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[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

>  Cindy's Victory 
> By William Rivers Pitt 
> t r u t h o u t | Perspective 
> 
> Monday 15 August 2005 
> 
> 
> >> This thing, the wheels are coming off it. 
>> - Gen. Barry McCaffrey, after returning from an inspection of Iraq, 
>> 08/12/2005.
>  
> They are sunburned and storm-lashed. They sleep in tents that sit along the 
> muddy earth of drainage ditches by the side of the road. They have been 
> heckled by "counter-demonstrators" who chanted "We don't care!" during a rendition 
> of "God Bless America." They have been attacked by fire ants and hassled by 
> local health inspectors. On Thursday morning, at about 5:30am, they were 
> blasted awake by a fourteen-car convoy of Secret Service SUVs which roared 
> through the camp at high speed while leaning on their horns the whole time. 
> They have been jolted with fear when a local resident fired his weapon into 
> the air several times to make them go away. When the shooter, one Larry 
> Mattlage, was asked why he was firing his gun, he said, "We're going to start 
> doing our war and it's going to be underneath the law. We're going to do whatever 
> it takes." It is safe to say, therefore, that their lives have been 
> threatened. 
> The thing is, they've already won. 
> Cindy Sheehan and her ever-growing band of supporters intend to stay in 
> those ditches outside Bush's Crawford "ranch" until he comes out to talk or until 
> August 31st, whichever comes first. If he does not come out by the end of 
> the month, she intends to follow him to Washington and camp out in front of the 
> White House. She and the others have been there for more than a week now, 
> garnering more and more attention from the national and international press. 
> Yes, they are tired. Yes, they are uncomfortable. Yes, they have already won. 
> The nearly 2,000 crosses, crescents and Stars of David that make up the 
> Arlington West cemetery, erected by the demonstrators a few days ago to represent 
> all the fallen American soldiers in Iraq, stretch almost a mile down the 
> country road. Bush had to drive past that on Friday when he went to his 
> fundraising shindig at the Broken Spoke Ranch. 54 crosses have been added to the 
> cemetery since he first showed up for his vacation at the beginning of August. It 
> takes a while to drive past them all. This man, who cannot abide hearing or 
> seeing anything in the way of dissent or disagreement, saw those crosses 
> whistle past his window. That is a victory. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> August 10, 2005 | A portion of Arlington West in Crawford. 
> (Photo: Will Pitt / t r u t h o u t) 
> 
> 
> Over the weekend, as the camp prepared for the arrival of the 
> counter-demonstrators, a huge diesel pickup truck rumbled into camp with its nose 
> menacingly pointed towards the tents. It sat for a while, and everyone waited to see 
> what would happen. Ann Wright, the main organizer of camp activities, finally 
> approached the truck and met the driver. He was a father, Wright discovered, 
> and his son had been killed in Iraq. 
> He did not agree with this protest, he said, but wanted to know if his son's 
> name was on one of the crosses in the Arlington West cemetery. Ann Wright 
> invited the man to walk the rows of crosses and find his son's name. They found 
> it. Ann and the man from the truck sat down in front of the cross, wrapped 
> their arms around each other, and wept. Later, the man shared a beer with 
> Cindy Sheehan and told her he loved her. That is a victory, one that surpasses 
> any sort of mean politics. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> August 10, 2005 | The grave of Casey Sheehan, who died in Iraq, from the 
> Arlington West cemetery. 
> (Photo: Will Pitt / t r u t h o u t) 
> 
> 
> For three years now, both before the invasion of Iraq began and then after 
> it was unleashed, millions of people have marched and screamed and stomped in 
> order to try to put a stop to this disaster. The Bush administration was not 
> pushed off its tracks even an inch in all this time. Discussions and debates 
> on why we are there and whether or not we should leave have been bunted 
> aside. 
> Half a dozen reasons for the invasion and occupation have been put forth - 
> weapons of mass destruction, ties to al Qaeda terrorism, the building of a 
> democracy, Hussein was a bad man - but in the end, the debate is halted by the 
> kind of brainless thinking that left us in Vietnam for far too long: "We are 
> there, so we have to stay." This was the accepted wisdom. 
> Not anymore. 
> All the protests, all the articles, all the books, all the whistleblowers, 
> all the criticism combined have not packed the kind of punch that one mother 
> in a ditch has delivered to this administration's carefully crafted fantasy 
> vision of what is happening in Iraq. Suddenly, Bush has been forced to go 
> before cameras and try to explain why staying in Iraq is the only option 
> available. Suddenly, the accepted wisdom isn't so accepted anymore. A majority of 
> Americans, according to every available poll, agree with the lady in the ditch 
> and not with the president. 
