An important piece of context is that longer tours and shorter breaks between tours is making things worse:

Suicides are up, marital conflicts are up, and 10% of soldiers and marines reported mistreating civilians when not necessary...

"torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents... Four in 10 said they approve of such illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier." is a false choice. Inthe real world soldiers are never in the situation where they have possesion of a person and they know beyond a reasonable doubt that that person has time-sensitive information vital to the operations of the enemy or a held captive. Well trained insurgents (which is what we are dealing with here) share info on a need to know basis for just this reason. They also never tell their captors,"I planted a bomb that is going to go off very soon. Oops, I shouldn't told you that! But I am not going to tell you where it is."

As one of the (occasional) posters with part of my life spent with the military, it behooves me to make a couple observations. (Since my father was in the Marines, my comments are probably most relevant to them. The other, lesser branches can take a hike.)

1) You want some pretty tough people doing your fighting for you. If the Boy Scouts could do it, they'd be sent to Iraq instead of the military. By the same token, this is why effective fighting men and women shouldn't be deployed as police. Policing is a very different job than conquering. Being tough in war requires a mental outlook many of us would find unpleasant.

2) I wish the article (or the study) differentiated between enlisted personnel and officers. My inference from the article is that the study population was enlisted personnel, and their opinions, quite frankly, shouldn't be taken very seriously. They aren't paid to have opinions; they're paid to do as ordered. If the officers share the opinions surveyed (and given some of the misdeeds in Iraq some of them seem to) we've got a problem. Put another way, I don't really care so much what they think as what they do.

2a) Similarly, on a higher level, this is why civilians control the military. If the civilians in charge of the military were to share these opinions, we would have a problem. Oops! They don't share them, they fostered them.

3) As a Marine, you have a number of key responsibilities, one of which is preserving your fellow Marines' lives if doing so does not materially interfere with your primary mission. Not a big step from that to seeing no limits on what can be done to carry out that responsibility. I'd also suggest that such a mentality would be common in the general population. Would you allow torture if it was the only way to save your spouse, partner, or child? Or, to speak to Patrick's good observation of the false dichotomy: Would you allow torture if you were in a very stressful situation requiring or seeming to require immediate action and were pretty sure that it was the best way to save your spouse, partner, or child?

4) As in Vietnam, the difference between a combatant and a non-combatant is often rather gray. If teenagers are suicide bombers, how do average personnel know the difference? (And keep in mind that those serving in Iraq have a cultural history in the U.S. That is, they have heard about terrorist acts by women and teenagers in the world, whether or not they have seen such firsthand in Iraq.)

I'm not saying we can't take this survey seriously or that we can't hold enlisted personnel responsible for mistreating civilians. Quite the contrary. However, we also have to treat the military as a unique institution with unique characteristics, some of which might be unacceptable in civilian society.

(Ennis, could you amend your post to indicate that the emphasis is yours, not the original article's?)

So, is this where the "we support the troops" canard is finally dropped for good? I mean, it ain't Viet Nam until somebody is spitting on the troops coming home.

And nobody spit on the troops in Vietnam either. It's all a myth.

However, we also have to treat the military as a unique institution with unique characteristics, some of which might be unacceptable in civilian society.

Trip, the survey is coming from the Pentagon, not some random bunch of outsiders. Hopefully they have a good sense of the military as an unique institution.

preserving your fellow Marines' lives if doing so does not materially interfere with your primary mission. Not a big step from that to seeing no limits on what can be done to carry out that responsibility.

The military men I know emphasize that this is precisely where they are different from civilians, that they can use force in a precise and limited fashion. That's why they are professionals, rather than killing machines.

It's a crucial point, if you take that away, you take away the discipline that is central to the conception of the modern military.

What the survey shows, I believe, is that discipline is eroding greatly. The survey probably under-reports attitudes and behavior since soldiers do know that what they are discussing is both illegal and improper. This means it is probably more widespread than what we are seeing, which is very worrying.

In Vietnam we saw not only attacks on local civilians but also "fragging", attacks on US officers. It was part and parcel of the same indiscipline, and it took over a decade to reverse that damage. If this survey is any indication, the armed forces have moved back in the wrong direction.

Ennis, citing Wikipedia for anything politically charged isn't likely to convince anyone of anything.

For instance, I could probably find somebody who says just as authoritatively that the prevalence of fragging in Viet Nam was greatly exaggerated.

So, someone writes a book that says there wasn't really a lot of spitting?

