CINDY HAS ALREADY WON

[Guest guest]

Monday 15 August 2005

 

This thing, the wheels are coming off it.

- Gen. Barry McCaffrey, after returning from an inspection of Iraq,

08/12/2005.

 

 

They are sunburned and storm-lashed. They sleep in tents that sit

along the muddy earth of drainage ditches by the side of the road.

They have been heckled by " counter-demonstrators " who chanted " We

don't care! " during a rendition of " God Bless America. " They have

been attacked by fire ants and hassled by local health inspectors. On

Thursday morning, at about 5:30am, they were blasted awake by a

fourteen-car convoy of Secret Service SUVs which roared through the

camp at high speed while leaning on their horns the whole time.

They have been jolted with fear when a local resident fired his

weapon into the air several times to make them go away. When the

shooter, one Larry Mattlage, was asked why he was firing his gun, he

said, " We're going to start doing our war and it's going to be

underneath the law. We're going to do whatever it takes. " It is safe

to say, therefore, that their lives have been threatened.

The thing is, they've already won.

Cindy Sheehan and her ever-growing band of supporters intend to

stay in those ditches outside Bush's Crawford " ranch " until he comes

out to talk or until August 31st, whichever comes first. If he does

not come out by the end of the month, she intends to follow him to

Washington and camp out in front of the White House. She and the

others have been there for more than a week now, garnering more and

more attention from the national and international press. Yes, they

are tired. Yes, they are uncomfortable. Yes, they have already won.

The nearly 2,000 crosses, crescents and Stars of David that make

up the Arlington West cemetery, erected by the demonstrators a few

days ago to represent all the fallen American soldiers in Iraq,

stretch almost a mile down the country road. Bush had to drive past

that on Friday when he went to his fundraising shindig at the Broken

Spoke Ranch. 54 crosses have been added to the cemetery since he

first showed up for his vacation at the beginning of August. It takes

a while to drive past them all. This man, who cannot abide hearing or

seeing anything in the way of dissent or disagreement, saw those

crosses whistle past his window. That is a victory.

 

Over the weekend, as the camp prepared for the arrival of the

counter-demonstrators, a huge diesel pickup truck rumbled into camp

with its nose menacingly pointed towards the tents. It sat for a

while, and everyone waited to see what would happen. Ann Wright, the

main organizer of camp activities, finally approached the truck and

met the driver. He was a father, Wright discovered, and his son had

been killed in Iraq.

He did not agree with this protest, he said, but wanted to know

if his son's name was on one of the crosses in the Arlington West

cemetery. Ann Wright invited the man to walk the rows of crosses and

find his son's name. They found it. Ann and the man from the truck

sat down in front of the cross, wrapped their arms around each other,

and wept. Later, the man shared a beer with Cindy Sheehan and told

her he loved her. That is a victory, one that surpasses any sort of

mean politics.

 

For three years now, both before the invasion of Iraq began and

then after it was unleashed, millions of people have marched and

screamed and stomped in order to try to put a stop to this disaster.

The Bush administration was not pushed off its tracks even an inch in

all this time. Discussions and debates on why we are there and

whether or not we should leave have been bunted aside.

Half a dozen reasons for the invasion and occupation have been

put forth - weapons of mass destruction, ties to al Qaeda terrorism,

the building of a democracy, Hussein was a bad man - but in the end,

the debate is halted by the kind of brainless thinking that left us

in Vietnam for far too long: " We are there, so we have to stay. " This

was the accepted wisdom.

Not anymore.

All the protests, all the articles, all the books, all the

whistleblowers, all the criticism combined have not packed the kind

of punch that one mother in a ditch has delivered to this

administration's carefully crafted fantasy vision of what is

happening in Iraq. Suddenly, Bush has been forced to go before

cameras and try to explain why staying in Iraq is the only option

available. Suddenly, the accepted wisdom isn't so accepted anymore. A

majority of Americans, according to every available poll, agree with

the lady in the ditch and not with the president.

Bush isn't doing a very good job of explaining his side of

things, and his people seem unable to keep their stories straight.

After the fourteen Marines from Ohio were killed in Iraq, Bush got up

and stated that it would be unreasonable for him to lay down a

timetable for withdrawal. Yet at the same time, his generals were

bent over maps and logistics notebooks, trying to do exactly that.

The Los Angeles Times on Saturday took a look at the mixed

messages coming from the war party. " Are the president and the

Pentagon on the same page over the war in Iraq? " asked the

Times. " That question is percolating in Washington after President

Bush twice in the last 10 days tried to clarify a message sent by

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and military leaders. After

Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials indicated their desire to shift

away from discussing the struggle against terrorism as a 'war' -

saying it placed too much emphasis on military solutions to

terrorism - Bush repeatedly used the word 'war' in an Aug. 3 speech

to conservative state legislators. "

" Then, " continued the Times article, " on Thursday, Bush dismissed

as 'rumors' and 'speculation' reports that U.S. commanders were

contemplating significant withdrawals of American troops from Iraq

next year. His comments came after Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top

U.S. military official in Iraq, and Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, the

top ground commander, had publicly raised exactly that possibility. "

Hm.

On Sunday, out of nowhere, the Washington Post published a page-

one story titled " US Lowers Sights on What Can Be Achieved in Iraq. "

The story stated, " The Bush administration is significantly lowering

expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the

United States will have to settle for far less progress than

originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four

months. The United States no longer expects to see a model new

democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the

majority of people are free from serious security or economic

challenges. "

The article goes on to describe how any " democracy " will have to

bend itself around the laws of Islam, a fact that chucks the secular-

government talking points into the round file. Iraqi women, should

not get their hopes up about being granted significant rights of any

kind. The kicker came in the third paragraph, which quotes an unnamed

US official saying, " What we expected to achieve was never realistic

given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground. We are in a

process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and

shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning. "

In other words, the whole thing was a Charlie Foxtrot from soup

to nuts. There are no weapons of mass destruction, the terrorists

connected to 9/11 were not there (though there are plenty there now

learning how best to kill Americans with bombs), and democracy is not

to be found anywhere on the menu. The hearts and flowers we were

promised have not come, and are not coming. Sure, Hussein is still a

bad man, but that rationale for this war is an outright laugher when

compared to the cost of getting rid of him. Though Bush clings

desperately to his canned lines to defend his actions, the facts

speak for themselves. This whole bloody enterprise has been a

colossal, expensive, murderous failure.

 

The funny part is that Bush almost certainly could have

maintained the public fantasy with one simple act. He could have

jumped into his pickup truck last Saturday, when Cindy Sheehan was

alone except for her sister in that ditch, and driven down to see

her. He could have invited her into the shotgun seat and driven her

around the neighborhood for a few minutes. He could have then gone

back up to the " ranch " and told the press corps that he met with her,

and that they had looked into each other's hearts. That would have

been the end of it.

He did not do that. Now, his generals are at loggerheads with the

public line coming from the White House about getting out of Iraq.

Unnamed officials are going on the record to state that the whole

plan was hare-brained from the word " go, " and that the entire deal

sits now in the ashes of its own utterly ruined failure. Bush has to

keep explaining why we have to stay, why rearranging the deck chairs

on this Titanic is a noble and worthwhile process. Meanwhile, the

whole world mocks him for hiding from one woman and her broken heart.

Cindy Sheehan has done this with one act of conscience. She has

managed to do what no other protest or action or statement has been

able to do. She has knocked the wheels right off this absurd

applecart. She has called the man to account. She can hang her

own " Mission Accomplished " banner above her tent in that ditch. She

has already won.

Her son would be very, very proud.