Mixed feelings about Ms. Sheehan

Sober dove Alan Bock isn’t sure whether we’re seeing the beginning of a grass-roots anti-war movement that “looks like America”:

As a war opponent from the beginning, I have mixed feelings. Ms. Sheehan has not confined herself to doubting the war’s wisdom, but has unburdened herself of an array of remarks ranging from personal insults of the president and his family to offhand remarks about Israel and Palestine. It’s understandable that one might want to put an array of issues before the public when you have the chance to have your views magnified by the amplifiers of the media. But I think she would have been more effective if she had stuck stubbornly to a single question: “I just want to know what core American interest was served by my son’s death.”

There’s a constituency for comments like saying a protest is “for all our brave souls (American or Iraqi) who have been murdered by the Bush crime family,” which Mrs. Sheehan is widely reported to have said. There are unquestionably Americans who take delights in hearing someone call the president “that lying bastard” or “that maniac.” There’s a frisson in comments to the effect that without the Internet America “would already be a fascist state.” Plenty of people get their intellectual rocks off hearing comments like “You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East.”

In terms of influencing the larger body politic, however, such remarks are not likely to persuade. They might even repel people who are coming to doubt the wisdom of the war in Iraq but are not even close to hating their country, their government or even their president.

None of this takes anything away from the fact that it was Cindy Sheehan, not you or I, who actually took the initiative to go to Crawford. Nor does it justify some of the more scurrilous and personal attacks on her that have come from the War Party from the beginning of her vigil. Indeed, it is impressive that at least several hundred other antiwar Americans, of varying political persuasions, have joined her there. It is encouraging that they have held prayer meetings, demonstrating that like most Americans, they are respectful of religion.

I suspect, however, that the fact that the predominant tone coming from Camp Casey has been embittered-left – which may be how it has been filtered through the media and not reflective of a wider variety of views on the road to the Bush estate – might have been helpful in the short run but not perhaps in the long run. We need at least some faces of the antiwar movement to be people whose deep love of America and respect for her institutions and the promise she still holds of expanding freedom the right way practically oozes from their pores, so there can be no doubt they are patriots. We need people in suits and ties as well as dungarees and bandanas. We need an antiwar movement that looks like America to begin to have a real impact on American policy.