[Mb-civic] Swift-Boating (NYTimes)

[Linda Hassler]

I may be a day late in sending this; perhaps someone else already has. 
It's relevant. Yea again for the New York Times columnists!

Linda Hassler

The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 21 August 2005

    Cindy Sheehan couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the 
vigil that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of 
that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded 
to an intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack 
Inside the United States" by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the 
president was no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14 
marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in 
Haditha, his national radio address that morning made no mention of 
Iraq. Once again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he wouldn't 
see Ms. Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who hasn't foreseen 
any of the setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did 
not attack inside the United States in 2001.

    When these setbacks happen in Iraq itself, the administration 
punts. But when they happen at home, there's a game plan. Once Ms. 
Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character 
assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by 
his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a 
critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is 
especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a president 
who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other 
priorities" during Vietnam.

    The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents 
with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry. But 
the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism 
czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly 
challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last 
December. The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph Wilson - the 
diplomat described by the first President Bush as "courageous" and "a 
true American hero" for confronting Saddam to save American hostages in 
1991 - was so toxic it may yet send its perpetrators to jail.

    True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox 
News, where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. 
The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her 
angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her 
incendiary sloganeering and her association with known 
ticket-stub-carrying attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush Limbaugh went 
so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more than 
forged documents - there's nothing about it that's real."

    But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure 
is yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of 
political support for the Iraq war.

    When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest 
priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's 
character, then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11 
inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an 
insubordinate plant of the "liberal media," we forget the Pentagon's 
abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that 
persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph 
Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration 
twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent 
W.M.D.'s.

    The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy 
Sheehan's "wacko" rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that 
have attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would 
forget about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the 
bait, much of the public has not.

    The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr. 
Bush's what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly 
synergistic with her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless 
carnage. Her point would endure even if the messenger were shot by a 
gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never returned to Texas from her 
ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the media circus by 
actually meeting with her.

    The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's 
story, not the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers, 
you'll notice, almost never tell her son's story. They are afraid to go 
there because this young man's life and death encapsulate not just the 
noble intentions of those who went to fight this war but also the 
hubris, incompetence and recklessness of those who gave the marching 
orders.

    Specialist Sheehan was both literally and figuratively an Eagle 
Scout: a church group leader and honor student whose desire to serve 
his country drove him to enlist before 9/11, in 2000. He died with six 
other soldiers on a rescue mission in Sadr City on April 4, 2004, at 
the age of 24, the week after four American security workers had been 
mutilated in Falluja and two weeks after he arrived in Iraq. This was 
almost a year after the president had declared the end of "major combat 
operations" from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

    According to the account of the battle by John F. Burns in The 
Times, the insurgents who slaughtered Specialist Sheehan and his cohort 
were militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite 
cleric. The Americans probably didn't stand a chance. As Mr. Burns 
reported, members of "the new Iraqi-trained police and civil defense 
force" abandoned their posts at checkpoints and police stations "almost 
as soon as the militiamen appeared with their weapons, leaving the 
militiamen in unchallenged control."

    Yet in the month before Casey Sheehan's death, Mr. Rumsfeld 
typically went out of his way to inflate the size and prowess of these 
Iraqi security forces, claiming in successive interviews that there 
were "over 200,000 Iraqis that have been trained and equipped" and that 
they were "out on the front line taking the brunt of the violence." 
We'll have to wait for historians to tell us whether this and all the 
other Rumsfeld propaganda came about because he was lied to by 
subordinates or lying to himself or lying to us or some combination 
thereof.

    As The Times reported last month, even now, more than a year later, 
a declassified Pentagon assessment puts the total count of Iraqi troops 
and police officers at 171,500, with only "a small number" able to 
fight insurgents without American assistance. As for Moktada al-Sadr, 
he remains as much a player as ever in the new "democratic" Iraq. He 
controls one of the larger blocs in the National Assembly. His 
loyalists may have been responsible for last month's apparently 
vengeful murder of Steven Vincent, the American freelance journalist 
who wrote in The Times that Mr. Sadr's followers had infiltrated 
Basra's politics and police force.

    Casey Sheehan's death in Iraq could not be more representative of 
the war's mismanagement and failure, but it is hardly singular. Another 
mother who has journeyed to Crawford, Celeste Zappala, wrote last 
Sunday in New York's Daily News of how her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, 
was also killed in April 2004 - in Baghdad, where he was providing 
security for the Iraq Survey Group, which was charged with looking for 
W.M.D.'s "well beyond the admission by David Kay that they didn't 
exist."

    As Ms. Zappala noted with rage, her son's death came only a few 
weeks after Mr. Bush regaled the Radio and Television Correspondents' 
Association banquet in Washington with a scripted comedy routine 
featuring photos of him pretending to look for W.M.D.'s in the Oval 
Office. "We'd like to know if he still finds humor in the fabrications 
that justified the war that killed my son," Ms. Zappala wrote. (Perhaps 
so: surely it was a joke that one of the emissaries Mr. Bush sent to 
Cindy Sheehan in Crawford was Stephen Hadley, the national security 
adviser who took responsibility for allowing the 16 errant words about 
doomsday uranium into the president's prewar State of the Union 
speech.)

    Mr. Bush's stand-up shtick for the Beltway press corps wasn't some 
aberration; it was part of the White House's political plan for keeping 
the home front cool. America was to yuk it up, party on and spend its 
tax cuts heedlessly while the sacrifice of an inadequately manned 
all-volunteer army in Iraq was kept out of most Americans' sight and 
minds. This is why the Pentagon issued a directive at the start of 
Operation Iraqi Freedom forbidding news coverage of "deceased military 
personnel returning to or departing from" air bases. It's why Mr. Bush, 
unlike Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, has not attended funeral 
services for the military dead. It's why January's presidential 
inauguration, though nominally dedicated to the troops, was a gilded 
$40 million jamboree at which the word Iraq was banished from the 
Inaugural Address.

    This summer in Crawford, the White House went to this playbook once 
too often. When Mr. Bush's motorcade left a grieving mother in the dust 
to speed on to a fund-raiser, that was one fat-cat party too far. The 
strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice has at 
last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the war's critics 
has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury in 
Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming 
Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of 
flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any more 
control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 9749 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050823/cb930a6b/attachment.bin