fighting words
What Cindy Sheehan Really Wants
Now imagine if she gets it.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Friday, Aug. 19, 2005, at 1:44 PM PT
When are the bureau chiefs of our newspapers and networks going to snap out of their own vacation-induced trances and send some grown-up correspondents down to Crawford, Texas? For weeks now, Cindy Sheehan has not been asked a single question that is any tougher than "How does it feel?" The media have been acting as her megaphone. After Slate published her real opinions on politics (a weird confection of pacifism with paranoid anti-Zionism) last Monday, she was eventually asked about her statement that her son Casey had been killed in a war for Israel, and she denied ever having made it. So, we must now say that, as well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist.
After Slate published an extract from a letter that she wrote last March to ABC Nightline, Anderson Cooper of CNN asked her about the anti-Israel remarks the letter contained. She denied making them and proceeded in her blog to assert that someone had gotten hold of her original letter and somehow doctored it. This dark and murky allegation—evincing further paranoia on her part—has been easily and convincingly refuted, as can be seen in this sidebar. Cindy Sheehan, not content with echoing the Bin-Ladenist line that the president is the real "terrorist" and that he is the tool of a Jewish cabal, has dug a pit of falsehood around her own wild story.
This week, before family matters called her away from Crawford, she mutated her demand—that the president lower himself into that pit and join her down there—into the shameless request that he join her for Friday prayers. The nerve! We all know how much the MoveOn.org forces believe in the power of prayer, and in the president's sincere religious convictions (their contempt for this is the only thing on which I agree with them). But, hey, try anything once for a tear-jerker or a bit of moral blackmail—what Maureen Dowd has so laughably called "absolute moral authority."
What do these people imagine that they are demanding? Would they like a referendum to be held, among the relatives of the fallen in Iraq, to determine the future conduct of the war? I think I can promise them that they would heavily lose such a vote. But what if the right wing were also to demand such a vote and the "absolute moral authority" that supposedly goes with it?
One of three things could then happen. The ultra-right anti-Zionist forces of David Duke and Patrick J. Buchanan, both of whom approvingly speak of Ms. Sheehan's popular groundswell, would still lose the vote. So would the media fools who semi-automatically identify Sheehan and her LaRouche-like drivel with the "left" or "progressive" forces. This would leave us with a random pseudo-majority, made up of veterans and their relatives. Who wants this to be the group that decides? One might as well live in a populist, jingoist banana republic. Never mind the Constitution, or even the War Powers Act. Only victims and martyrs can decide! Get ready to gather under the balcony of a leader who speaks rotundly of such glory.
Then there is the question of humanitarian or pacifist emotion. Some have perhaps been drawn to "Camp Casey" out of reverence for life. Their demand, however, is an immediate coalition withdrawal from Iraq. Have they seriously asked themselves how humane the consequences of that would be? The news of a pullout would put a wolfish grin on the faces of the "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia" brigade, as Mr. Zarqawi's force has named itself in order to resolve all doubt. Every effort would be made to detonate every available car-bomb and mine, so as to claim the withdrawal of coalition forces as a military victory for jihad. I can quite understand Ms. Sheehan's misery at the thought of her son being killed on some desolate road. But will she be on hand to console the parents whose sons are shot in the back while being ordered to surrender and withdraw?
I hope I don't insult the intelligent readers of this magazine if I point out what the consequences of such a capitulation would be for the people of Iraq. Paint your own mental picture of a country that was already almost beyond rescue in 2003, as it is handed back to an alliance of homicidal Baathists and Bin-Ladenists. Comfort yourself, if that's the way you think, with the idea that such people are only nasty because Bush made them so. Intone the Sheehan mantra—repeated this very week—that terrorism is no problem because after all Bush is the leading terrorist in the world. See if that cheers you up. Try it on your friends. Live with it, if you are ready to live with the consequences of what you desire.
This is an argument, about a real war, that deserves moral seriousness on all sides. Flippancy and light-mindedness have no place. Cindy Sheehan's cheerleader Michael Moore has compared the "insurgents" in Iraq to the American minutemen and Founding Fathers. Do I taunt him for not volunteering to fight himself in such a noble cause? Of course I do not. That would be a low and sly blow. Do I say that he is spouting fascistic nonsense? Of course I do. Is Cindy Sheehan exempt from any verdict on her wacko opinions because of her bereavement? I would say that she is not. Has she been led into a false position by eager cynics who have sacrificed nothing and who would happily surrender unconditionally to the worst enemy that currently faces civilization? That's for her to clarify. While she ponders, she should forgo prayer, stay in California, and end her protest.
sidebar
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Cindy Sheehan has denied that she wrote certain parts of the March 15, 2005, letter that was e-mailed to Nightline in her name. This was the letter quoted in Slate's Aug. 15 Fighting Words column. Specifically, Sheehan claimed that her letter was doctored after the fact to include anti-Israel language. Here is the controversial passage:
Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agendas after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy … not for the real reason, because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy.
Was the letter doctored? Or did she write the anti-Israel language in it?
In March, after participating in a Nightline town hall meeting, Cindy Sheehan wrote a letter and e-mailed it to James Morris—an anti-Zionist activist—who forwarded it at her request to Nightline Executive Producer Tom Bettag. Sheehan admits this, and Nightline spokesperson Emily Lenzner has confirmed that Bettag received Sheehan's e-mail via Morris on March 15.
On Aug. 15, Anderson Cooper asked her about the anti-Zionist statements contained in the letter, and she denied having made them. Sheehan then claimed that Morris doctored her Nightline letter. On Aug. 17, she wrote in her blog:
Another "big deal" today was the lie that I had said that Casey died for Israel. I never said that, I never wrote that. I had supposedly said it in a letter that I wrote to Ted Koppel's producer in March. I wrote the letter because I was upset at the way Ted treated me when I appeared at a Nightline Town Hall meeting in January right after the inauguration. I felt that Ted had totally disrespected me. I wrote the letter to Ted Bettag [sic] and cc'd a copy to the person who gave me Ted's [sic] address. I believe he changed the email and sent it out to capitalize on my new found notoriety by promoting his own agenda.
[Note: Sheehan misremembered when she said that she cc'd it. Nightline and Morris both confirm that she sent the letter to Morris, who forwarded it to Bettag.]
Sheehan subsequently implied, through a spokesperson at Fenton Communications, that Morris had hacked into her e-mail. Later, Fenton Communications and Sheehan backed off the hacking claim, but both maintain that the words in the letter about Israel are not her own. For his part, Morris denies having tampered with the letter and confirms that the version circulating is the same as the one she sent to him.
There is other proof that Sheehan wrote the whole letter. After she sent the letter to Morris, Sheehan also e-mailed it to several other people, including Tony Tersch, a retiree living in Thailand, and Skeeter Gallagher. Both belong to a small Internet bulletin board called Bull Yard. Tersch had become her correspondent after contacting her out of personal and political sympathy. At Gallagher's request, Tersch posted Sheehan's letter to Bull Yard on March 17. Here is the letter as it appears there. This is the version that has been circulating, and from which Slate quoted. Tersch has confirmed that he received the letter from Sheehan directly and has stated that he did not doctor the e-mail before posting it.
Unless Sheehan is the victim of an elaborate Morris-Tersch conspiracy quietly put in motion on March 17, months before she became famous, those are her words.—By Blake Wilson
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.
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