Tide turning on Sheehan
August 26, 2005
rockymountainnews.com
In spite of her glorified treatment in the liberal media, the tide of public opinion is turning against Cindy Sheehan. Her words and actions simply don't stand up to objective scrutiny. She's a veritable supermarket of rants, cliches and conspiracy theories about President Bush and the United States of America.
She opposed U.S. action against the Taliban in Afghanistan. She wants Israel out of Palestine. Because her son was killed in 2004 ("murdered" by George W. Bush, as she puts it), she's refused to pay her income taxes. She's severed relations with her in-laws as punishment for their voting for Bush in 2004. She believes the "mainstream media" (The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Newsweek, The Associated Press, ABC, CBS, NBC?) are "a propaganda tool for the government," and that were it not for left-wing bloggers on the Internet, "we would already be a fascist state."
She wants the president to be impeached, tried for war crimes and sent to jail. She brands the U.S. government a "morally repugnant system" and declares that "this country is not worth dying for."
Last April, she spoke at a San Francisco State University rally supporting Lynne Stewart, the radical left-wing lawyer who was convicted in 2003 of complicity in a terrorist conspiracy, passing information from her client in jail to his agents on the outside. Stewart's client was Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (the "blind sheikh"), an Egyptian terrorist with links to al-Qaida, who was given a life sentence in 1995 for his role in a plot to launch a "Day of Terror" in New York City, to include blowing up the U.N. building, the George Washington Bridge, the Holland Tunnel and other landmarks.
At the Stewart rally, Sheehan asserted that Bush and "his band of neo-cons" deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to happen so that it would serve as "their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through." She went on to compare Stewart to Atticus Finch, the courageous lawyer in To Kill A Mockingbird. Finch, you'll recall, defended a black man who was falsely accused of raping a white woman in a segregationist Southern town. What a ludicrous comparison! Does Sheehan believe that Rahman and Stewart were unjustly convicted? And is she so blind that she can't see the connection between Rahman and the terrorists in Iraq who murdered her son?
Sheehan has also echoed the argument of others on the left that if George W. Bush truly believes in this war, he should prove it by sending his daughters to fight in Iraq. (Instructively, this comes from a woman who tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade her son to let her take him to Canada so that he could desert the U.S. Army.)
This piece of silliness is worth spending some time on. For openers, imagine the practical complications of having the president's daughters in a combat zone in this kind of a terrorist war with no front lines. What a prize they would be. Al-Qaida would be working overtime to take them hostage for political leverage, endangering everyone around them.
On a more general level, parents don't "own" their children, certainly not their adult children. They can't be "sent" anywhere they don't choose to go. The Bush twins, Jenna and Barbara, are free to oppose the war, regardless of their father's views or station. But even if they support it, they have no obligation to join the military, nor does anyone else who supports the war, for that matter. We have an all-volunteer force today, and a relatively small one at that. At present, there are 1.4 million active-duty military personnel in all branches, combined. That's down from 2.2 million in 1986, a one-third reduction. We had 3.5 million in 1968 during the Vietnam War, 3.6 million in 1952 during the Korean War and more than 12 million in 1945 during World War II.
Arguably, it might be prudent to add a couple of hundred thousand to today's active-duty force, but we don't require a million more, much less 10 million. We're not involved in a major mobilization. We certainly don't need a universal draft. The military represents less than 1 percent of the American work force. Anyone's free and welcome to enlist, but the great majority will contribute more by continuing to do what they do best.
The military is a highly professional and specialized force these days. We need a few good men and women who have the skills, the aptitude and the desire. If Jenna and Barbara don't fit that description, they don't belong in the service. The military is about performance, not politics.
Mike Rosen's radio show airs daily from 9 a.m. to noon on 850 KOA
|
