who has never been in combat, not that that’s a bad thing.

It’s easier to maintain high ideals when you’re not making life and death decisions on a daily basis.

WASHINGTON รขโ‚ฌโ€ In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, less than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.

More than 40 percent support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10 percent reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Friday in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.

“It is disappointing,” said analyst John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank. “But anybody who is surprised by it doesn’t understand war. … This is about combat stress.”

The military has seen a number of high-profile incidents of alleged abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of 24 civilians by Marines, the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the slaying of her family and the sexual humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

These are not western values, and they have become the enemy of western society.

It is not a matter of placing a higher value on the prisoners life than the lives of my men, although that is exactly the spin that would be put on it by those who either condone, or are trying so desperately to excuse, and/or justify, the human rights violations that have already taken place – it is a matter of either believing that there is a fundamentally moral difference between the two sides, or there is not.

Becoming the enemy is not defeating the enemy.

The real question now is whether the American republic will endure or eventually fall under the rule of a Commander Imperitor …