The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan

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Sun, 21 Aug 2005 14:22:29 -0700 (PDT)

The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan

August 21, 2005

 

 

 

 

The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan

By FRANK RICH

 

CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil

that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that

fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an

intelligence briefing titled " Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside

the United States " by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was

no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14 marine reservists

had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in Haditha, his

national radio address that morning made no mention of Iraq. Once

again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he wouldn't see Ms.

Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who hasn't foreseen any of

the setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did not

attack inside the United States in 2001.

 

When these setbacks happen in Iraq itself, the administration punts.

But when they happen at home, there's a game plan. Once Ms. Sheehan

could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character

assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by

his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a

critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is

especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a

president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had

" other priorities " during Vietnam.

 

The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents

with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry. But

the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism

czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who

publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored

vehicles last December. The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph

Wilson - the diplomat described by the first President Bush as

" courageous " and " a true American hero " for confronting Saddam to save

American hostages in 1991 - was so toxic it may yet send its

perpetrators to jail.

 

True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News,

where she was immediately labeled a " crackpot " by Fred Barnes. The

right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry

Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary

sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying

attendees of " Fahrenheit 9/11. " Rush Limbaugh went so far as to

declare that Ms. Sheehan's " story is nothing more than forged

documents - there's nothing about it that's real. "

 

But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is

yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of

political support for the Iraq war.

 

When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest

priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's

character, then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11

inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an

insubordinate plant of the " liberal media, " we forget the Pentagon's

abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that

persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph

Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration

twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent

W.M.D.'s.

 

The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy Sheehan's

" wacko " rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have

attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget

about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait,

much of the public has not.

 

The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr.

Bush's what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly

synergistic with her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless

carnage. Her point would endure even if the messenger were shot by a

gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never returned to Texas from her

ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the media circus by

actually meeting with her.

 

The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's story,

not the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers, you'll

notice, almost never tell her son's story. They are afraid to go there

because this young man's life and death encapsulate not just the noble

intentions of those who went to fight this war but also the hubris,

incompetence and recklessness of those who gave the marching orders.

 

Specialist Sheehan was both literally and figuratively an Eagle Scout:

a church group leader and honor student whose desire to serve his

country drove him to enlist before 9/11, in 2000. He died with six

other soldiers on a rescue mission in Sadr City on April 4, 2004, at

the age of 24, the week after four American security workers had been

mutilated in Falluja and two weeks after he arrived in Iraq. This was

almost a year after the president had declared the end of " major

combat operations " from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

 

According to the account of the battle by John F. Burns in The Times,

the insurgents who slaughtered Specialist Sheehan and his cohort were

militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric.

The Americans probably didn't stand a chance. As Mr. Burns reported,

members of " the new Iraqi-trained police and civil defense force "

abandoned their posts at checkpoints and police stations " almost as

soon as the militiamen appeared with their weapons, leaving the

militiamen in unchallenged control. "

 

Yet in the month before Casey Sheehan's death, Mr. Rumsfeld typically

went out of his way to inflate the size and prowess of these Iraqi

security forces, claiming in successive interviews that there were

" over 200,000 Iraqis that have been trained and equipped " and that

they were " out on the front line taking the brunt of the violence. "

We'll have to wait for historians to tell us whether this and all the

other Rumsfeld propaganda came about because he was lied to by

subordinates or lying to himself or lying to us or some combination

thereof.

 

As The Times reported last month, even now, more than a year later, a

declassified Pentagon assessment puts the total count of Iraqi troops

and police officers at 171,500, with only " a small number " able to

fight insurgents without American assistance. As for Moktada al-Sadr,

he remains as much a player as ever in the new " democratic " Iraq. He

controls one of the larger blocs in the National Assembly. His

loyalists may have been responsible for last month's apparently

vengeful murder of Steven Vincent, the American freelance journalist

who wrote in The Times that Mr. Sadr's followers had infiltrated

Basra's politics and police force.

 

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.

 

Nicholas D. Kristof and David Brooks are on vacation.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/opinion/21rich.html?pagewanted=print