Cindy Sheehan: The Human Cost of Peace

Although much has been written and said about the casualties of war, there are few mentions of the casualties of those committed to peace and opposed to war. In demonstrations against past wars, protestors have been beaten by police, imprisoned and rendered penniless by expenditures on defense lawyers, as well as had their characters and reputations lied about and smeared by government officials, war supporters and the press. This is no less true of those opposed to President George W. Bush's war against Iraq and his use of U.S. military forces in a continuing occupation of what was once the "cradle of civilization."

On August 6, 2005, a peace activist named Cindy Sheehan arrived in Crawford, Texas, and camped outside the gates of Bush's ranch. Her avowed purpose was to meet with the president and obtain an explanation from him for his preemptive, unconstitutional war against Iraq. She had personal knowledge of the casualties of war. On April 4, 2004, her son U.S. Army Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan was killed in Sadr City, Iraq, while on a rescue mission. Cindy Sheehan had been against the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq before Casey's death, but afterwards she began publicly traveling and speaking against the war. What took her to Crawford was a television clip from a speech by Bush that was broadcast on August 3. In it, he described his war against Iraq and the subsequent occupation of that country by American troops as a "noble cause" that required continuation "to honor the sacrifices of the fallen."

Enraged at the president's vacuous justification for what she perceived to be a great wrong, and the use of the death of her son as an argument in support of continuing that wrong, Cindy Sheehan went to Crawford for retribution. As the mother of one of the victims of his unjust war she wanted to confront the president and call him to account. He refused to meet with her, but sent two of his staff – National Security Advisor Stephan Hadley and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Joe Hagin – in an attempt to mollify her. They failed, and her subsequent vigil led to international publicity and her almost instant celebrity as the "Peace Mom."

It also made her the favorite target of pro-war and pro-Bush journalists, commentators, pundits, talk-show hosts and political organizations. She was subsequently arrested for demonstrating without a permit (September 26, 2005), for unlawful conduct (January 31, 2006) and for criminal trespassing and resisting arrest (March 6, 2006), the last of which was coupled with an unnecessarily violent arrest and rough treatment by New York City police. Thus, Cindy Sheehan joined the casualties of peace.

After her August 2005 vigil in Crawford, there followed a succession of lies, distortions, misrepresentations and facile interpretations designed to paint Cindy Sheehan as an opportunistic, self-centered, lying media whore who uses her son's death as a means both to enhance her own celebrity and to aid the political left in its war against George Bush. None of this was, or is, true.

The following are the main elements in the sliming of Cindy Sheehan, as well as the simple facts of the matter:

  1. On September 15, 2005, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh asserted that Cindy Sheehan's story of her dead son was "nothing more than forged documents." Two days later, he pretended he had never said she was a fake and asserted that he had expressed sympathy for her loss on his program of September 12, but saw her actions as merely an opportunity to bash Bush. The facts of Casey's death are public knowledge and indisputable; in fact, on Monday April 4, 2006, a memorial dedicated to all the members of the 1st Cavalry Division who died on April 4, 2004, was dedicated at Fort Hood, Texas. Casey's name is among those listed. It is tempting to regard Limbaugh's conflicting statements as merely a case of his oral r.p.m. exceeding his mental rate, with the torque at the low end of the scale. He is, after all, a political pornographer. But, in his obvious recklessness Limbaugh presented himself as either a fool or a malicious liar. Either way, his actions seem conscienceless. One can only speculate on the personal and professional ethics of a man or woman who will publicly repeat unfounded rumors or tell deliberate lies about a mother grieving for her dead child and demanding that the man responsible for that death explain himself.

  2. Shortly after I wrote a positive article on Cindy Sheehan's actions and character, followed by a review of her book Not One More Mother's Child, I began to receive emails from people who claimed that Cindy Sheehan was divorced from her husband Pat while Casey was a toddler and that Pat and his new wife raised the boy to adulthood. So, my correspondents claimed, Cindy Sheehan was obviously using the death of her son for personal aggrandizement – not having had a parental relationship with him other than being his biological mother. Not one word of this vicious rumor is true. Cindy and Pat Sheehan were high school sweethearts, married on May 30, 1977, and subsequently had four children – Casey, Carly, Andy and Janey – all of whom they jointly raised to adulthood. The marriage lasted 28 years until Cindy and Pat Sheehan separated on June 1, 2005. Pat Sheehan subsequently filed for divorce on August 12, citing "irreconcilable differences."

