Cindy Sheehan's Protest

Cindy Sheehan is a mother whose professional soldier son, 25 year old Specialist Austin Sheehan, was killed on April 4th 2004 while serving with the 1st Cavalry Division of the US Army.

According to the Vallejo Times Herald, Casey Sheehan joined the army in 2000 and re-enlisted after the start of the Iraqi war. He was a vehicle mechanic, who had apparently volunteered to go on a rescue mission knowing it was risky. It was. He was an Eagle Scout, an altar boy at St. Mary's Church in Vacaville California, a youth counsellor at a Catholic youth camp and from all accounts an all round nice guy. In his last communication with his family he said he was on his way to mass. Then he joined the rescue mission.

Ms Sheehan, as anyone who watches the main stream media must know, is currently leading a very successful (i.e., lots of media attention) protest outside George Bush's Texas ranch to protest the war in Iraq. Ostensibly, the protest is intended to obtain a meeting with President Bush, who met with her once shortly after her son's death (after which she said nice things about the president.) That was then and this is now.

I must preface what follows with these comments. I grew up as a brat on Her Canadian Majesty's air force stations. I am the grandson and son of world war veterans and have myself had the great honour of wearing my country's uniform. You will appreciate, therefore, that I do not take the combat death of soldiers lightly, nor am I keen on criticising a mother who has suffered such a terrible loss. Having said that, I will say this.

What we are witnessing outside the Bush ranch in Texas is political manipulation pure and simple. Cindy Sheehan was before her son's death, and continues to be now, a virulent anti-George Bush/Republican Party political activist. She is channelling public sympathy for her son's loss into anti-war political activism, in order to pursue a left-wing anti-war political agenda.

She is one of those Americans who does not accept the legitimacy of the Bush presidency and holds Bush personally responsible for all combat deaths in Iraq. This is fair game as far as it goes. I think she is wrong on those matters, but I?m a Canadian and the United States is a free country.

So why am I weighing in on my modest blog about this matter? I believe that the views she, and the anti-war left, is advocating would be disastrous for all of us in the West. From the Drudge Report.

Anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq, is calling for Bush's "impeachment," and for Israel to get out of Palestine!

"You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop terrorism," Sheehan declares.

This is errant nonsense, of course. The United States was attacked before the Iraq war was launched and anyone who thinks that that Osama bin Laden and the Islamist religious fanatics who are his allies would stop short of eliminating the whole state of Israel is ingesting hallucinogens.

In a nutshell, Cindy Sheehan advocates the capitulation of the West to the cause of the Islamist terrorists. She and her ilk are filled with a great hatred, but not for the enemy that threatens us all, but for the democratically elected President of the United States. If she believes what she spouts she is a philosophical descendent of the 1930's appeasers who believed that Hitler would cease waging war on his neighbours if only the Allies gave him yet one more slice of his neighbours' territories.

And yes she is a grieving mother. But her grief does not give her a free pass to push a political agenda under the guise of her grief.