The NYT has an excellent op-ed on corruption. Specifically, corruption in the context of the Iraq war. Called Suicide is Not Painless (a kind of hat tip to MASH whose theme music was "Suicide is Painless"). It starts with the suicide of a civil servant who could have been indicted for corruption… and then it articulates the level of corruption in Iraq

Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq, Mr. Riechers’s tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he received for two months in a non-job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit. So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone. Yet Mr. Riechers, not the first suicide connected to the war’s corruption scandals, is a window into the culture of the whole debacle. Through his story you can see how America has routinely betrayed the very values of democratic governance that it hoped to export to Iraq. Look deeper and you can see how the wholesale corruption of government contracting sabotaged the crucial mission that might have enabled us to secure the country: the rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure, from electricity to hospitals.

Read the entire opinion piece and mourn the absence of this level of incisiveness, articulation and analysis in the [tag]Indian News Media[/tag] – being the largest is not going to be enough… occasionally, just occasionally you also need to be the best.