  3. And, there were those public-spirited correspondents who informed me that Cindy Sheehan's anti-war protests and speeches betrayed that for which her son lived and died and thus dishonored his memory – that he died willingly fighting for his country and his mother was just using his death for her own political agenda. This mirrored the August 11, 2005, letter from her aunt, Cherie Quartarolo, and other in-laws, to Matt Drudge that said that Cindy Sheehan was promoting her own notoriety and personal agenda at the expense of her son's good name and reputation. Quite aside from the point that one inherits one's in-laws – for better or worse – one can only respond with a question: "For what did Cindy Sheehan's son Casey fight and die?" Did he give his life for his country, or for George W. Bush? Congress did not declare war against Iraq, George W. Bush did. And for what reason? Every successive rationale for the war that George Bush, Dick Cheney Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell or Condi Rice have presented to the American public has either gone down in the flames of evidence to the contrary, been exposed as a misrepresentation or an outright lie, or it has been expressed as an empty slogan like "noble cause." More to the point: Who is it that has used the bodies of Casey Sheehan and other fallen American soldiers and Marines as part of an obvious political agenda? The answer is not "Cindy Sheehan," it is "George W. Bush." It is Bush who seeks to sanctify his war by pouring the blood of its victims over it. Cindy Sheehan wants him to stop the sacrilege; she wants no more victims. And why does it "dishonor the memory" or expend the "good name and character" of a fallen soldier to ask for a clear explanation of why he became such? Isn't it clear to the entire civilized world that the "honor" and "good name and character" in question is not that of a fallen soldier, but that of the commander who put him in the position of being fallen? Casey Sheehan's good name and character has never been in question; rather it is that of George W. Bush that Cindy Sheehan has been questioning – and with good cause.

  4. For an obnoxious example of the sort of political muggings to which Cindy Sheehan has been subjected for the past eight months, one need go no further than the Canadian website of Steve Janke, who bills himself as "Angry In the Great White North" and a representative of the Canadian conservative "right." Janke has made a cottage industry of scurrilous attacks on Cindy Sheehan's mental health, veracity, marital situation, personal finances, political views and true regard for her dead son. And he has done so on the thinnest of factual grounds. Almost every action, change in circumstances or statement by Cindy Sheehan has been used by Janke as the basis for a creative speculation that implies that she is a true villain. Only one example is necessary: In his article of October 17, 2005, Janke used the fact that Sheehan had recently purchased a new car, while there was as yet no gravestone on Casey Sheehan's grave, as obvious evidence of her moral depravity – or at least that's the implication of the juxtaposition of the two facts. Janke hammered in this accusation with a speculation that the money used to buy the car either came out of Casey's insurance payoff or the federal government military death benefit. What sort of mental sludge pit can manufacture an accusation like this from virtually no information at all? Janke has no information on why there is no gravestone; he has no information on whether Cindy Sheehan paid cash for the car and, if so, from whence the cash; he has no information on exactly what insurance amounts were paid to Sheehan and when. So, he takes this absence of knowledge and uses it to libel a woman he has never met, and knows virtually nothing about, except what he reads in newspapers or receives in gossip. Sludge from Janke's pit is still being circulated on the web despite origins that are reminiscent of the harvesting of the orcs from the mud in The Lord of the Rings. Anyone with the stomach to do so can "google" a veritable smorgasbord of similar baseless accusations against Cindy Sheehan as well as clumsy character assassinations.