Great. I remember what I thought of the military as a pre-adolescent, and I'm damn sure I didn't get those impressions from first sources. I grew up with the impression that soldiers in Viet Nam were largely drug-addled out-of-control losers who were to be feared when they got home. My impression now is that I was being mislead. So whatever the actual fluid volume expended, there sure as hell was some virtual spit being projected at the vets, because this middle-aged man was actually there being affected by the splash damage.

Why settle for little lies when big ones are so much more likely to end up on the Best Seller list?

I frankly see the Washington Post piece as being of a piece with the same "end the war now" activism on the part of the media as we had back in the beginning of the seventies. Reputations of hundreds of thousands of young people trying to do the right thing as they understand it be damned.

I don't mind an opinionated media that wears the opinion front-and-center. (This is one of the few places where I think Britain is clearly superior to the United States.) What I do mind is a "how do we make the average soldier stop committing atrocities" (sorry, Groucho, you were funny but this isn't) story being presented as objective reporting.

Mark:

I think you are missing the forest for the trees, and possibly only a couple trees at that. What Ennis seems to be saying, and certainly part of what I'm saying, is that we need to be concerned with the well-being of our soldiers. (Which is a vital part of supporting them. It's a rather cold support to turn a blind eye to their troubles.)

Ennis:

Fundamentally, we seem to agree. I'm not questioning the accuracy or validity of the survey. Part of what I mean by "we also have to treat the military as a unique institution with unique characteristics" is that we can discount to a great extent what the rank-and-file say. What we need to look at is a) what they do and b) what their superior officers do, both in the context of their challenges and environment. IOW, the Pentagon is doing a good thing with this survey if their aim is to identify where they are failing in treating the troops' mental health and conveying the values of the military, but it's a bad thing if they are placing the blame on the enlisted men and women rather than the officers. It's like a software company that blames the coders for failing to meet impossible deadlines with enormous feature lists.

And we agree on the fact that trained military personnel are not random balls of fury. To me, this is another reason why the focus needs to be on the training and command structure. That is, two things are wrong when an infantryman mistreats a prisoner (for example): the mistreatment itself is wrong, and the training or supervision was clearly inadequate. Like the concept of communication has it: If you don't understand what I'm saying, I have to assume that I'm doing a bad job of conveying my ideas, not that you're doing a bad job of listening.

NB: I'm not saying that enlisted personnel are merely empty vessels waiting to be filled with righteous orders.

However, where we may disagree is whether the survey indicates that continuing the occupation of Iraq is a bad idea or that there is room for improvement in conducting the occupation. Though I believe the first is true, I think the survey only indicates the second.

I think I am lost in the forest and trees too,but here are a couple of thoughts.
I have read debates regarding the spitting incidents for years, even before the web. I think most people do conclude that it did happen sometimes.
I have no idea what it means to "support the troops", and I wish people would stop saying it. I pay my taxes, some of which pays for the troops. I don't want anyone, US or Iraqi or other, to get hurt. I really wish they would stop hurting each other. But I have taken no positive action to help anyone there or to end the violence. And I don't really know how what I could do. I also have sent no letters or care packages to our troops or to the insurgents.
So do I support the troops?
This survey confirms a lot of what we already know about people in a war zone. All armies (including American) in all wars have some atrocities. It is part of war. If anybody thinks it didn't happen in The Civil, Spanish American, WWI, WWII, Korea or Vietnam is fooling themselves. That's one of the reasons why war should always be a last resort.
The training of US soldiers has a lot more of turning them into killing machines than you might think. Most people raised in non violent households will not kill somebody very easily. The Pentagon realized this after WWII and redesigned basic training to turn normal farm boys into killers. Controlled killers, but killers none the less. In the field they tend to err on the side of killing and being overly destructive (this, I think dovetails with TKs comments).
None of this hase anything to do whether the iraqi invasion was justified or is being well run. Only on whatthe cost of any war is. Hopefully we will remember this the next time we have the "should we invade" debate.

TK, I actually think I fundamentally agree with you. It seems to me that a big part of the story should be that someone at the Pentagon is paying attention to what is happening in the ranks and for the most part paying attention to the right things.

Is that mentioned anywhere in the original WaPo article? Well, not per se, no.

Where we differ is that I think the things Ennis highlighted in the post above actually are the takeaway (the forest, if you will) the editors wanted in the story. Hence their dominance in the first three grafs, and the supporting anecdotal quotes.

