Conservative Advocate: Sheehan heads to Washington
When Cindy Sheehan began her vigil outside President Bush’s ranch in Texas, there was widespread goodwill for this mother whose son, age 24, had been killed in Iraq. That tragedy didn’t magically transform her into an authority on the Middle East, but it induced in most Americans a feeling that she was entitled to have her say, whatever that might be.
It turned out that what she had to say was what I and others consider a vicious attack on Bush. She demanded to talk to him personally, to force him to admit that “my son died for oil,” “my son died to make your friends rich,” that he was “murdered by the Bush crime family,” and much more along the same lines.
She didn’t get to see the president, and, given the above comments, it’s hard to imagine what would have been accomplished by his seeing her.
This past August she camped out on the ranch road in Crawford, Texas, and the press corps covering the president’s “vacation” was apparently bored to tears. When she began spouting the toothsome little phrases quoted above, the media quickly converted her vigil into a national event.
All this has fatally undermined Cindy Sheehan’s sympathetic image as simply a grieving mother who must be indulged, no matter what she says. Today, she is (intentionally or unintentionally) just a figurehead for a snarling mob, seemingly exploiting her son’s death.
Now that Bush has returned to Washington, she has taken her show on the road, and promises to stage a rally there late this month. But Washington is a busier place than Crawford, and September a busier month than August, and Cindy will find it hard to compete for attention with all the real problems facing the nation, which is currently topped off by Katrina’s aftermath.
Paradoxically, it is the remarkably low casualties in Iraq, as compared to casualties from other wars, that have made possible the individual attention that the media have lavished on every combat death. In the 2-1/2 years since President Bush ordered the attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, less than 2,000 Americans have died there. In Vietnam, 526 Americans died in combat every month for 90 months. In the Korean War, nearly a thousand died every month for 37 months. And in World War II (the last “good war”) 6,639 Americans, or well over three times as many as have died in Iraq altogether, were killed in combat every month for 48 months.
In previous conflicts, there were certainly plenty of mothers who grieved as deeply as Sheehan does, and no doubt many of them had their reservations about the wisdom of the nation’s commitment to war. But the media, by and large, didn’t try to make icons out of them, because the press and TV hadn’t yet learned how to play politics with the deaths of American troops in combat.
It will be interesting to see how the Democratic politicos in Washington react to Cindy Sheehan when she shows up with her traveling circus on the National Mall and asks them to join her in attacking Bush. So far, they have been happily content to let her do what damage she could in Crawford, without contaminating themselves by participating in a performance that they well know is turning off many Americans. But, offered a choice between endorsing and repudiating her, I bet a lot of them may suddenly remember important appointments in their home states.
William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.