The way the Pentagon and its defenders have pushed back against this story is to say: "They weren't doing psychological operations, they were doing information operations and public affairs. They were just helping us spin senators like we normally do."

If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that Bush lied about WMD, the thumbnail version of Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.

The minute you start arming people in these conflict zones, things don't go as expected. We also need to look at precedent before making these decisions. Instead of listening to Muammar Qaddafi's rhetoric, we should look at how he's behaved. The fact is he's been making concessions recently. He gave up his nuclear weapons. He allowed hundreds of Americans to evacuate Tripoli. Did he crack down on his people who revolted? Yes, but that's not so unusual.

It was interesting watching the Afghanistan war review deliberations, this three-month process where Barack Obama did the most thorough foreign policy review ever by a modern American president. Compare that to Libya. For a month he said we weren't going to do anything, then suddenly changed his mind and did it on the fly. My view is that it's not how long or quick you take to make a decision, it's whether you make the right one.

The fact is, psychiatric help is not widely available to CIA agents - and as in the military, there is a stigma attached to admitting post-traumatic stress.

When you go into a country like Libya where a large chunk of the population wants the old regime back you could end up with a protracted civil war. That we're now in a stalemate was both entirely predictable, and predicted. That we're now relying on drones is disturbing. How vital can a cause be if we're not willing to risk American lives to defend it, and instead use robots and remote control operators? It gets me back to the larger feeling about the intervention - there's just not a compelling reason for us to be involved.

I have a deep-seated skepticism about the morality of violence. Violence is almost always morally corrosive.