In other words, I'm not talking about the occupation in Iraq, I'm talking about the Culture War in America.

The "indiscipline" Ennis laments is an integral part of the Iraq=Viet Nam syllogism which set me off, and which Ennis conveniently re-iterates:

In Vietnam we saw not only attacks on local civilians but also "fragging", attacks on US officers. It was part and parcel of the same indiscipline, and it took over a decade to reverse that damage. If this survey is any indication, the armed forces have moved back in the wrong direction.

Now, I am all for finding ways to decrease the load on the troops on the ground and to increase the quality of their leadership (at all levels). I just happen to think portraying soldiers in the Iraq theater as ethically-challenged PTSD victims happens to be a little too tough in the tough love department.

Quickly, as I run out the door. There was a researcher who tried to find a single verified account of spitting, that is, one which where somebody would testify that they had been spit upon. What he found were lots of friend of friend stories, typical urban legend stuff. If spitting happened, it was very rare. Maybe Patrick knows of cases where people have testified that it has happened to them, but I don't know of any.

As for the survey referenced in the article, Mark this is a survey by the Pentagon itself, being released by the Pentagon itself. The bits I quoted are pretty much straightforward reports from the survey. Now if you want to say that the Pentagon is "portraying soldiers in the Iraq theater as ethically-challenged PTSD victims", you can do so, but the point is that it is the Pentagon doing so.

Why might they say so? This comes back to Trips point about officers and enlisted men, which I don't have time to reply to fully, but I'm guessing that the officer corps is concerned that the operational tempo is damaging professionalism and discipline within the military. I'll ask a friend who is an officer what the consensus is.

Trip - enlisted men in the US military now have more education than before, and have more autonomy than in most other militaries. In some ways, NCOs form the backbone of the fighting units because they stay there much longer, whereas officers come and go. In any case, even if officers bear some responsibility for misbehavior, I would argue that soldiers themselves also do.

"The bits I quoted are pretty much straightforward reports from the survey. Now if you want to say that the Pentagon is "portraying soldiers in the Iraq theater as ethically-challenged PTSD victims", you can do so, but the point is that it is the Pentagon doing so."

Really? Where did you find the survey? What were the goals of the study? Which department of the Pentagon commissioned it? What was the title of the study, for Pete's sake?

Links to original sources are always appreciated.

I should have qualified that. I've read other Pentagon surveys, and what the article quoted sounded just like the standard talking points that they publish.

They survey is an Army survey, and the WaPo article quotes directly from it at one point.

"Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect," the Army report stated.

Wait, here's more. The team that led the survey was led by Colonel Carl Castro.

Here's the military's press announcement about it:

The Department of Defense will brief key findings from the latest Mental Health Advisory Team (MHAT-IV) survey at 11 a.m. EDT, May 4, in the DoD Briefing Studio, Pentagon 2E579. This is the fourth in a series of studies since 2003 to assess the mental health and well-being of the deployed forces serving in Iraq. Briefers are listed below: Dr. S. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock, commander U.S. army medical command and acting Army surgeon general Rear Adm. Richard Jeffries, medical officer of the Marine Corps CAPT. William P. Nash, combat operation stress control Col. Carl Castro - MHAT-IV team leader Maj. Dennis McGurk - MHAT IV team member

Aha! And here is the official military report itself .

You asked what was the focus of the survey, right?

At the request of the leadership in theatre, this team for the first time examined the ethical behavior of U.S. troops so that battlefield ethics training can be improved. They recommended training based on the Army Chief of Staff's "Soldiers' Rules," and such training is being developed by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command as well as by the Marine Corps' Training and Education Command. [Link]

Again, that's from a Pentagon source.

I'l do a mire exhaustive google later, but her is what I could find on Snopes re spitting on Vietnam Vets. It is in an article listed as true about Ann Margaret signing a veterans photo in contrast to :
"Richard, like many others, came home to people who spit on him and shouted ugly things at him. "

http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/margret.asp
Not the most conclusive (and it is second person)

Bravo for multitasking:
http://newsbusters.org/node/10594
Website with links to government and military sites with documented stories. Names names.

Bravo for multitasking. re spitting:
http://newsbusters.org/node/10594
Website with links to government and military sites with documented stories. Names names.

Not the soldiers, it's the officers' fault:
A failure in generalship
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/05/2635198
Commentary from Slate one the above article
http://www.slate.com/id/2166215?nav=tap3
Audio Commentary
http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp070501are_americas_top_mil