CINDY’S WAR
11 December 2005
Many voices have opposed the war in Iraq, but few cries have been louder than that of grieving mother Cindy Sheehan. Her campaign against George Bush [and the lure of speaking fees] brought her to Scotland last week. Neil Mackay joined her on the road
THE thought goes through my head: “Can you love a dead child too much?” [A question Cindy goes on to answer unconsciously in the rest of her interview.]
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Casey Sheehan, a dead American GI – shot in the head while trying to rescue his wounded comrades on April 4, 2004, the fifth day of his tour of duty in Iraq. In her grief, Sheehan became a peace campaigner, ignited the anti-war movement in a once supine America and humbled the imperious Bush White House with both her suffering and her unceasing demands for an explanation from her President about why her son died for nothing in an illegal war. [Except that he has answered her several times. And the war is not illegal in any fashion.]
“He was my first-born,” she explains, as we bump through central Scotland in a taxi taking her from one rabble-rousing anti-war speech at the Scottish parliament to another rabble-rousing anti-war speech in Glasgow. She’s an ordinary 48-year-old Californian mom who morphed into a media celebrity when she camped outside George W Bush’s Texas holiday home this summer and refused to move until he accounted for the invasion of Iraq. [Except when she got bored and flew back to California in the middle of her encampment.]
Sheehan’s here in Scotland as part of a grand tour of Europe [and highly lucrative book and speaking tour] – which includes speaking to the Spanish parliament [who have already capitulated to the terrorists and have suffered the Madrid bombing deaths for their thanks]– and she’s using the media exposure during her trip to hammer home a simple message: “End the Iraq war and bring the troops home now.” [Despite her recent vows to not stop her efforts even after the war in Iraq ends.]
“We had four children,” she says, her voice full of memories but not sad or self-pitying. [Never self-pity from Cindy!] “We never left them at home with nannies or grandparents. They went everywhere with us; I nursed my children until they were a year old, so they had to be with me everywhere as I was their nourishment. [Paging Doctor Freud.]
“Casey was a real sweet child. He got along with everybody and never even got in a fist-fight his whole life. [How would she know this?] He never talked back to us. [Never mind that Cindy didn't want him to join the Army. He did. He even re-enlisted. And Cindy has said they argued about this.]
When he was a teenager, and we told him something he didn’t want to hear, this was his rebellion …” She rolls her eyes and tuts, mimicking her boy’s muted teenage tantrums. [Right. Perhaps joining the army was another form or rebellion. Or escape.]
He was a good kid, she says. An Eagle Scout [which is a paramilitary organization according to most lefties like Sheehan], an altar server. When he got a full-time job in college, he was never late or missed a day. He was going to be an elementary school teacher. That’s why he joined the army – the recruiter told him he could get educational benefits and finish college. [Too bad that Cindy is on record saying Casey joined the army because he wanted to fight for his country.]
“When he joined the army,” Sheehan goes on, “Casey wanted to be a chaplain’s assistant as he was so spiritual, but when he got to boot camp they told him he could be a Humvee mechanic. The recruiters lied. [This has been debunked several times. It is in fact debunked by Casey's re-enlistment. Casey's father is on record as saying he was happy in the army and proud of his service.]
“When he was in the army, he’d call me at least once a day. I had a feeling that he wouldn’t come back as he was too gentle and kind and sweet; he wasn’t a warrior. For many people, Casey is now the face of the Iraq war in America. And he deserves that because he was such an amazing person. He was pure and good. He died on April 4, the day Martin Luther King was assassinated.” [What a relevant things to point out. April 4th is also the date NATO was formed in 1949.]
That’s when I stupidly wonder if you can love a dead child too much; pour too much pain into their memory. [Perhaps not so stupidly.] The bereaved parents I’ve met over the years – mothers and fathers who’ve had their children taken from them by acts of terrorism, murder or war – nearly all seemed hopelessly lost in the moment of their child’s death; frozen, stunted and left for dead themselves . The remembrance of the child becomes a shrine itself: inviolable, sacrosanct, mythic. [These fellow sufferers Mother Sheehan calls "brainwashed" and "murder and mayhem mothers" if they disagree with her insistence we surrender to the terrorists.]
Sheehan has displayed a sense of humour on our car journey through Scotland, so I ask her: “Surely, you must have shouted at him once, Cindy? He must have done something bad at some time.”
There isn’t a beat. “He was a virgin,” she says in immediate answer to my question, and without any anger in her voice. “He was 24 years old when he died and he was a virgin. He would tell me all the time that he wanted to save that part of his life for his wedding night.”
