He didn't care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response.
The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: There's talk of creating a new medal for "courageous restraint,"...
His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where ... was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal's new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Flaubert-s-simple-heart-5320
Un coeur simple. In it, he managed the difficult technical feat of making someone interesting who was good but ordinary and not particularly intelligent, and he also managed the far more difficult emotional and ethical feat of entering the world of someone with whose outlook he did not agree, and portraying it with sympathy, understanding, and admiration, recognizing in it the beauty that it possessed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html
Most people in government, I find, are there because they sincerely want to do good. But they’re also exhausted and frustrated much of the time... These people often spend 16 hours a day together, and they bond by moaning and about the idiots on the outside.
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=23542
There was a time when appeasement was an inoffensive, even a rather positive term. The French word “l’apaisement,” from which it probably derives (or the earlier medieval-French apeser), meant the satisfying of an appetite or thirst, the bringing of comfort, the cooling of tensions. Even today, Webster’s dictionary’s first definition of “appease” is “to bring peace, calm; to soothe,” with the later negative meaning being, well, much later in the entry.
