Pat Tillman was the poster boy for the US war in Iraq.

President Bush heralded him as a hero in life when the young American football player walked away from a multimillion dollar contract to serve in Iraq after the 9/11 attacks, and an even greater hero in death when Tillman was killed in Afghanistan two years later - until it came out that the Pentagon had lied to cover up that his death was from friendly fire.

What Bush did not know was that Tillman regarded him as a "cowboy" who had led the country in to an "illegal and unjust" war in Iraq.

I'm seeing a lot of outrage, real or feigned, about Representative Joe Wilson yelling "You lie!" during President Obama's speech. I don't think it was a nice thing to say, because the claim Obama was making was probably true. False accusations of lying aren't cool. I don't know if it's outrageous enough to warrant the amount of hubbub it generated.

What would be equally outrageous, if not more so, would be if a president did lie during a speech to Congress and nobody in Congress objected. That's what happened on several occasions between 2002 and 2008. Some of the same people now objecting to Wilson's false accusation are the very same people who didn't say anything when George W. Bush lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction and being involved with al Qaeda.

There seems to be a current of thought lately that speaking directly and bluntly to the president, as Joe Wilson did to Obama and as hundreds of Democratic representatives and senators should have done to Bush, is unacceptable behavior, that showing extreme deference to the president is somehow good for our country.

Fuck that. This is America. We purposefully did away with kings when we made this country. The president is a citizen, like the rest of us. He or she is someone we choose to do a job. If he lies, we should say he lied. If he gets a few blow jobs from an intern, we should say he got a few blow jobs from an intern. Pussyfooting around the truth is bad for a republic.

Joe Wilson was wrong, but the people criticizing him are doing so for the wrong reasons. If you're going to call someone a liar, get your facts straight first. But if your facts are straight, call him a liar. If you don't, you're enabling his lies.

Labels: bush, congress, liars, lies, lying, obama, wilson

The actual headline of the article I'm linking to is Taliban Surprising U.S. Forces With Improved Tactics. The headline made me angry, as I suppose it was designed to do. Why would you be surprised that your enemy would adapt to your tactics and change theirs?

It's important to remember that the reporters who write newspaper articles do not get to write the headlines. As I read the article, I realized the officers in Afghanistan aren't surprised. And they shouldn't be. The Taliban is doing what most insurgent forces do against a larger and better-equipped enemy.

The insurgents have largely abandoned the large-unit attacks they used several years ago. "In 2005, Marines and Army units were having pretty decisive engagements" against massed Taliban fighters, another senior officer said, adding that "every time, we killed them in very large numbers." Small bases and checkpoints manned by Afghan national security forces have become preferred targets for the Taliban, he said, because they are "isolated and easy to kill," and the Afghan units are relatively easy to infiltrate for intelligence.

The Taliban has also taken advantage of changes in U.S. air and artillery tactics, adopted to decrease civilian casualties that have alienated the population. U.S. airstrikes and culturally offensive night ground raids are authorized far more selectively than they were. The Taliban has also adjusted its own tactics, gathering in populated areas and increasing its night operations, and "the playing field is leveled," one U.S. officer said.

A number of officials and experts, within and outside the military, said that while the Taliban was able to regroup militarily while U.S. attention was diverted to Iraq, its widening influence has as much to do with Afghan government corruption, tensions among regional ethnic groups, lack of state service and justice in rural areas, and high rates of unemployment as it does with insurgent efforts.

Military officials expressed confidence in the evolving U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, but also concern about whether there is time to make it work. "I'm not one myself to believe it's a zero-sum game of winning and losing," said an official with long experience in Afghanistan.

"To the Taliban, winning is, in fact, not losing," he said. "They feel that over time, they will ultimately outlast the international community's attempt to stabilize Afghanistan. It's really a game of will to them."

This was always the danger of pursuing a nation-building project instead of limiting the mission to Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda leaders associated with him. It didn't help that the Afghanistan mission was deprived of resources because of the Iraq campaign.

Labels: afghanistan, nation building, taliban