A Brother's Rage

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

By Christopher Dickey

Oct. 24, 2006 - 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.

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