Cindy Sheehan is someone I view sympathetically, and not just because of her personal loss. But she’s been led down a blind alley by the far-left activists who’ve been whispering in her ear from the beginning. This account from Green Left Weekly is regarding a speech she delivered in
Sheehan said her son, Casey, was killed by someone in the Mahdi Army controlled by Moqtada al Sadr. But she bears no animosity towards the Iraqi resistance fighters. She told the meeting that the mother of an Iraqi fighter had written to her afterwards saying that Iraqis didn’t want to kill young Americans, but that they did want the US to get out. “They wanted my son out of their country”, she said simply, adding “I wish they didn’t have to, but the Iraqi people have the right to resist the occupation”.
How Sheehan chooses to understand the death of her son is nobody’s business but her own. But is she unaware of the wanton murder and terror being sown by the Mahdi Army at this point in time? I often get the sense that some the most outspoken antiwar advocates stopped following the news from Iraq about two years ago.
One of the big lies of this war (and there have been lies in abundance) is that the Sadrists and their Sunni counterparts — those who kidnapped and tormented Jill Carroll and murdered her translator Alan Enwiya — had no choice in all of this. Just utter the magic word “occupation” and all is forgiven. In 2004, this view was naive. In 2006, when Iraq has descended into civil war and the militias have turned their guns on Iraqi civilians as never before, it is inexcusable. The antiwar movement needs to move beyond “occupation” consciousness and take a long, deep inhale of civil war consciousness. In this regard, the lefties are not ahead of the rest of the country.
To confront the Bush administration as Sheehan has done requires courage, yes. But she’d be all the more courageous if she challenged some of the left’s glib talking points and showed some genuine understanding of the situation on the ground in Iraq. True, she has sacrificed a great deal for her cause, at serious detriment to her own health. She has endured torrents of ignorant abuse. But this does not mean that her every utterance is splendid.
Comments are closed.