The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan

Casey Sheehan’s death in Iraq could not be more representative of the war’s mismanagement and failure, but it is hardly singular. Another mother who has journeyed to Crawford, Celeste Zappala, wrote last Sunday in New York’s Daily News of how her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was also killed in April 2004 - in Baghdad, where he was providing security for the Iraq Survey Group, which was charged with looking for W.M.D.’s “well beyond the admission by David Kay that they didn’t exist.”

As Ms. Zappala noted with rage, her son’s death came only a few weeks after Mr. Bush regaled the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association banquet in Washington with a scripted comedy routine featuring photos of him pretending to look for W.M.D.’s in the Oval Office. “We’d like to know if he still finds humor in the fabrications that justified the war that killed my son,” Ms. Zappala wrote. (Perhaps so: surely it was a joke that one of the emissaries Mr. Bush sent to Cindy Sheehan in Crawford was Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser who took responsibility for allowing the 16 errant words about doomsday uranium into the president’s prewar State of the Union speech.)

Mr. Bush’s stand-up shtick for the Beltway press corps wasn’t some aberration; it was part of the White House’s political plan for keeping the home front cool. America was to yuk it up, party on and spend its tax cuts heedlessly while the sacrifice of an inadequately manned all-volunteer army in Iraq was kept out of most Americans’ sight and minds. This is why the Pentagon issued a directive at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom forbidding news coverage of “deceased military personnel returning to or departing from” air bases. It’s why Mr. Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, has not attended funeral services for the military dead. It’s why January’s presidential inauguration, though nominally dedicated to the troops, was a gilded $40 million jamboree at which the word Iraq was banished from the Inaugural Address.

This summer in Crawford, the White House went to this playbook once too often. When Mr. Bush’s motorcade left a grieving mother in the dust to speed on to a fund-raiser, that was one fat-cat party too far. The strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice has at last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the war’s critics has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury in Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq.

Frank Rich | NYTimes (read more. . .)

August 21st, 2005 || PermaLink

Moral Authority

It is a great wonder that war opponents, including increasing numbers of Democratic “leaders,” are so silent. Some of the most visible simply believe the invasion of Iraq, which they endorsed, has been mismanaged, that more troops (not fewer) are needed! Even today, they seem untroubled by the false statements and manipulated intelligence of the administration. The most difficult political statement in the English language is: I made a mistake.

Speaking only for myself, I will find it very difficult to support any Democratic “leader” who remains silent at this critical moment but who wants to be president in 2008. There are defining moments in political careers and in national life where true character is revealed, where moral authority is achieved, or forfeited. Recall Dante’s well-known warning that a special place is reserved in hell for those who, in times of moral crisis, preserve their neutrality.

There are those who earn their moral authority the hard way, by going to jail or, like Cindy Sheehan, by sacrificing a loved one. Such people do not merely earn an audience with the president.

Such people deserve an accounting.

Gary Hart | Huffington Post (read more. . .)

August 20th, 2005 || PermaLink

Why Casey Sheehan Was Killed

I had traveled to Sadr City to cover the Bush Administration’s undemocratic attack on the movement of Shi’ite cleric Muqtada Sadr. It didn’t matter that the cleric had millions of followers or that he was scion to an important political family with a history of standing up to tyranny. (His father was killed by Saddam’s regime for fomenting revolution in 1999. His uncle, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, was killed for leading an insurrection against Ba’ath rule in 1980.)

It didn’t matter that Sadr’s forces were providing food aid to the poor, or organizing traffic patrol and garbage duty in an atmosphere with no basic services.

The problem for Bush and his Iraq Administrator L. Paul Bremer was that Sadr was against American occupation. So he had to be dealt with. First his newspaper was closed. Then his top advisor was arrested. Then, Bremer announced an unnamed judge was demanding Sadr be arrested on charges of murder.

“He’s effectively attempting to establish his authority in place of the legitimate Iraqi government,” US Administrator Paul Bremer told reporters. “We will not tolerate that.”

