Demagogue

The 2004 death of ex-NFL football player Pat Tillman in Iraq was supposed to provide the U.S. military with a great public relations opportunity -- much better than those "Army of One" TV ads and, moreover, at no cost. But truth came along and destroyed those plans. (Tillman was killed by "friendly fire," although the details came to light only months later.)

The Pentagon probably expected that to be the end of it. But, as Tapped notes, the Tillman family "is not going away." In this article, Tillman's brother, Kevin (who also served in Iraq), doesn't mince words in giving his assessment of the past few years:

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.

... 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.

The full text of Kevin Tillman's article is here.