A Brother's Rage
    By Christopher Dickey
    Newsweek

    Tuesday 24 October 2006

Kevin Tillman's incandescent statement against the Iraq war reads like poetry, and is part of a tragic tradition.

    Anger has its moments, and this is one of them. You will hear that those who vent their fury about the Iraq war offer no solutions. You will hear that they want to cut and run. You will hear all sorts of things. But there is one common theme in the anger you've heard of late, and it's the outrage that the people who have watched this disaster unfold before their eyes-up close and personal-feel for the politicians who have never been held responsible for the horrors they've loosed upon Iraq, America and the world.

    We have reached the point where men of experience and wisdom can no longer contain themselves, even if in the end they allow their politician bosses to spin them back into line. So, Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt recently told the British newspaper "The Daily Mail" of his doubts about how wise it was to "kick the door in" in Iraq. So, the spokesman for the Middle East division of the State Department, Alberto Fernandez, spoke on Al-Jazeera television about the American "arrogance and stupidity" that contributed so mightily to the current disaster. The general said he was quoted out of context. The diplomat conceded he "seriously misspoke."

    But now Kevin Tillman has said his piece. Kevin's brother, football star Pat Tillman, was the Bush administration's poster boy for patriotism until investigations showed that "friendly fire" had killed him in Afghanistan in April 2004, and the Pentagon had buried the facts.

    Kevin and Pat joined the U.S. Army Rangers together in 2002. Both served in Iraq during the invasion. Both knew-or thought they knew-what they were getting into. Kevin writes on Truthdig.com that his brother talked to him "about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice until we got out."

    Kevin Tillman then writes that "much has happened since we handed over our voice," and so begins the litany of shame:

    "Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that."

    Tillman doesn't stop there. He's on a roll, he's righteous, and more important still, he's right:

    "Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

    "Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

    "Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

    "Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

    "Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated."

    The recitation becomes a dirge. In fact, this is a poem, and one with a power that reminds me of something I re-read recently in the collected works of Rudyard Kipling.

    No, certainly not the Bard of Empire's excessively cited "If," that banal paean to stiff-upper-lippishness written in 1909 that has been quoted scripturally for most of the last century by pink-cheeked schoolboys and back-slapping businessmen. ("If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you "... etc.) No. Kevin Tillman's poem is reminiscent of one that Kipling wrote at the height of his powers, and of his anger.

    After a gruesome military disaster in 1917, Kipling wanted to know why the men who sent the soldiers to their deaths day after day, week after week, month after month in a futile exercise of arrogance and stupidity still managed to escape punishment:

They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?

    Kipling wrote such poems because he wanted action. He wanted punishment, vengeance, or at the very least some public holding to account. "Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?" he demanded. "When the storm has ended" would the politicians and bureaucrats have "sidled back to power" by the "favor and contrivance of their kind?"

    Kevin Tillman is asking the same question, with the same well-sharpened edge of indignation. He is making this statement now in hopes that voters will listen. No, he does not offer solutions. No he does not have all the answers. But he does have one: the people who got us into this war should pay for it with their careers, their fortunes and what little pretense they can have to honor.

    And, oh yes, there is one more thing you should know about the poem that Kipling wrote in 1917. The World War I debacle he described was in a place that gave his work its title, "Mesopotamia": the word the British used for the country before they called it Iraq. The officials responsible for the disaster there were never sanctioned. We'll see if that part of history repeats itself as well.

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