That was the last straw. Until April 4, 2004 Muqtada Sadr had urged his followers to protest peacefully against American occupation. But the American assault lead him to urge his followers to “terrorize the enemy.”

In the first 48 hours of fighting Sadr’s followers seized police stations and government buildings across the country including the Governor’s Office in Basra. At least 75 Iraqis and 10 American servicemen were killed, among them Army Specialist Casey Sheehan. As an unembedded journalist I saw only the Iraqi casualties (the U.S. casualties being taken away to military hospitals). My translator Waseem and I weaved through roads closed by American tanks until we arrived at Sadr City’s al-Ubaidi hospital.

There, I interviewed 15 year old Ali Hussein. He lay in the hospital - an American bullet lodged in his gut. He was barely able to lift his head, but he wanted to say a few words to the American reporter: “I was standing in my door-way and I was shot,” he said. “I don’t have anything to say to the Americans. It’s just between them and God.”

A few miles away at Baghdad’s Mustansuriye University, hundreds of students marched through the center of campus. They chanted: the dead want a brave people so we won’t follow the law of Bremer.

Aaron Glantz | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

August 19th, 2005 || PermaLink

People’s Petition for a Way Out of Iraq

We propose the following principles as essential to ending the war in Iraq:

First, as a confidence-building measure, the US government must declare that it has no interest in permanent military bases or the control of Iraqi oil or other resources.

Second, as a further confidence-building measure, the U.S. government must set goals for ending the occupation and bringing all our troops home - in months, not years, beginning with an initial withdrawal of troops by the end of this year.

Third, the US government must request that the United Nations monitor the process of military disengagement and de-escalation, and organize a peaceful reconstruction effort. The US must accept its obligation to fairly compensate Iraqis for damages, assist Iraqi reconstruction, cease the imposition of privatization schemes, and end the dominance of US contractors in the bidding process.

Fourth, the US government should appoint a peace envoy independent of the occupation authorities to underscore its commitment to an entirely different mission, that of a peace process ending the occupation and returning our soldiers home.

Fifth, the peace envoy should encourage and cooperate in talks with Iraqi groups opposed to the occupation, including insurgents, to explore a political settlement. The settlement must include representation of opposition forces and parties, and power-sharing and the protection of women’s rights as core principles of governance and economic and energy development. We believe such an initiative will reduce, though not eliminate, violence by lessening any rationale for Jihadist or sectarian conflict.

We send this message to all Americans in civil society, to our elected officials, and to the global peace movement. We demand that Congressional hearings begin to define an exit strategy now. We demand that members of Congress, reflecting the will of the people, adopt policy and budget initiatives that call for an exit strategy based on the above principles. We demand a peace envoy, peace talks with the opposition, reconstruction, the closure of US bases, and the safe return home of all US troops.

Katrina vanden Heuvel | Nation (read more. . .)

August 18th, 2005 || PermaLink

Left Behind

And maybe this is the part I find most distancing about my president, not his fanatic heart - the unassailable sense he projects that God is on his side - we all have that. But that he seems to lack anything like real remorse, here in the third August of Iraq, in the fourth August of Afghanistan, in the fifth August of his presidency - for all of the intemperate speech, for the weapons of mass destruction that were not there, the “Mission Accomplished” that really wasn’t, for the funerals he will not attend, the mothers of the dead he will not speak to, the bodies of the dead we are not allowed to see and all of the soldiers and civilians whose lives have been irretrievably lost or irreparably changed by his (and our) “Bring it On” bravado in a world made more perilous by such pronouncements.

Surely we must all bear our share of guilt and deep regret, some sadness at the idea that here we are, another August into our existence, and whether we arrived by way of evolution or intelligent design or the hand of God working over the void, no history can record that we’ve progressed beyond our hateful, warring and fanatical ways.

We may be irreversibly committed to play out the saga of Iraq. But each of us, we humans, if we are to look our own kind in the eye, should at least be willing to say we’re sorry, that all over our smaller and more lethal planet, whatever the causes, we’re still killing our own kind - the same but different - but our own kind nonetheless. Even on vacation we oughtn’t hide from that.

