The Peace Mom
Cindy Sheehan, the woman camped outside the President's ranch in Texas, is from Vacaville, which is two towns over along the freeway. She has a fairly big following here because this is a fairly liberal town. I like what she's doing, since anything that removes a news cycle from White House control makes it harder for the conservatives in Congress to actually do anything horrible. At least that's what I'm hoping. My fear is that every news cycle dominated by Cindy Sheehan provides ample cover for the conservatives in Congress to accomplish horrible things.
Someone asked me what I thought about this story and this issue. I didn't have much of an answer for that then, which was fine because I had to watch a baseball game. But I've stopped trying to talk about the war because every discussion inevitably turns into an argument about President Bush. Isn't it demeaning to the troops to answer a question about the future of the Iraq policy with a full-throated defense of the President or an attack on the questioner? What the Sheehan saga really represents is the personalization of the military. In an era when everyone has a blog and journalism tries to tell individual stories as representative of broad social trends, most people see the army as a collection of sons and daughters who joined up for hundreds of different reasons. I think this is a largely positive development. But I imagine the President can't see it that way. If the President truly supports the mission, believing in it enough to continue to commit American troops and money, why should we actually expect him to feel bad about the death of an individual soldier?
I don't know anyone who is fighting in Iraq. And I don't actually know anyone who knows anyone fighting in Iraq. I imagine those people don't want to hear that the argument that the mission was a mistake and that those who had died did so in a less-than-necessary war. Describing the war as "dollar auction" would probably strike those people as offensive considering the sacrifice their loved one made. I understand that reaction. But the President doesn't get to hide behind that when his war strategy is questioned. I like that Bush looks weak when he uses a motorcade to speed past a grieving mother. It's a cheap political point, which I'm ashamed to admit I enjoy.
What we're learning is that if you sell a war entirely using public relations tactics, and it doesn't go well, you don't have a wellspring of principle to fall back on. So you've got the WMD, the spreading of democracy and completing the mission for the sake of our troops, but you don't really have a framework in which the military is operating. I've given up on straight answers. What I want is a little intellectual rigor, some honest argument deconstruction. Is that too much to ask for? I can't tell.
Someone asked me what I thought about this story and this issue. I didn't have much of an answer for that then, which was fine because I had to watch a baseball game. But I've stopped trying to talk about the war because every discussion inevitably turns into an argument about President Bush. Isn't it demeaning to the troops to answer a question about the future of the Iraq policy with a full-throated defense of the President or an attack on the questioner? What the Sheehan saga really represents is the personalization of the military. In an era when everyone has a blog and journalism tries to tell individual stories as representative of broad social trends, most people see the army as a collection of sons and daughters who joined up for hundreds of different reasons. I think this is a largely positive development. But I imagine the President can't see it that way. If the President truly supports the mission, believing in it enough to continue to commit American troops and money, why should we actually expect him to feel bad about the death of an individual soldier?
I don't know anyone who is fighting in Iraq. And I don't actually know anyone who knows anyone fighting in Iraq. I imagine those people don't want to hear that the argument that the mission was a mistake and that those who had died did so in a less-than-necessary war. Describing the war as "dollar auction" would probably strike those people as offensive considering the sacrifice their loved one made. I understand that reaction. But the President doesn't get to hide behind that when his war strategy is questioned. I like that Bush looks weak when he uses a motorcade to speed past a grieving mother. It's a cheap political point, which I'm ashamed to admit I enjoy.
What we're learning is that if you sell a war entirely using public relations tactics, and it doesn't go well, you don't have a wellspring of principle to fall back on. So you've got the WMD, the spreading of democracy and completing the mission for the sake of our troops, but you don't really have a framework in which the military is operating. I've given up on straight answers. What I want is a little intellectual rigor, some honest argument deconstruction. Is that too much to ask for? I can't tell.
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