Cindy Sheehan May Be Our Secret Weapon Against The War
Jim Moore | August 17 2005
By now you know all about that gutsy gal, Cindy Sheehan. She is the lady who lost a son in Iraq, and is now camping outside President Bush’s Texas ranch protesting her boy’s death.
She isn’t asking anything unreasonable from Bush. Merely a face-to-face explanation about why her son had to die for a dubious cause. Bush has driven by her camp several times but has yet to acknowledge that Sheehan is even there. So much for presidential noblesse oblige.
So, Cindy Sheehan and her small but growing army of sympathetic followers sit peaceably by and simply wait. Of course, they can wait until doomsday, and unless Rove or one of his cronies advises Bush to meet with this woman and get her off our back, nothing tangible in the way of a presidential meeting is likely to take place.
That, however, is beside the point. The very fact that Sheehan’s vigil has touched the hearts of war-weary Americans indicates, with power, that this one woman and her cause is making a huge dent in the wall of resistance to public dissatisfaction put up by an uneasy and desperate administration.
In other words, Sheehan, almost single-handedly, is turning this administration on its head. How? By revealing its avoidance of dissent, its false rationale for continuing the killing, its frightening disregard for political and military reality, and its cold-blooded unconcern for families suffering losses because of the war.
Nothing like this happened in WWII. But the same kind of turn-around, you may remember, happened in the late 1960’s. Public confidence in the Vietnam war began to slip and never recovered. The only difference is, it didn’t have a Cindy Sheehan, like we have, to help it along.
And, of course, there were bizarre reactions to this blowback of wartime bad news. One man from Pennsylvania said: “We can’t pull out now because if we do it would be just a waste of our peoples’ lives, and all their peoples’ lives.”
No, of course not. Let’s stay this crazy course and waste MORE peoples’ lives. The logic in that reasoning flies right by me. An Ohio man said, “If we had done this (war) in the 1990’s I don’t think (9/11) would have happened.”
War prevents war? Now there’s a novel idea. Actually, if we had heeded our founders’ words and stayed out of foreign fights from the beginning, chances are we would have had neither a 9/11 NOR an Iraq war. A woman from South Carolina, who had backed the war, but has since changed her mind because, she says, the Bush administration failed to show that Iraq had a connection to the terrorists.
Dear lady, that isn’t the only way Bush has failed (conned) us. He has been asked repeatedly if he had any kind of exit strategy for Iraq. Since Bush lied to get us into this chaotic madhouse, why would we expect the truth from him as to when we might get out? C’mon.
But further along the interview, the same lady said that “the war was something we needed to do in response to 9/11.”
“Needed to do” is a typical knee-jerk reflex action to any conflict, tragedy, or emergency. By not first stopping to think about why we were attacked, and who was responsible, we jumped into a war at the wrong time, for the wrong reason, with the wrong country. The result is what we have now: a war we cannot win---because we “needed to do it.”
But the full extent of peoples’ dissatisfaction and/or dissolution with the war is glaringly evident in the latest statistics, gathered by CNN/USA Today/Gallup polls.
Fifty-seven percent of the people say the war has made us LESS safe from terrorism (despite what Bush tells us to the contrary). In March 2004, 65-percent of the people supported the war; today, only 44-percent do.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld predicted at the beginning of this long battle that the fighting “could last six days, six weeks, I doubt six months.” Yet, 92-percent of all military deaths have occurred since Bush told us on May I, 2003, that “major combat” was over.
So much for administrative bull dung.
And now, with your permission, it’s prediction time.
Prediction one: Cindy Sheehan’s courageous camp-out at Bush’s Texas ranch will expand into a national movement: frustration with Bush’s dispassionate reaction to a citizen’s plea for a face-to-face talk, and with his evasive answers about the war. This will cause consternation in the administration and a need for a new “fear inspiring” scenario.
Prediction two: The new scenario will be one of two things. Either the administration will peddle Iran’s nuclear capability to us in the form of a deadly threat, then answer its own threat with a surprise attack on Iran. OR, another spectacular event (such as another 9/11) will occur, giving the administration the justification it needs to respond.
In any case, no U.S. troops will leave Iraq, and Iran will be the next target.
http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/august2005/170805secretwar.htm
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