CounterPunch Diary
Can Cindy Sheehan End the War?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
You can tell in five-minutes channel surfing how Cindy Sheehan frightens the pro-war crowd. One bereaved mom from Vacaville, camped outside Bush's home in Crawford, reproaching the vacationing President for sending her son to a pointless death in Iraq has got the hellhounds of the right barking in venomous unison.
Christopher Hitchens attacked Cindy Sheehan, of course. Called her a LaRouchie! Why? No reason given. He obviously reckons "LaRouchie" is one of those let-her-deny-it slurs, like "anti-Semite". Let's suppose Hitchens was writing in similarly nasty terms about Hitchens. He'd probably remember that in 1999 Edward Jay Epstein publicly recalled a dinner in the Royalton Hotel in New York where Epstein said Hitchens had doubted the Holocaust was quite what it's cracked up to be. In Epstein's memory Hitchens belittled the idea that six million Jews died, said the number was much less.
So, under Hitchens' rules of polemical engagement, was does that make Hitchens? A holocaust denier, a guy who has Faurisson and David Irving's books under his pillow. A Jew hater, or--if you believe his sudden discovery (privately denied by his own brother on at least one occasion) at a mature age that his mother was Jewish--a Jewish self-hater. Of course Hitchens revels in Cindy Sheehan's denial that she said in an email that her son died in a war for Israel. Hitchens writes that this denial makes her "a shifty fantasist". What would Hitchens, who's an on-the-record admirer ("a great historian") of the work of Nazi chronicler David Irving say about Hitchens' shifty denial of Epstein's recollection? What fun he would have with the witnesses the panic-stricken Hitchens, well aware that "holocaust denier" is not part of the resume of a Vanity Fair columnist, hastily mustered for his defense, a woman and a man present at that famous dinner in the Royalton. One his close friend, Anna Wintour, the present editor of Vogue and the other, Brian McNally, a longtime friend and business associate.
What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is. A guy who called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who waited till his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in US policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan as a LaRouchie and anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared mention the word Israel. She lost a son? Hitchens (who should perhaps be careful on the topic of sending children off to die) says that's of scant account, and no reason why we should take her seriously. Then he brays about the horrors let loose in Iraq if the troops come home, with no mention of how the invasion he worked for has already unleashed them.
>From Hitchens to Bill O'Reilly, who has a voice as soft as soap in a shower
stall when it comes to whispering lewdly down the phone to a female employee
about loofah-uses, but who howls about Sheehan's low character in her
refusal to pay federal taxes that might put more money the Pentagon's way.
Listening to O'Reilly and even mainstream pundits, you'd think tax-resistance was a fresh and terrible arrival on the shores of American protest, instead of a form of resistance as old as the Republic.
But the notion that tax-resistance somehow marginalizes Sheehan as an "extremist" does highlight an important point. The aim of any serious anti-war protest is to force a government to quit fighting, pull the troops out, come home right now.
But Sheehan is castigated in the press, by mainstream liberals as well as mad-dog rightists, for not leaving any wriggle-room on this central point. She says, Bring the troops home right now.
How many people echo that straightforward demand? Millions of ordinary Americans--around 34 per cent--certainly do, if we are to believe the numbers in polls that also give Bush an approval rating of only 34 per cent for his conduct of the war.
But to be effective the opinion of ordinary people has to be harnessed into a powerful political movement that offers energetic leadership.
Here the picture is dismayingly cloudy. MoveOn.org, has used Sheehan's siege of Bush as springboard to mount supportive anti-war vigils. But what exactly is MoveOn calling for, in terms of ending the war?
Go to the website of the Win Without War coalition, of which MoveOn is a member along with groups ranging from the Sierra Club, to National Organization of women to the Methodists, Unitarians and Quakers and youll find a mush-mouth statement about "a gradual, phased decrease in numbers rather than augmenting the size of the force", plus other familiar boilerplate about how the UN Security Council "should authorize and encourage the creation of an international stabilization force to assist the Iraqi authorities with security and training of Iraqi forces."
This leisurely agenda doesn't add up to anti-war leadership. After all, Gen. George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, talks bluntly about "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring.
It's no secret why MoveOn and Win Without War are so timid. Square in their field of vision is the Democratic Party whose high-profile congressional leaders such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are calling for more troops to be shipped out to Iraq. Push comes to shove, most of the Win Without War coalition members won't get more than half a beat out of step with the Democrats.
Serious resistance, of the sort Sheehan calls for, has to throw the threat of popular sanction over both Democrats as well as Republicans. What leadership is available for this task? The obvious candidate is the United for Peace and Justice coalition, which mounted the huge anti-war protests of 2003 and which has been conducting peace actions ever since.
But as it organizes its upcoming September 24-26 rallies in Washington DC UFPJ seems to be turning its back on the rich opportunities for mainstream organizing offered by Sheehan and the nerveless platform of Win Without War, preferring to dilute the Out of Iraq message with cumbersome left agendas written by ultras from the casting couch of the Life of Brian.
Anyone can go on a vigil. It only costs the price of a candle and a solemn expression. The price of entry into serious antiwar organizing at the crucial moment is steeper. It requires political nerve. A substantial coalition has to lead the way, pointed to by Sheehan, with the slogan Bring Them Home Now.
What truly frightens governments is mutiny or the threat of mutiny. It was soldiers shooting their officers and sailors pushing planes off air craft carriers that prompted the Pentagon to run up the white flag in Vietnam. Along that same spectrum is draft resistance, and the refusal to go to war. Already that's had an effect. The Pentagon says the reserve system is in ruins.
Gold Star moms like Cindy Sheehan could be leading sit-ins at military recruitment offices across the country and in the home district congressional offices of Democrats and Republicans. How about Cindy Sheehan moving Camp Casey from Crawford to Hillary Clinton's offices in Washington or New York. Only this time the demand would not be for a meeting but for a reversal of HRC's pro war position which has her putting up a bill to increase US forces overall by 90,000. One of the greatest achievements of the antiwar movement in Viertnam era was to make it untenable for a Democrat, LBJ, to run again for the presidency, or for Hubert Humphrey to run and win on a prowar platform. Question, would the MoveOn operation take the slightest interest in any vigils outside HRC's offices, or those of any other prominent Democrat? Of course not.
Cindy Sheehan frightens the right and stirs them to venom, and she frightens the Democrats too, because she's so clear. Contrast the timeline of Sheehan as against that of even a relatively decent Democrat like Russ Feingold. Feingold calls for a start to withdrawal from Iraq maybe sixteen months from now. How many dead troops and new Gold Star moms can you fit into that calendar. A thousand or more? Sheehan's Out Now call should be the bright-line test for any antiwar spokesperson.
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