"The Fine Print", 6 Jun 07 -- "Good Riddance, Publicity Whore" (With Thanks To Cindy Sheehan)

<span style='font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt'>"The Fine Print", by Michael Schrader

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<span style='font-size:14.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt'>Whwhat Is the Rust

“Good Riddance, Publicity Whore” (With Thanks To Cindy Sheehan)

(Written and posted 6 June 2007)<o:p></o:p>

I am going to start off by giving credit where credit is due for the title. The title, “Good Riddance, Publicity Whore” is what Cindy Sheehan titled her blog when she declared to the world that she was resigning as the voice of the anti-Iraq movement. Given that it was so appropriate for this column, I appropriated it from her. So thank you, Cindy Sheehan, for creating such a good title that I felt compelled to use it for myself.

I think it is appropriate that I am writing this column on the 63^rd anniversary of D-Day, a day that we would not have the stomach for now. More men were killed on the first day of the Normandy invasion than have been killed in the entire Iraq war. Think about that for a minute. More men were killed in one day than have been killed in over four years. There were as many men who invaded five beaches in France in 1944 as who invaded an entire country in Iraq. Kind of puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?

War is hell. War kills. It takes a lot of men to win a war. And a lot of resolve. The latter seems to be missing in our country nowadays.

What would have happened if Cindy Sheehan had been alive at the time of the Normandy invasion? I can picture her camping out around the summer White House in Georgia, asking to “talk” to FDR. I can imagine her demanding that FDR be impeached for the slaughter of tens of thousands of young American soldiers fighting an unjust war. After all, it was Japan who attacked us, not the Germans, so why are we fighting them? The war against Germany is just a distraction, a way to enrich the military-industrial complex on the backs of the poor fighting men, a way to correct, once and for all, the non-resolution of a previous war. So what if Adolph Hitler killed tens of thousands of his own countrymen? That is not a reason to go to war and invade another country. Roosevelt is a criminal and should be punished. Impeach Roosevelt!

If that isn’t enough to convince you, how about the general incompetence of the execution of the war. After all, it has been three years, and things haven’t gotten better. It is time to surrender (I mean withdraw) all of the troops and bring them home. We are in a quagmire; it’s a European civil war. Why should our boys have to die in such a useless endeavor?

Before you start and give me the bologna sausage (as my dear old grandmother used to say) that Iraq can’t be compared to World War Two, that it is most like Vietnam, let me stop you right there. ALL WARS ARE ALIKE. You look at any war, and you compare to any other war, and fundamentally they are alike. All wars have one winning side and one losing side. There are no ties in a war; you either win, or you lose. It is as simple as that. Each side to a war has an objective; whichever side achieves its objective is the winner; the side that does not achieve its objective is the loser. Oh yeah? What about Korea! What about it? The North’s objective was to take over the entire peninsula; the South’s was to restore the status quo. The South won!

Take a “pointless” war, like the War of 1812. The American objective was to convince the British that we could not be bullied and jacked with. Guess what? We convinced them. Issues such as taking over Canada were side issue; the real issue was maintaining the American Republic free from outside interference. Since that useless war, you haven’t seen the Europeans coming over to jack with us; we won respect through the musket and the sword. Think about the War of 1812 for a minute—we fought for three years, lost thousands of men, and in the end had pretty much the exact same territory as we had before. There was no quantifiable benefit. There was a qualitative one, though – the American Republic existed free of threats and harassment and fear of annihilation, and that is as good as anything you can touch or see.

The Cindy Sheehans of the country are dead wrong when they compare Iraq to Vietnam. In Vietnam, we were fighting over real estate, namely the preservation of a separate South, and we are not fighting over real estate in Iraq. A more apt comparison would be to the War of 1812, where we were fighting to prevent the extinguishing of an ideal, a way-of-life, from external threats, real and perceived, present and future. So Bush exaggerated the present threat a bit; so what? Do you really think that people would have rallied around him for an abstract ideal? Of course not. We all know that we are only willing to take action if we think our hineys are in danger; so Bush embellished a bit to make us think so. Not the nicest thing to do, but probably a necessary evil. Besides, it isn’t like that hasn’t been done before. The American revolutionaries exaggerated the stories of British “atrocities” to whip up public support for an abstract ideal such as self-governance; Madison embellished British horror stories to rally the people around him in 1812; Polk was not quite truthful about the Mexican transgressions that led to the Mexican-American War. Propaganda is part and parcel of the war game, and what was told before the start of Iraq was none other than good old fashioned propaganda.

Cindy Sheehan is mad because Bush wasn’t impeached like she wanted. News flash, Cindy – you can’t impeach a President for telling tall tales. I don’t think that is what the framers means by “high crimes and misdemeanors”.

The problem I had with Cindy from day one is that it was never about her son; it was about her. She disrespected her son by disrespecting the cause that he believed in. It doesn’t matter whether she believed in it; what matters is that her son did, and she told the world that she thinks her son was a gullible naïve fool for believing in it. That is a way to respect to dead – insult what they believed in.

Why did Cindy quit? Why doesn’t she like this country anymore? Because the country saw through her, saw that she was just a “publicity whore”, and ignored her and went on with its collective life. What did she gain fro her fifteen minutes of fame? Well, she defame her dead son, lost her husband, ignored her other children – that seems like too steep of a price to pay for me, but then I am not thriving publicity.

Good riddance, Cindy, and Godspeed.

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