Gee.....I wanted to play with him some more.
Posted on 08/16/2005 5:56:50 PM PDT by kaehurowing
The Tipping Point in Iraq
Fawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.com
The tipping point in the American public’s support for the Iraq war may already be here, its arrival accelerated by an unlikely figure: A middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow American woman whose story made headlines and vaulted her into national consciousness this month. Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother of a soldier, Casey Sheehan, 24, who fell in battle last year, began her protest by crisscrossing the country demanding answers for why the US continues to wage what she has called an unjust and unnecessary war.
She established an anti-war organization, Gold Star Families for Peace, that labored largely in obscurity, until last week, when she set up camp in Crawford, Texas, along the road leading to President Bush’s ranch, where he is vacationing.
What began as a solitary campaign by a grieving mother has taken on the trappings of a political movement, complete with a political consultant, a team of public relations professionals and sundry activists who have mobilized around her cause — a cause that seems to hit a chord with a public that polls show is growing increasingly dissatisfied with the war in Iraq.
Beyond her ever-swelling vigil in Crawford, Sheehan has also launched a TV ad campaign (which aired with a modest $15,000 buy of airtime in Waco, the nearest broadcast market to Bush’s 1,600 acre spread) in which she tells the president about the suffering she has endured at her son’s death. “Mr. President, I want to tell you face to face how much this hurts,” she intones. “How many of our loved ones need to die in this senseless war?”
Bush has been publicly respectful of Sheehan — not wanting to refute the mother of a fallen soldier — and last Thursday responded to reporters that he “thought long and hard about her position,” even though he disagreed with her.
To be sure, President Bush had met with Sheehan as part of a larger group of grieving mothers just two months after her son’s death in April 2004, but what she got out of the encounter was sympathy, not answers.
And that’s what a lot of Americans want these days — answers.
As the administration remains locked on the same disastrous course in Iraq, a nightmare for Americans and Iraqis alike, voices are being raised by a gamut of commentators who had hitherto displayed only muted concern over the mess in that country, whose invasion, they are now convinced, was not just inadvisable and costly, but morally wrong as well.
Those of us who had applauded the downfall of Saddam’s totalitarian regime, and awaited the emergence of an egalitarian and democratic society in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, were wrenchingly disillusioned to see the country enmeshed in a blood-soaked emergency, tribal feuding and rampant corruption. We took Washington’s assurances that it intended to liberate Iraqis from totalitarianism in good faith. The assurances were not worthless. It is the war that is now worthless.
When Americans went to Vietnam they justified their venture on morality and geopolitics — the loss of that country to communist domination, the domino theory had it, would have resulted in the fall of Australia, Malaysia, India, and even Hawaii — and had that been true, the venture would have been worth it. But it was not. And 58,000 American soldiers died. An equally firm moral case could be made for invading Iraq — the liberation of its people from tyranny — were that true. But it is not.
It now boils down to American will, the will to demonstrate American resolve and reliability. Those ordinary folk, like Cindy Sheehan, who oppose the war do not do so because they were against the overthrow of Saddam’s brutal dictatorship or against the emergence of a democratic Iraq. If the war was fought with that aim in mind, it clearly would have been a moral, even quixotic, war.
But this says no more than that the invasion was triggered by good intentions, and if good intentions were the aim, what were neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney doing mapping out its grand design, and deceiving us about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s complicity with terrorists?
Until documentary evidence emerges, I will not embrace the American left’s notion that the US wanted to “establish a solidly pro-American regime in Iraq that would provide basing rights for the US military for decades to come,” as Helena Cobban suggested in The Nation last week, a position that would “enable Washington to threaten military action against both Iran and Syria.”
But what I will embrace as true is the notion that the invasion of Iraq has alienated Muslims against the US, not just in the Arab world but throughout the Muslim world. (According to the Pew Research Center, the number of Indonesians, for example, who viewed the US favorably fell from 61 percent to 15 percent, and from the summer of 2002 to the summer of 2004, those who viewed the US favorably in Egypt plummeted from 15 percent to 2 percent.)
