In the end, only one hero remains. She's the one we started with, Jessica Lynch. But she's a different kind of hero than we were led to expect. A bigger, braver hero, actually.
She did something every bit as brave as confronting those Iraqis. She came back home and told the truth.
Former POW from Kansas recounts capture in Iraq:
After he and his fellow soldiers were set free, there were stories of [Pfc. Patrick] Miller pestering the Iraqi guards by constantly singing a pro-American song, and by giving them chewing tobacco that he said was candy in hopes of making them sick.
"It's small victories that keep your hope up," Miller said. "You got to have small victories when you're in a situation like that."
making the rounds, and deservedly so:
via TPM, Slate articles by Jacob Weisberg, examining the evidence on Do Dim Bulbs Make Better Presidents? and on Occupational Hazards - How the Pentagon forgot about running Iraq -
The difficulties we have faced...were largely to be expected from a devastated post-totalitarian society in a part of the world overwhelmingly hostile to the United States and its interests. What is surprising-amazing, in fact-is how unprepared we were for these problems...How did the world's greatest military power plan the invasion of a country without also planning its occupation?
Also Seymour Hersh on Niger:
When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study's exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. "Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads," the official told me. "You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails."
TPM - "Hope is not a plan"
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