Cindy Sheehan's War, in a Ditch at the Side of the Road

Tomgram: Cindy Sheehan's War

Cindy, Don, and George
On Being in a Ditch at the Side of the Road
By Tom Engelhardt
LINKS: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=12740

Retired four-star Army General Barry McCaffrey to Time Magazine: "The Army's wheels are going to come off in the next 24 months. We are now in a period of considerable strategic peril. It's because Rumsfeld has dug in his heels and said, I cannot retreat from my position."

Cindy Sheehan testifying at Rep. John Conyers public hearings on the Downing Street Memo: "My son, Spc Casey Austin Sheehan, was KIA in Sadr City Baghdad on 04/04/04. He was in Iraq for only 2 weeks before [Coalition Provisional Authority head] L. Paul Bremer inflamed the Shi'ite Militia into a rebellion which resulted in the deaths of Casey and 6 other brave soldiers who were tragically killed in an ambush. Bill Mitchell, the father of Sgt. Mike Mitchell who was one of the other soldiers killed that awful day is with us here. This is a picture of Casey when he was 7 months old. It's an enlargement of a picture he carried in his wallet until the day he was killed. He loved this picture of himself. It was returned to us with his personal effects from Iraq. He always sucked on those two fingers. When he was born, he had a flat face from passing through the birth canal and we called him �Edward G' short for Edward G. Robinson. How many of you have seen your child in his/her premature coffin? It is a shocking and very painful sight. The most heartbreaking aspect of seeing Casey lying in his casket for me, was that his face was flat again because he had no muscle tone. He looked like he did when he was a baby laying in his bassinette. The most tragic irony is that if the Downing Street Memo proves to be true, Casey and thousands of people should still be alive."

Donald Rumsfeld testifying before the House Armed Services Committee in March, 2005: "The world has seen, in the last 3 1/2 years, the capability of the United States of America to go into Afghanistan . . . and with 20,000, 15,000 troops working with the Afghans do what 200,000 Soviets couldn't do in a decade. They've seen the United States and the coalition forces go into Iraq. . . . That has to have a deterrent effect on people." (Ann Scott Tyson, "U.S. Gaining World's Respect From Wars, Rumsfeld Asserts," the Washington Post, March 11, 2005 [scroll down])

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?"

A teaser at the "Careers and Jobs" screen of GoArmy.com: "Want an extra $400 a month?" Click on it and part of what comes up is: "Qualified active Army recruits may be eligible for AIP [Assignment Incentive Pay] of $400 per month, up to 36 months for a total of up to $14,400, if they agree to be assigned to an Army-designated priority unit with a critical role in current global commitments."

Who Is in That Ditch?

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.

Confusion in the Ranks

Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post reported last week that "a U.S. general said... the violence would likely escalate as the deadline approached for drafting a constitution for Iraq." For two years now, this has been a dime-a-dozen prediction from American officials trying to cover their future butts. For the phrase "drafting a constitution" in that general's quote, you need only substitute "after the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons" (July 2003), "for handing over sovereignty" (June 2004), "for voting for a new Iraqi government" (Jan. 2005) -- or, looking ahead, "for voting on the constitution" (October, 2005) and, yet again, "for voting for a new Iraqi government" (December 2005), just as you will be able to substitute as yet unknown similar "milestones" that won't turn out to be milestones as long as our President insists that we must "stay the course" in Iraq as he did only recently as his Crawford vacation began.

After each "spike of violence," at each "tipping point," each time a "corner is turned," Bush officials or top commanders predict that they have the insurgency under control only to be ambushed by yet another "spike" in violence. This May, for example, more than three months after violence was supposed to have spiked and receded in the wake of the Iraqi election, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Richard Myers offered a new explanation -- the "recent spike in violence� represents an attempt to discredit the new Iraqi government and cabinet." When brief lulls in insurgent attacks (which often represent changes in tactics) aren't being declared proof that the Iraqi insurgency is faltering/failing/coming under control, then the spikes are being claimed as "the last gasp" of the insurgency, proof of the impending success of Bush administration policies -- those "last throes" that Vice President Cheney so notoriously described to CNN's Wolf Blitzer as June ended.

Recently in a throw-(not throe-)up-your-hands mode, Army Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, which oversees Baghdad, offered the following, taking credit for having predicted the very throe his troops were then engulfed in: "If you look at the past few months, insurgents have not been able to sustain attacks, but they tend to surge every four weeks or so. We are right in the middle of one of those periods and predicted this would come... If they are going to influence the constitution process, they have only a few days left to do it, and we fully expect the attacks to continue."

You would think that someone in an official capacity would conclude, sooner or later, that Iraq was a spike in violence.

It's an accepted truth of our times that the Bush administration has been the most secretive, disciplined, and on-message administration in our history. So what an out-of-control couple of weeks for the President and his pals! His polls were at, or near, historic lows; his Iraq War approval numbers headed for, or dipping below, 40% -- and polls are, after all, the message boards for much of what's left of American democracy. As he was preparing for his record-setting Presidential vacation in Crawford, George and his advisors couldn't even agree on whether we were in a "global struggle with violent extremism" or in a Global War on Terror. (The President finally opted for war.) He was, of course, leaving behind in Washington a Special Counsel, called into being by his administration but now beyond its control, who held a sword of judicial Damocles over key presidential aides (and who can probably parse sinking presidential polls as well as anyone).