That’s when I realise that you can’t love a dead child too much. In Sheehan’s mind, her son was pure, both as a boy and a man. [Dr. Freud, the white courtesy phone, please.]
The loss of a child will make a mother or a father want to change the world, even if it’s a hopeless cause. If a woman has fed her baby at her breast, watched that child grow up to be a good man and then watched that good man die in a bad war then the words “loss” and “love” can’t truly explain how she feels. [Never mind that Cindy says there has never been a good war, as she does later in this homily.]
To Sheehan, her son was murdered by a lying president who should be in prison for the rest of his life for war crimes, ideally sharing a cell with our prime minister. Casey didn’t die in a car accident or in a robbery in a liquor store – pointless acts which nevertheless could be understood, or at least coped with, because sometimes terrible, pointless things happen to people. He died in a war which didn’t have to happen. He should still be alive. He should have been married, had children, become a teacher. And there are tens of thousands of American, British and Iraqi mothers who feel just like her . That’s the heart and soul of who Cindy Sheehan is.
To her detractors – and there are many who loathe her and wish her dead [who says? Who cares whether she lives or dies?] – Sheehan is a un-American traitor who has fouled the patriotic death of her son. She gets e-mails from fellow US citizens with the words “lesbian c***” in the subject box, or letters telling her that the rest of her children should die too. [I'm sure she does. And she is just too concerned about the privacy of others to produce them along with their "headers" so they could be verified.]
When she started her peace campaign, most of America was in lock-step behind the White House – backing the war and believing the bogus claims about weapons of mass destruction. [Right. Cindy changed the world.]
Today, thanks in no small part to Sheehan herself, the ranks of the pro-war lobby are depleting fast. The latest polls show that support for the war is at an all-time low. Now more than half of America believes the invasion was a bad idea and a besieged Bush is slipping to new depths of unpopularity in public opinion.
The President famously refused to meet Sheehan when she posted herself outside the gates of his ranch in Crawford, Texas in August this year, demanding an immediate audience with the leader of the free world. He turned her down flat, saying he’d already met her once before. That allowed the right-wing press in the USA to label her a publicity hound who was crying over nothing. “She’s already met the President and had a chance to whine,” they said. “What the hell does she want now?!”
It’s true that Sheehan had met Bush in early summer 2004, along with her husband and children – but the meeting took place just a few weeks after they’d buried their son. “By the time we left the meeting,” she says, “we felt worse than when we went in. [Never mind that she told her local newspaper that she was grateful to President Bush for meeting them. She said he was sincere. And that she thanked him for making them "feel whole again."]
We didn’t think properly of what we wanted to say as we were still in shock. If I’d been able to meet him at Crawford it would have been a lot different.
“We were soft at that meeting. My family all knew that Bush was lying to the US public. We decided we’d just tell him about Casey and show him pictures of Casey and hope that this would demonstrate what his policies had done to us. But every time we tried to talk about Casey he’d change the subject. I asked him why my son died and he said, ‘Because I believe that everybody on this planet deserves to be free.’” [This is yet another retelling of their meeting. In other accounts, Cindy has said she wished she had asked Bush why her son had to die. In fact, that is what she claims as her impetus for stalking him.]
Sheehan paints the Bush she met as an almost gothic grotesque. “He was very cold, callous and rude to us,” she says. “The first thing he said was, ‘So who are we honourin’ here?’ He didn’t even know Casey’s name. He wouldn’t look at pictures of Casey that we’d brought with us. He called me ‘mom’ the whole time, and he called Casey ‘the loved one’. He didn’t even say ‘him’. Bush said to my daughter, ‘I wish we could bring your loved one back,’ and she replied, ‘So do we.’ He shot her a dirty look and turned his back on her.”
Suddenly, Sheehan laughs at what seems to be the most inappropriate moment. “Bush later kissed me on the right cheek,” she says. “The next day – and I’m not kidding – my right eye swelled up to the size of a golf ball. I told everyone he’d given me some Republican disease.”
After the Bush meeting, she decided to quit being an “apathetic American” and to start doing something about a war she despised. She began campaigning, joined anti-war groups, made a commercial for the pro-Democrat moveon.org lobby group and set up her own [bogus "charity"] organisation, Gold Star Families For Peace.
Despite the hectic, breakneck rate of the work she threw herself into, she was just another anonymous activist – ignored by the majority of the established media in the USA . [Except for all the fawning coverage these events got from the established media, which can be still found with any Google search.]
