Once were warriors. "Cindy Sheehan gave her son to the cause, whether you agree with her or not. Whether you support the war or not." (Photo: Reuters/Jason Reed)

by Ross Levine

Now that she is back at the President's Texas ranch, one can only imagine what might have happened had George Bush agreed to a second meeting with Cindy Sheehan, the California mother of a soldier killed in Iraq.

One can only now imagine the floodgates that would have opened. Some 62% of Americans -- about 180,000,000 people -- would soon be descending on Crawford demanding a presidential audience to express their disapproval of the war. Texas is a big state, but not that big.

So what is Dubya to do?

He's certainly been trying his best to dowse the flames without actually getting his eyebrows seared. He said he "sympathizes with Mrs. Sheehan. She feels strongly about her position and she has every right in the world to say what she believes. This is America."

True enough. Sheehan is no Schiavo; she can speak for herself, and so she has. The forces of the right are busy trying to discredit her, and were delighted when her husband filed for divorce -- after all, no good wife would be anywhere but home. The forces of the left are busy canonizing her, perhaps ignoring her comment last March that her "son joined the army to protect America, not Israel."

And the citizens of Crawford (with the exception, most likely, of those who write for the Lone Star Iconoclast, the local paper that endorsed Kerry last November ), deplore the fact that she disturbed the peace of their quiet enclave, and say, in so many words, that she is a disgrace to the nation, that, in a sense, her son chose to die for his country, and by protesting the war he died in, she is trying to rob him of his free choice. The logic is muddled, but the message is clear: Take your anti-Americanism elsewhere.

The irony of ironies yet again. We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. We're defending freedom over there so we don't have to defend it over here.

But even if her husband is divorcing her, even if she did meet with the President previously when, surely overwhelmed with grief, she wanted to believe his assurances that her son had not died in vain, and that even if -- as she claims now -- he didn't know her son's name, nor how best to comport himself in the presence of a grieving mother, or called her "Mom" because maybe he thought that would comfort her, the fact is, Cindy Sheehan decided that, in the name of her dead son, she wants to speak with the President one more time.

How many presidential encounters does a dead son entitle you to? Apparently just one.

In Lincoln's day, people filed into the White House all the time to present Honest Abe with their grievances, and he spoke to them, much like a preacher would when church lets out. This is not how things work today. The President appears to us during well-orchestrated events and occasionally at press conferences where he answers questions -- that is, he responds to questions. Yes, the President does meet with individuals on a personal basis -- heads of state, important business or organizational leaders, VIPs. But if the average citizen were to request a meeting to simply give the President a few pointers, well, a friendly but firm denial would surely follow. Which is why Cindy Sheehan has gotten as far as she has -- a Presidential response, albeit in absentia. Because let's face it, she's not the average citizen. At least not yet.

She's given more to this war than a thumbs up or a denunciation. She's given more than a contribution to the Family Research Council or Move On. She's given more than extra dollars at the gas pump and extra tax dollars to the Pentagon. She's given more than just maybe not turning off the radio at the news of yet another roadside bomb.

Cindy Sheehan gave her son to the cause, whether you agree with her or not. Whether you support the war or not.

That Cindy Sheehan, the phenomenon, is taking place at all is testimony to the fact that the force field protecting Bush -- which he often describes as "the attacks of September the eleventh" -- is weakening, and that the Iraq war is transitioning -- if we may mix our comic book symbols -- from spinach to kryptonite.

Finally, it seems, even for an American public still consternated over evolution, platitudes are not quite enough now that the death toll is mounting. "We'll be there as long as we have to and not a day longer," "we're making progress," "democracy is on the march" and "we must stay the course" are fine when you're running against a guy who has more plans than a housing development, and when a war is still fresh enough to be rife with the possibility of freedom and oil for all. But when you're not campaigning but commanding, and when your war starts dragging on and its lofty goals get mired in political and historic realities, as well as blood -- when it transforms into a war you were not prepared to fight, and you appear -- paradoxically -- unwilling to fight effectively, and would rather delude yourself into believing that your original plan has to have been the best one -- that's when you become vulnerable to a woman camped out in your driveway who, no matter how you look at it, gave her son to the execution of your vision. Casey Sheehan did volunteer for the army, true, but to say he volunteered to die in Iraq on a WMD goose chase is, well, a bit of a stretch.

Conjuring Lincoln again, in 1863 he took a trip to Gettysburg, and gave a little speech that can be pretty much summed up as "we must stay the course." So is the difference between Lincoln and Bush simply a matter of eloquence? Were he the President today, would Lincoln, who once called Harriet Beecher Stowe "the little woman … who started this great war," leave his compound and face Cindy Sheehan and say, "So, you're the little woman who wants to end this not-so-great war?"

It seems easier to imagine Abe facing Cindy down than it is to see Dubya doing it, but then again, even the paranoid Richard Nixon came out of his bunker now and then to argue one-on-one with opponents of the Vietnam war.

The important difference between Bush and Lincoln is that the latter stood among the graves at Gettysburg and made the Northern populace believe that he felt the tremendous human cost of the war, and could thus ask that we give "increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion" -- and it wasn't just because Lincoln believed it, but because he believed it deeply enough to stand on a battlefield where thousands of soldiers had died with the confidence to say that the struggle must go on.

Compare this with out present Commander-in-Chief, who does not, it seems, like to appear at military funerals or consecrations. Does he lack conviction? Probably not, since his dogged adherence to his war convinces us that (unlike an ever-growing number of Americans), he does indeed find the war in Iraq just and necessary. More likely, the political sixth sense he and his co-commanders possess is such that they do not have confidence that the public would fully appreciate the President showing up in Dover, Delaware to welcome all those flag-draped caskets home on the evening news. They believe in their war, but perhaps don't believe that all of us do, or perhaps believe that we do only as long as things are kept at a certain level. The President, at his presidential podium declaiming on Saddam Hussein and our progress against "the Al Qaeda," etc. is one thing, but what would he say next to a casket -- he might have to memorize some new lines.

Which is precisely why he has this Cindy Sheehan problem. What can he say to her? What should he say to her? He may be avoiding her because he doesn't want to have a flood of Cindy Sheehans at his door – he may be avoiding her because his handlers have convinced him that she's nothing but an opportunistic Democratic shill -- he may be avoiding her because it's better to ignore a leaky faucet than risk breaking a pipe trying to fix it. But the fact is, Cindy Sheehan's presence at Bush's Crawford doorstep is like, if we use terms that perhaps the President and his supporters might understand, a sign from God -- a sign that the tide has turned in the American public's perception of the Iraq war as a "great task remaining before us," and not simply one of the most foolhardy foreign escapades in our nation's history.

25 August 05

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