Iraq -- you can't leave home without it -- has, of course, been at the heart of everything Bushworld hasn't been able to shake off at least since May 2, 2003. On that day (when, ominously enough, 7 American soldiers were wounded by a grenade attack in Fallujah), our President co-piloted a jet onto the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier halted off the San Diego coast (lest it dock and he only be able to walk on board). All togged out in a military uniform, he declared "major combat operations" at an end, while standing under a White House-produced banner reading "mission accomplished." Ever since then, George has been on that mission (un)accomplished and Iraq has proved nothing if not a black hole, sucking in his administration and the American military along with neocon dreams and plans of every ambitious sort.

The Iraqi insurgency that should never have happened, or should at least have died down after unknown thousands of its foot soldiers were killed or imprisoned by the American military, inconveniently managed to turn the early days of August into a killing zone for American soldiers. Sixteen Marine Reservists from a single unit in Ohio were killed in a couple of days; 7 soldiers from the Pennsylvania National Guard were killed, again in a few days. Thirty-seven Americans were reported to have died in Iraq in the first 11 days of the presidential vacation, putting American casualties at the top of the TV news night after night. And yet the administration has seemed capable only of standing by helplessly, refusing to give an inch on the "compassion" President's decision -- he and his advisors are still navigating by the anti-Vietnam playbook -- not to visit grief-stricken communities in either Ohio or Pennsylvania, or ever to be caught attending the funeral of one of the boys or girls he sent abroad to die. He did manage, however, to fly to the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico to sign the energy bill and also left his ranch to hobnob with millionaire Republican donors.

In this same period, cracks in relations between an increasingly angry military command in Iraq and administration officials back in Washington began to appear for all to see. The issue, for desperate military officers, was � as for Cindy Sheehan -- how in the world to get our troops out of Iraq before the all-volunteer military went over an Iraqi cliff, wheels and all.

As July ended, our top general in Iraq, George W. Casey, announced (with many conditional "ifs") that we should be able to start drawing-down American troops significantly by the following spring -- that tens of thousands of them were likely to leave then and tens of thousands more by the end of 2006, and Don Rumsfeld initially backed him up somewhat edgily. Then, as Rumsfeld hedged, more military people jumped into the media fray with leaks and comments of all sorts about possible Iraqi drawdowns and there was a sudden squall of front-page articles on withdrawal strategies for a hard-pressed administration in an increasingly unpopular war. At the same time, confusingly, reports began to surface indicating that, because of another of those prospective "spikes" in violence, the administration would actually be increasing American troop strength in Iraq before the December elections by 10,000-20,000 soldiers.

Finally, after a war council of the Rumsfeld and Rice (Pentagon and State Department) "teams" in Crawford last week, the President held a press conference (devoted in part to responding to Cindy Sheehan) and promptly launched a new, ad-style near-jingle to explain the withdrawal moment to the American people: "As Iraqis stand up," he intoned, "we will stand down."

But in a week in which the American general in command of transportation in Iraq announced that roadside bomb attacks against his convoys had doubled over the past year, such words sounded empty -- especially as news flowed in suggesting that, while the insurgents continued to fight fiercely, the new Iraqi military seemed in no rush whatsoever to "stand up" and that our own commanders believed it might never do so in significant numbers. At his news conference, our never-never-land President nonetheless spoke several times of being pleased to announce "progress" in Iraq. ("And we're making progress training the Iraqis. Oh, I know it's hard for some Americans to see that progress, but we are making progress.")

He spoke as well of attempts to ease the burden on the no-longer-weekend warriors of the National Guard and the Reserves (who are taking unprecedented casualties in August). He said: "We've also taken steps to improve the call-up process for our Guard and for our Reserves. We've provided them with earlier notifications. We've given them greater certainty about the length of their tours. We minimized the number of extensions and repeat mobilizations." Unfortunately, at just this moment, Joint Chiefs head Myers was speaking of the possibility of calling soldiers back for their third tours of duty in Iraq: "There's the possibility of people going back for a third term, sure. That's always out there. We are at war."

"Pulling the troops out would send a terrible signal to the enemy," the President insisted as he turned to the matter of withdrawal in his news conference. He then dismissed drawdown maneuvers as "speculation and rumors"; and, on being confronted by a reporter with the statements of his own military men, added, "I suspect what you were hearing was speculation based upon progress that some are seeing in Iraq as to whether or not the Iraqis will be able to take the fight to the enemy."

While that may sound vague, it was, nonetheless, the sound of a President (who, along with his Secretary of Defense, has always promised to abide by whatever his generals in the field wanted) disputing those commanders in public. Gen. Casey was also reportedly "rebuked" in private for his withdrawal comments. Our commanders in Iraq are, of course, the official realists in this war, having long ago given up on the idea that the insurgency could ever be defeated by force of U.S. arms and worrying as they do about those "wheels coming off" the American military machine.

In fact, the Bush administration's occupation of Iraq -- as Howard Zinn put the matter recently, "[W]e liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein, but not from us." -- is threatening to prove one of the great asymmetric catastrophes in recent military history. A rag-tag bunch of insurgents, now estimated in the tens of thousands, using garage-door openers and cell phones to set off roadside bombs and egg-timers to fire mortars at U.S. bases (lest they be around when the return fire comes in), have fought the U.S. military to at least a draw. We're talking about a military that, not so long ago, was being touted as the most powerful force not just on this planet at this moment but on any planet in all of galactic history.

Previously, such rumors of withdrawal followed by a quiet hike in troop strength in Iraq might have been simply another clever administration attempt to manipulate the public and have it both ways. At the moment, however, they seem to be a sign not of manipulation but of confusion, discord, and uncertainty about what to do next. If the public was left confused by such "conflicting signals" about