But then came August 3 this year – some 16 months after the death of her son – the day she transformed from a grieving mother quietly pouring her humble efforts into a sidelined peace movement to the living incarnation of Bush’s nemesis, the poster-girl of the anti-war lobby and, in a typically American media slant, a creation known as “Peace Mom” – a term she admits she quite likes.
“I was on my computer at home that day and the news broke that 14 marines had been killed in one incident,” she says. “I was heartbroken, angry and frustrated. Then Bush came on TV and said, without mentioning the deaths of those marines, that the families of the soldiers who have fallen in Iraq could rest assured that their loved ones had died for a noble cause, and then he said we have to complete the mission to honour the sacrifice of the fallen. I didn’t want one more person to be killed because my son had died. Casey died saving the lives of his buddies and I couldn’t imagine him wanting his buddies to die just because he’d died.
“So I decided. I was going to Dallas as a speaker at a peace rally and I made up my mind that when I’d finished I was going to drive down to Crawford and demand to speak to the President and tell him that I wanted him to quit killing people. He’d already killed Casey. I wanted to ask him what the ‘noble cause’ was and I was not going to let him lie to me.”
Bush was on vacation in Texas – a 35-day vacation – and the White House press corps was camped out in Crawford with him. They were bored and looking for a story. Serendipitously, Sheehan arrived, refused to leave and then camped in a ditch for nearly four weeks. [Except for when she got tired of it and left to fly back to California. But never mind such details.]
Thousands [and by thousands we mean hundreds at best] turned up to support her – and many to jeer her too. The press had a story in their lap which gripped America. It turned into a good old- fashioned media circus. She called Bush “a lying bastard”, an “evil maniac”, a “filth-spewer and a warmonger”. [That's the "peace" talking. Her only crime is loving too much.]
Bush was rumoured to have “cussed her out” to an aide by calling her a “goddamn bitch”. ["Rumored" in the sense that Cindy has made this up to add to her mystique.]
A world war of words broke out in America. In the following months, Sheehan – and another lady by the name of Hurricane Katrina – battered Bush with both the war and images of a drowned New Orleans. [Of course Mother Sheehan blamed Katrina on Bush and then mocked the media's coverage of it and Hurricane Rita as just a little wind and rain, when they should have been covering her.]
Each day of Sheehan’s vigil gave more integrity to the anti-war movement; each day of White House paralysis in the face of dead bodies floating down city streets weakened the ground beneath the President. [I guess the reporter is just taking poetic liberty here, since I don't recall any photos of dead bodies floating down city streets. The reporter has been Cindy-cated.]
You can forgive Sheehan a little hubris for her role in catalysing America and making the nation finally sit up and take notice of the peace lobby. “Before Camp Casey [the name given to her impromptu home at Crawford] there was a huge peace movement, but it never got covered in the media. Now congressmen are ringing me and saying that what I did in the summer gave them the courage to speak out about the war.”
The campaign has cost her dearly, however. Her marriage of more than two decades to her husband, Patrick, is now in ruins.
She is also in a state of cold war with her pro-war in-laws who issued press statements condemning her during the vigil at Crawford. [This is interesting since hitherto Cindy first ignored than denied the authenticity of those press statements from the rest of the family.]
“Burying a child is very hard on a marriage,” she says. “My soon-to-be-ex-husband and I dealt with it in different ways. He wanted to go back to the way we were before Casey was killed. But to me, going to parties and the movies and bowling and drinking cocktails seemed so meaningless and such a waste of time. [Never mind the endless parties she has engaged in since, courtesy of the hate-America crowd.]
He wanted to bury his grief when he buried Casey. And by me doing what I was doing – the campaigning – that kept him immersed in his grief.
“He would say ‘this is sick’, ‘you need help’. [Perhaps he is right. Who would be in a better position to judge? Cindy herself has stated that she thinks she suffered brain damage when she heard the news of Casey's death. And she has often times talked about how she wanted to die with him, and be buried with him.]
We just went in two separate directions. Politically, he agrees with me. He said ‘keep doing it, but do it part-time’. That wasn’t an option. I’m compelled to do this. I can’t go back to my old life until the occupation ends and even then I will go on fighting for peace.”
It has also put pressure on her relationship with her three surviving kids. “ They wanted their old mom back, but she was killed the day Casey died. Sometimes I get e-mails from my other children saying, ‘Hi mom, we are still alive, you know?’
So I try and call them at least once a day when I’m gone . But the kids support me. They know that this family has made sacrifices to make the world a different place. They are willing to give up the idea of their old mom – the mom who did everything for them and tucked them in. Now this is a mom who is a mom to all the children in the world.” [She said referring to herself in the third person. I wonder if Cindy has ever read up on the messiah complex? Some of the worst people have had them, including some say, Hitler.]
