Two Cheers for Cindy Sheehan

By Colman McCarthy

Two cheers for Cindy Sheehan. But only two. A third isn’t deserved.

At Camp Casey, the roadside hangout near the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas where Sheehan bivouaced with hundreds of other antiwar protestors, the mother of the slain soldier, Casey Sheehan, was asking the president questions about his war policies in Iraq. Now on a national bus tour, she keeps asking.

First, though, a few questions for Sheehan about her peace policies. Was she against the war when the Army first sent her son to Iraq, there to kill people if ordered to? As a loving mother, did she ever have misgivings about raising a son who underwent rigid military training to kill the sons of other loving mothers? Would Sheehan’s vehemence about the war have the same strength had her son come home alive? Did she ever exert moral or motherly pressure to persuade her son to think twice about serving Commander-in-Chief Bush?

Whatever the answers may be—I suspect all no’s—Sheehan’s campaign to meet with Bush and tell him a thing or two is misguided. Her problem is less with Bush than with her own naivete. Her son joined the Army, not the Peace Corps. Soldiers risk death. Casey Sheehan, who was not drafted, assumed the risks. He was sent to Iraq with an invading military fully knowing the nature of combat: kill or be killed.

It is tragic that Casey Sheehan didn’t come home alive, but no more tragic than every death in Iraq’s time of horror. But was Cindy Sheehan so unaware of what militaries are paid to do, or so delusional about warfare, that she thought her son would breeze in and out of Iraq with no more bother than a few bites from sand ants? Did she think that Donald Rumsfeld was clowning when he said on July 14, 2003: “Are more people going to be killed? You bet.”

Lambasting the president provides Sheehan with a convenient dodge against questions about her own complicity with militarism. If she raised a son to be a soldier, and presumably took pride that he joined the Army when he had ample other options, it’s simplistic to condemn Bush because the war has turned untidy. Which war hasn’t? Truman’s Korea? Johnson and Nixon’s Vietnam? Clinton’s Somalia? Which president doesn’t lie about the reasons for starting wars? Which president admits his war was wrong? Wake up, Cindy Sheehan.

The good mother fumes that Bush led the nation into war, as if Congress didn’t have its militaristic say, as if much of the media weren’t sounding the war bugles, as if clerics weren’t intoning God bless America and sending onward the Christian soldiers.

It’s being claimed now that Cindy Sheehan is the Rosa Parks of the new peace movement. Before that notion gets out of hand, a reality check is needed. The genuine leaders of the peace movement are the many mothers and fathers who labor to get military recruiters out of the high schools, who instill their children with consciences that say no to killing, who show by example that nonviolence is a moral force superior to the violent force of fists, guns or armies, who reject warmaking politicians who ducked war themselves, who know that unless we teach our children peace someone else will teach them violence.

If Cindy Sheehan can help create a society where that kind of leadership takes hold, then she is on to something. Otherwise, she’s just another dabbler in theatrics.