The New York Times today quotes Col. Michael Walker in Iraq saying this about the non-response to the Falluja incident as it was happening: “‘Should we have sent in a tank so we could have gotten, with all due respect, four dead bodies back? What good would that have done? A mob is a mob. All we would have done was provoke them.’” Again, as we discussed here yesterday, the decision not to do anything at the time may have been correct, but it’s pretty galling to see American military officials speaking this way about the desecration of Americans—what happens to dead bodies matters, and our obligation to those Americans didn’t end after they were killed.