Pouring this love for her lost child into a safe future for the other sons and daughters out in the world who might die in this war or some other conflict is what saved her life, she says. “My mission gives me a reason to get up in the morning. Camp Casey gave me back my life, my joy in life and my hope. I do want to live now. Before I didn’t care if I lived or died. In fact, there were many times I almost killed myself.” [She really has the credentials to be deciding foreign policy it seems to me.]
She’s lost her faith as well. A once devout Catholic, she’s turned her back on organised religion. [Never mind that even before Casey's death Cindy claims she had a love-hate relationship with the Catholic Church. There seems to be a pattern here.]
This is one of the few differences she seems to have with her dead son. Casey was a eucharist minister in the Catholic Church. She still believes, however, in a “higher power”, an afterlife, and that fate ordained that her son would die and that her family would suffer and that something good would come from it. [What messiah complex? It certainly seems that Cindy does believe in a life after death, since she regularly reports what Casey is now telling her. I wonder why she doesn't hear any beyond the grave messages from any of the dead killed by Saddam or from any of those killed by her terrorist "freedom fighters"?]
Sheehan is now a complete pacifist. In her view, no war – not the second world war, nor the toppling of the Taliban – is worth spilling one drop of human blood. [Not the war against Nazism, not the wars against slavery. No wars are worth spilling one drop of human blood. So every wartime President is also a war criminal just like George Bush. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt. No wonder she hates this country's history so.]
The name Sheehan, she says, is Irish for peace [so whateth? It's also the name of a very peculiar, but apt syndrome. In any case, Cindy's now divorced. Her maiden name is Miller], and she takes her pacifist beliefs so devoutly that she says she doesn’t even “hate” Bush (although, she adds slyly, she certainly believes that there is evil in the world).
“Camp Casey showed that there is way more good in the world than evil. And we know that evil can never win. Evil never beats good.” [So when Hitler occupied most of Europe, evil was not winning? What stopped him, Cindy, if it wasn't war?]
It’s perhaps too glib to label Sheehan’s new world view a mere coping mechanism. The death of her boy has changed her forever. “I discovered I was a lot stronger than I thought,” she says. “The death of your child? You can’t even go there until it happens. Trust me. It’s 100 times worse, 1000 times worse, than you can ever imagine. But the sun still comes up in the morning and you still have to put one foot in front of the other. You have to find a way to do that.”
What burns the righteousness of her mission into her soul is that Casey would have agreed with her. He was a patriotic young man who went to war because his friends had to go too; he opposed the invasion of Iraq but didn’t want to abandon his comrades. [Within days of Casey's death Cindy said in a TV interview that Casey wanted to go to Iraq to fight for the United States. She is now lying about what he wanted to do. If Casey had agreed with Cindy, he would never have joined the army and he would have never re-enlisted, especially after the Iraq invasion when it was fairly certain he would be ordered to go there.]
“He told me that he felt Bush was just using him and his buddies,” she says, “that Iraq was no threat and that he didn’t understand why we were invading in the first place. [And yet he re-enlisted, long after the invasion of Iraq had occurred. And his father says he was happy with the army and proud of his service.]
I told him, ‘Go to Canada, I’ll get the car and drive you there.’ But he said he had to go. People ask me if I’m angry that he volunteered, but that’s the only thing Casey could do. It’d be like being mad at a bird for flying.” [It's the only thing you can do if you want to defend your country and are willing to die for it. Cindy cannot face that her son betrayed her by being a patriot.]
To European eyes, Cindy Sheehan seems remarkably un-American. She’s not. [Oh, yes she is. And isn't this supposed to be a news account?] Many ordinary Americans share her horror at the actions of the country they love dearly, though few are as forthright as her. [This is known by this Scotsperson through divine revelation presumably.
She does share one trait with nearly all her countrymen, however. As we are parting, I say to Sheehan: “So I take it your politics are pretty socialist, then?” She looks like I’ve just spat in her face. One of her American friends, who lives in the UK, says: “He means like the old Labour Party – social justice, social democracy, all that.”
“Oh,” she says. “Oh my God. Yes. Socialist? Is that what you call it? God, I thought you were calling me a communist.” [Yes, the country should take its marching orders from such a worldly sophisticate.]
As I get out of the car, another of her American friends [entourage] says to me: “She’s been called a lot of things in her time, but in American-English, what you just said is like calling someone a paedophile.” You can take the radical out of the American, it seems, but you can’t take the American out of the radical. Communist, apparently, is the worst c-word you could ever level at Cindy Sheehan.
