Cindy Sheehan has now been squatting in a roadside ditch near
President Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch since August 6. And every
day more aging hippies, professional grievance-mongers, and
underemployed liberal arts majors show up with their backpacks and
banjos to join her. Squatting in ditches, sleeping in pup tents,
and sitting around a campfire at night yodeling “This Land Is Your
Land” is after all the anti-war protesters idea of nirvana.
Sheehan says she is particularly upset — not so much about her
son’s death apparently — but by two statements the president
recently made: “We have to honor the sacrifices of the fallen by
completing the mission.” And “the families of the fallen can be
assured that they died for a noble cause.” Sheehan calls these
statements asinine and hurtful. It is doubtful her son would have
agreed. Twenty-four-year-old Army Spc. Casey Sheehan had
re-enlisted the August prior to his death, and had planned to make
a career in the military. A year ago Sheehan’s father told
reporters that Casey “loved the Army because it gave him a chance
to serve his country.”
Speaking of asinine statements, Sheehan now demands that, “if
George is not ready to send the [Bush] twins [to Iraq], he should
bring our troops home immediately.” Didn’t Clausewitz say something
similar in his chapter on war and hot-looking twins? Oh, yes, here
it is: “Only if the leader is willing to send his young twin
daughters to the front may a nation go to war. Otherwise he must
hoist the white flag and surrender his sword.”
Despite what the headlines say, Sheehan, 48, is more anti-war
protester than grieving mother. She is co-founder of Gold Star Families for
Peace, an organization that seeks to impeach George W. Bush and
apparently to convince the U.S. government to surrender to Muslim
terrorists. She has been joined at Crawford by similar peace groups
including CodePink (“We call on mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and
daughters, on workers, students, teachers, healers, artists,
writers, singers, poets and every ordinary outraged woman willing
to be outrageous for peace”) and The Crawford Peace House. So far
Sheehan has been unsuccessful despite her best efforts to defeat
Bush in 2004, to impeach Bush, or to get the president to meet with
her in her ditch. In fact her only success has been in getting lots
of fawning media coverage from the mainstream media, few of which
have reported her radical background and ideas.
In fact rather than pitying her, the public should be disgusted
how the mother of a dead serviceman is using his heroic death to
push her anti-Republican political agenda.
Sheehan also says she only wants to ask the president why he
killed her son, something she failed to ask during their first
meeting at Fort Lewis near Seattle on June 24, 2004. “‘I now know
he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,” she told the
Reporter newspaper of Vacaville, California, after that
visit. “I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I
know he’s a man of faith.” Back then Sheehan asked the President to
make her “son’s sacrifice count for something.” That was before
Sheehan and friends figured out that an American defeat in Iraq
would increase the Democrats’ chances in the next presidential
election.
President Bush told reporters Thursday that pulling out American
troops now “would be a mistake for the security of this country and
the ability to lay the foundations for peace in the long
run…”
Fortunately most Americans appreciate the sacrifice of our young
men and women in Iraq. As one Gulf War veteran has noted,
“[Casey’s] death only becomes meaningless when we back home choose
to NOT honor his mission and his sacrifice.”