Thomas Lynch | NYTimes (read more. . .)

August 17th, 2005 || PermaLink

A Constitution That Means Nothing To Ordinary Iraqis

Behind ramparts of concrete and barbed wire, the framers of Iraq’s new constitution wrestled yesterday to prevent - or bring about - the federalisation of Iraq while their compatriots in the hot and fetid streets outside showed no interest in their efforts.

Today is supposed to be “C” day, according to President Bush and all the others who illegally invaded this country in 2003. However, in “real” Baghdad - where the President and Prime Minister and the constitutional committee never set foot - they ask you about security, about electricity, about water, about when the occupation will end, when the murders will end, when the rapes will end.

They talk, quite easily, about the “failed” Jaafari government, so blithely elected by Shias and Kurds last January. “Failed” because it cannot protect its own people. “Failed” because it cannot rebuild its own capital city - visible to it between the Crusader-like machine-gun slits in the compound walls - and because it cannot understand, let alone meet, the demands of the “street”.

In the Alice-in-Wonderland Iraq of Messrs Bush and Blair - inhabited, too, by the elected government of Iraq and its constitutional drafters and quite a few Western journalists - there are no such problems to cope with. The air-conditioners hiss away - there are generators to provide 24-hour power - and almost all senior officials have palatial homes in the heavily protected “Green Zone” which was once Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace compound. No power cuts for them, no petrol queues, no kidnaps and murders.

As an Iraqi academic just returned from Paris and Brussels told me yesterday: “Europeans understand politics through the Green Zone level. They have no idea that the rest of Iraq - save for Kurdistan - is a place of anarchy and death. One asked me: ’Do you think federalism is really a danger to the Sunni?’ I answered him: ’Do you think the fear of constant death is not a danger to Sunnis, Shia and Kurds?’ His eyes glazed over. It was not what he wanted to talk about. But it is what we talk about.”

Robert Fisk | ZNet.org (read more. . .)

August 16th, 2005 || PermaLink

Testimonials of Resistance

Dr. Thomas Fasy of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York led us through a report with charts and graphs describing the rise in cancer in Iraq since the use of depleted uranium during the first Gulf War, the new nuclear weapon of choice that has horrific consequences. Leukemia had risen 450 percent in children under the age of 5 since 1990.

Fasy’s testimony reminded me of 5-year-old Atarid, whom we met in Iraq before the invasion. He had already lost all of his hair and had a very sweet smile, but couldn’t get the care available to children in the US because cancer therapies were not allowed under sanctions in Iraq. He was sent home to die and to make room for those wounded from the shock and awe that was about to descend on Iraq.

Denis Halliday, who had resigned his position as UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq in protest of the Iraq sanctions, completed the morning’s session. He enumerated all the ways in which the UN had failed at its job, both at the level of the UN Security Counsel, the Secretary General and the members. He had watched the US destroy Iraq’s potential, simply because it was no longer a useful friend, and set a pattern of militaristic aggression toward the people of Iraq that continues today.

He spoke about the rights of Iraqi self-defense and resistance to foreign military occupation, as set out in UN Charter Article 51, but added there is nothing glorious about killing, “be it of the enemy, or of one’s own country-men and women who decide, for whatever reason, to collaborate.”

The day continued with testimonial after testimonial from the many brave Iraqis who came to share their stories. By the late afternoon many of the jurors were in tears.

We had sat yet again through nearly 12 hours of testimony. There was no question that the UK and US were guilty of an illegal, immoral and unjust war — the case had been proven over and over. Nor was there the need to question the Iraqis’ right to resist. Of course they had the right if the invasion was illegal. Now the question had become: what do we do about it?

Were we as anti-war activists in the US really resisting? And if not, what would have to change? What do you do with an administration that has degraded the rule of law?

Jodie Evans | AlterNet (read more. . .)

August 15th, 2005 || PermaLink