> Bush isn't doing a very good job of explaining his side of things, and his 
> people seem unable to keep their stories straight. After the fourteen Marines 
> from Ohio were killed in Iraq, Bush got up and stated that it would be 
> unreasonable for him to lay down a timetable for withdrawal. Yet at the same time, 
> his generals were bent over maps and logistics notebooks, trying to do 
> exactly that. 
> The Los Angeles Times on Saturday took a look at the mixed messages coming 
> from the war party. "Are the president and the Pentagon on the same page over 
> the war in Iraq?" asked the Times. "That question is percolating in 
> Washington after President Bush twice in the last 10 days tried to clarify a message 
> sent by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and military leaders. After 
> Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials indicated their desire to shift away from 
> discussing the struggle against terrorism as a 'war' - saying it placed too 
> much emphasis on military solutions to terrorism - Bush repeatedly used the word 
> 'war' in an Aug. 3 speech to conservative state legislators." 
> "Then," continued the Times article, "on Thursday, Bush dismissed as 
> 'rumors' and 'speculation' reports that U.S. commanders were contemplating 
> significant withdrawals of American troops from Iraq next year. His comments came 
> after Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. military official in Iraq, and Army 
> Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, the top ground commander, had publicly raised 
> exactly that possibility." 
> Hm. 
> On Sunday, out of nowhere, the Washington Post published a page-one story 
> titled "US Lowers Sights on What Can Be Achieved in Iraq." The story stated, 
> "The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be 
> achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for 
> far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end 
> in four months. The United States no longer expects to see a model new 
> democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of 
> people are free from serious security or economic challenges." 
> The article goes on to describe how any "democracy" will have to bend itself 
> around the laws of Islam, a fact that chucks the secular-government talking 
> points into the round file. Iraqi women, should not get their hopes up about 
> being granted significant rights of any kind. The kicker came in the third 
> paragraph, which quotes an unnamed US official saying, "What we expected to 
> achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground. 
> We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and 
> shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning." 
> In other words, the whole thing was a Charlie Foxtrot from soup to nuts. 
> There are no weapons of mass destruction, the terrorists connected to 9/11 were 
> not there (though there are plenty there now learning how best to kill 
> Americans with bombs), and democracy is not to be found anywhere on the menu. The 
> hearts and flowers we were promised have not come, and are not coming. Sure, 
> Hussein is still a bad man, but that rationale for this war is an outright 
> laugher when compared to the cost of getting rid of him. Though Bush clings 
> desperately to his canned lines to defend his actions, the facts speak for 
> themselves. This whole bloody enterprise has been a colossal, expensive, murderous 
> failure. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> August 10, 2005 | Wearing a hat with supporting messages from friends, Cindy 
> Sheehan of Vacaville, California, takes a moment's rest in the ditch on 
> Wednesday. On Friday afternoon, she was contacted by Coretta Scott King and Rosa 
> Parks. 
> (Photo: Will Pitt / t r u t h o u t) 
> 
> 
> The funny part is that Bush almost certainly could have maintained the 
> public fantasy with one simple act. He could have jumped into his pickup truck 
> last Saturday, when Cindy Sheehan was alone except for her sister in that ditch, 
> and driven down to see her. He could have invited her into the shotgun seat 
> and driven her around the neighborhood for a few minutes. He could have then 
> gone back up to the "ranch" and told the press corps that he met with her, 
> and that they had looked into each other's hearts. That would have been the end 
> of it. 
> He did not do that. Now, his generals are at loggerheads with the public 
> line coming from the White House about getting out of Iraq. Unnamed officials 
> are going on the record to state that the whole plan was hare-brained from the 
> word "go," and that the entire deal sits now in the ashes of its own utterly 
> ruined failure. Bush has to keep explaining why we have to stay, why 
> rearranging the deck chairs on this Titanic is a noble and worthwhile process. 
> Meanwhile, the whole world mocks him for hiding from one woman and her broken 
> heart. 
> Cindy Sheehan has done this with one act of conscience. She has managed to 
> do what no other protest or action or statement has been able to do. She has 
> knocked the wheels right off this absurd applecart. She has called the man to 
> account. She can hang her own "Mission Accomplished" banner above her tent in 
> that ditch. She has already won. 
> Her son would be very, very proud. 
> William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling 
> author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The 
> Greatest Sedition Is Silence. 
> 
> ------- 
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