ENGELHARDT ON SHEEHAN
George Bush on arriving for a meeting with families of the bereaved, including Cindy Sheehan and her husband on June 17, 2004: "So who are we honoring here?"
Tom Engelhardt,TOMGRAM, adds his imput to the Cindy Sheehan saga ~ and explains how Cindy has rightfully and courageously exposed the arrogance, weakness and confusion of the Cheney/Bush administration.
Allen L Roland
Who Is in That Ditch?
Tom Engelhardt 8/14/05
Casey Sheehan had one of those small "critical roles" in the "current global commitment" in Iraq that, in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's words, "has to have a deterrent effect on people." As it happens, Sheehan was one of the unexpectedly deterred and now, along with 1,846 other American soldiers, is interred, leaving his take-no-prisoners mother Cindy -- a one-person anti-war movement -- with a critical role to play in awakening Americans to the horrors, and dangers, of the Bush administration's "current global commitments."
Over the last two years, administration officials, civilian and military, have never ceased to talk about "turning corners" or reaching "tipping points" and achieving "milestones" in the Iraq-War-that-won't-end. Now it seems possible that Cindy Sheehan in a spontaneous act of opposition -- her decision to head for Crawford, Texas, to face down a vacationing President and demand an explanation for her son's death -- may produce the first real American tipping point of the Iraq War.
As a million news articles and TV reports have informed us, she was stopped about 5 miles short of her target, the Presidential "ranch" in Crawford, and found herself unceremoniously consigned to a ditch at the side of a Texas road, camping out. And yet somehow, powerless except for her story, she has managed to take the President of the United States hostage and turned his Crawford refuge into the American equivalent of Baghdad's Green Zone. She has mysteriously transformed August's news into a question of whether, on his way to meet Republican donors, the President will helicopter over her encampment or drive past (as he, in fact, did) in a tinted-windowed black Chevrolet SUV.
Faced with the power of the Bush political and media machine, Cindy Sheehan has engaged in an extreme version of asymmetrical warfare and, in her person, in her story, in her version of "the costs of war," she has also managed to catch many of the tensions of our present moment. What she has exposed in the process is the growing weakness and confusion of the Bush administration. At this moment, it remains an open question who, in the end, will be found in that ditch at the side of a Texas road, her -- or the President of the United States.
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