The Question
I've been wondering what it is about Cindy Sheehan that's gotten under people's skin. Her loss is horrible and everyone can see that she is deeply pained.(Only the lowest, cretinous gasbags are crude enough to attack her in her grief.) She's a very articulate person and she's incredibly sincere. But she's touched a deeper nerve than just the personal one.
A couple of months ago, when the Downing Street Momos came out and the media elite pooh poohed them as nothing but old news, I wrote a post called "The Elephant":
...the Downing Street Memo gives the press the chance to ask, finally, why we really invaded Iraq.
Have any of you been at a social gathering in which this question comes up? Have you felt the palpable discomfort? Nobody really knows. Those that adhere to the "CIA fucked up" rationale can't explain Downing Street. Those who think you had to back the government in a time of war, are visibly discomfitted by the fact that we never found any WMD. Flypaper is crap...
Yes, we already knew the intelligence was fixed, we knew they understood that Saddam was no threat, we knew they lied to the American people and we knew that they intended to go to war no matter what.
But we still don't know for sure why they did all that. Until we do, I don't think we will be able to figure out how to deal with it.
I asked "why did we invade Iraq" and commenters had dozens of possible reasons. Everybody "knows" why Bush did it -- oil, revenge, imperial ambition, because he could etc, etc etc. There are many possible reasons and perhaps the truth is that there wasn't one reason. But we really don't know.
Atrios posted a question from a reader around that time about the same subject in which he or she asked:
...Can’t someone come up with a pithy sound bite that captures this and makes it accessible to a non-political, non-foreign policy public? I love your indignation and your explanations, but I have a hard time seeing this go anywhere without a talking point that even a Democratic senator can remember.
That's what Cindy Sheehan has finally been able to do. And it's why she's driving the Republicans crazy.
I said I want the president to explain what was the noble cause that my son died in, because that's what he said the other day when those 14 marines were killed. He said their families can rest assured that their sons and daughters died for a noble cause. And I said, "What is that noble cause?"
It is not an academic exercise for her. She lost her son --- and she'd like to know why. Nobody can explain to her -- or to any of us --- why we invaded Iraq and why people are dying. They said it was to protect us -- but it wasn't a threat. Then they said it was to liberate the Iraqi people, but Saddam and his government are a memory and yet the Iraqi people are still fighting us and each other. Our invasion of iraq has inspired more terrorism, not less. Oil prices are higher than they've ever been. The country is swimming in debt. People are being killed and maimed with the regularity of the tides.
And everybody knows this. Deep inside they know that something has gone terribly wrong. We were either lied to or our leaders are verging on the insanely incompetent. That's why when Cindy Sheehan says that she wants to ask the president why her son died --- in those simple terms --- it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It's not just rhetorical.
She literally doesn't know why her son had to die in Iraq. And neither do we.
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