  5. Three days after Cindy Sheehan began her vigil in Crawford, Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly said that "she has been hijacked by some very, very far left elements…there is no question that she has thrown in with the most radical elements in this country…" He added that the other families who have lost sons and daughters to the Iraq war "feel that this kind of behavior borders on treasonous." Two days later in his August 11, 2005, "O'Reilly Factor" column he said that "far left ideologies are controlling access to Cindy Sheehan…." Given O'Reilly's personal moral character, as revealed in certain of his telephone conversations made public last year, one is tempted to dismiss this as proof of Samuel Johnson's adage that "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel;" however, it is certainly true that Cindy Sheehan has allied herself with many "progressive groups" in her campaign against the war. On January 30, 2006, she appeared on a six-person panel on impeachment at a public forum held at the Bus Boys and Poets Bookstore in Washington, D.C. The forum was sponsored by Democracy Rising, ImpeachPAC, Backbone Campaign and Censure Bush. On March 6, 2006, she was arrested for criminal trespassing and resisting arrest outside the U.S.U.N. mission in New York City, along with Medea Benjamin of Code Pink. Code Pink is on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, which also includes Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out and the Communist Party of the U.S.A. On August 8, 2005, syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin referred to Code Pink as anti-American, anti-military, terrorist-sympathizing agitators. Malkin is hardly a fount of objectivity on any issue, but many other commentators have similarly characterized Sheehan's choice of allies and criticized her for those associations. It only deepened this perception when her January 2006 trip to Venezuela to participate in the World Social Forum was sponsored by the Venezuelan foreign ministry, and that following her appearance arm-in-arm with Hugo Chavez at a rally she said that she admired him "for his strength to resist the U.S." Yet, left out of this characterization of her choice of allies is the fact that only a few weeks before she went to Crawford in August 2005 she lectured at the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. It is also a fact that many anti-war libertarians have joined with her and all the other groups mentioned above, as well as others not listed, to oppose this unconstitutional war. Several members of the Congress of the United States, including John Conyers, Jr., have united with Cindy Sheehan against this war. Several leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement, including Dr. Joseph T. Lowery, co-founder with Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, have united with Cindy Sheehan against this war. Prominent figures in the television and motion pictures industry have all united with Cindy Sheehan against this war. In the past few months, Cindy Sheehan and I have co-authored two anti-war articles that have appeared in online journals as politically diverse as LewRockwell.com, Michaelmoore.com, palestinechronicle.com and political affairs.net – a Marxist online journal. Anyone consulting my scholarship would discover that I have been a severe critic of "progressive" and socialist theories and practices for most of my academic life. The point is that mere association in a common cause does not connote a commonality of views on other matters. I would add that anyone who knows Cindy Sheehan is very much aware that she is not liable to be "hijacked" by anyone – she is an implacable foe of Bush's war and accepts all allies in that fight, despite other differences in views. Her allies stand with Cindy Sheehan; none of them "run" her.

What strength of character, coupled with the conviction of the rightness of one's cause, is required to wade through a daily sewer of lies and twisted interpretations about one's character, motives, actions and personal history? Cindy Sheehan has been subjected to an almost continuous stream of conscienceless vituperation since she publicly raised the question of the motives of George W. Bush in waging a preemptive war against Iraq and continuing the devastating occupation of that country. It is true that she has often not deleted expletives from her speeches and has called the president and his closest associates "war criminals," "liars," "murderers," "cowards," and deemed them "morally corrupt." But, aren't they? And, isn't she justified in being angry? Shouldn't all of us be just as angry at what is being done in the name of our country by what appears to be a pack of cowardly, arrogant, avaricious political terrorists? And what good does the argumentum ad hominem used against Cindy Sheehan do in a debate over principles and political actions? Don't the attempts to attack and discredit her provide a strong sign that her critics dare not debate principles or facts?

The George W. Bush presidency is one that has made the act of lying to the public the centerpiece of its administration. This is a regime that appears to be dedicated to shredding the last tattered vestiges of the Constitution of the United States for purposes that the members of that regime either cannot or will not reveal. Kidnapping, torture, imprisonment without due process, violation of the Geneva Conventions, ad hoc trial procedures forced on prisoners brought to military tribunals, domestic spying in violation of federal law; all of these are features of the Bush regime.

To date, almost 2400 U.S. soldiers and Marines have died and over 17,000 have been wounded in a preemptive and unconstitutional war and occupation waged by the Bush regime. Tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children have suffered the same fate. Cindy Sheehan has single-handedly and publicly called the President of the United States to account and has demanded the return of U.S. forces from Iraq if he cannot provide a clear explanation for their being there. And he continues to run from her. Rather than branding her as "unpatriotic" and accusing her of aiding and abetting the enemy, of being "a hardleaning leftie" (Jeff Quinton) or a "fascist fishwife" (James Taranto), some of her critics need to refresh their memories about what the United States of America used to represent to the rest of the world. Ronald Reagan called it "a shining city on a hill"; few outside its borders see much shine to that city anymore. In spite of his almost constant use of the word "freedom," George W. Bush has taken us closer to the Britain of V for Vendetta than to the "Atlantis" of Atlas Shrugged.

Those same critics should also look within themselves to discover how they managed to join the lowest common denominator in the vulgarization of public debate over this war. They should be celebrating Cindy Sheehan for her patriotism and love of country, rather than vilifying her with terms that would have caused their mothers to wash out their mouths with soap.

April 20, 2006