As for Iraq, the elusive endeavor of introducing its society, along with other societies in the region, to democracy is now a pipe dream. Saddam’s dictatorship has been replaced by an abusive regime hell-bent on settling scores with its rivals.
The US has failed in its aims in the country it invaded two and a half years ago — and whether you see those aims as benign or egregious will depend on your ideological orientation — but it is not above playing the blame card, in this case blaming both Syria and Iran for that failure, alleging that they are “interfering” in the internal affairs of their neighbor by aiding the insurgency.
If you don’t want to call that brazen, well then, call it ironic. For the US, which has no business being in Iraq in the first place, is blaming that country’s neighbors for “interference.”
Moreover, the United States’ Greater Middle East initiative, whose goals of encouraging democratic norms and promoting freedom in the region, are commendable, is now dismissed because of the credibility problems that Washington has created for itself in that part of the world. That is why reformers in the Middle East are reluctant to be tarred with an American brush. Who wants to trust a big power that continues to support Israel blindly and that has brought chaos and misery to Iraq?
Meanwhile, back in Crawford, Cindy Sheehan, along with her supporters, continues her vigil, demanding from the president answers to her pressing and compelling questions.
She is not the only American asking them. As the New York Times columnist, Bob Herbert, wrote last Thursday: “Ask a thousand different suits why we’re in Iraq and you’ll get a thousand different answers. Ask how we plan to win the war, and you’ll get a blank stare.”
The real problem is that from the terrorists' perspective, it isn't false hope.
Well, when I say "false hope", I mean hope that will ultimately prove false in the end. I believe that America will stay the course.
As far as the Iraqi dead-enders are concerned, any hope they have is "true" from their perspective. And, when that Iraqi dead-ender's hope is dying, the liberal news media's efforts to undermine the morale of the American Home Front breathes new life into that hope and gives him the encouragement to hang on just one more month and to try to kill just a few more Americans.
"After all, this is a "Free Republic", isn't it?"
Free Republic is a privately owned website and thus private property.
If it were owned by the government, that would be one thing, but sinbce it is not federally funded, guess what.
You cen get the zot, amuse us, and goodbye to you.
The Big Liberal Media wants a Civil War to help rescue their businesses.
Gee.....I wanted to play with him some more.
So did I, but he'll be back.
They always come back.
We are nowhere near a 'tipping point' though the liberal media desperately wants to think we are.
Oh puhleeze!! It has been less than two years, and we've had to help build that country back from years of neglect by its so called 'leader'. Sadaam made public works projects contingent upon support for him. If a village was less than enthusiastic, they didn't get even basic services like sewer and water.
It will take a long time to get that country anywhere NEAR running smoothly. I'd not even a professional pundit, but I figured THAT out!
If you only ask the question of the people in the largest cities (liberals) you might get a blank stare, but ask the people in the heartland and you'll get the answer and it will always be the same. We're in Iraq to establish democracy in an area of the world that threatens us and we're not leaving until it's established.
you got me thinking, during the first gulf war (I was just a kid then) we used to go to the local AFB here (Westover in Chicopee MA) and greet the troops who were coming home, wonder how much work it would be trying to orginize something like that.
"you got me thinking, during the first gulf war (I was just a kid then) we used to go to the local AFB here (Westover in Chicopee MA) and greet the troops who were coming home, wonder how much work it would be trying to orginize something like that."
armymarinemom : Any words of advice for bgnn32
Or so the Arab fascists hope, just like the communists winning Nam on the PR front, but it may not be the same now. The communications structure is vastly different and we can now more about what is really happening despite the media elite.
I couldn't give a rat's hindquarters what the "Muslim world" thinks of us. If anything, I want them to fear total annihilation unless they clean up the rat's nests within their countries. We've been far too easy on them...and far too easy with our so-called allies on the security council who express outrage at attacks on America while dealing under the table with our attackers.
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