The agendas of grief

Let's be honest now. Cindy Sheehan was never just "a mom in a chair waiting for George Bush." Yes, we should sympathize with the mother who lost her son in a war, but once she decided to make a public spectacle of her grief, she put that grief into the service of other agendas. Now that all the liberal interest groups have cynically and despicably used her to further their own cause (mainly the demonization of George Bush), and the media have turned the whole thing into a political freak show, it's a little late in the day to be complaining that too much attention is being focused on her instead of her cause.

And she does have a cause, and it goes far beyond just wanting Bush to explain to her why her son died. She wants the U.S. out of Iraq now. She's in the blame-Israel crowd. She could even be a leader in the "U.S. is a blight on the face of the earth and deserves everything it gets" school of foreign policy. And she's already met with President Bush; she just doesn't like what he had to say. What would he be expected to say in a second meeting? "You're absolutely right, and we'll start pulling the troops out tomorrow"?

But nobody really wants a meeting between Mrs. Sheehan and the president -- not the liberal interest groups, not the media, not even Mrs. Sheehan. The non-meeting is the cause, the message, the story, the poltical freak show. An actual meeting would spoil everybody's fun and tip their hands, which, come to think of it, is a reason for Bush to grant one.

And now the show is going on the road. This is a letter to the editor on our editorial page today:

Fort Wayne Peace Action will hold a vigil at 7:30 tonight on the Courthouse Green in Fort Wayne to stand in solidarity with Cindy Sheehan as she stands in Crawford, Texas.

Peace Park (the Courthouse Green) is an appropriate place to hold a vigil in support of Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq and has been waiting outside the gates of President Bush's ranch to speak with him. The United States has lost more than 1,840 service men and women in the war on Iraq. Thirty-eight of them were from Indiana.

Can't argue with their right to protest. But they are wrong, and what they say adds nothing useful to the debate. It's fair to ask whether going to Iraq was a legitimate or necessary part of the war on terror. It's a necessary discussion to question whether the administration had the wrong idea about what would happen in Iraq or has bungled the effort there (but not to the point of completely ignoring any good news, I hope). It's important to ask where we go from here in combating Islamofascists who use terror as the weapon of choice.

But we're there now, and what we're doing in Iraq is inextricably bound up in the larger campaign. To just cut and run -- "oops, sorry; just kidding, didn't really mean it" -- would tell our allies we can't be trusted and our enemies we aren't to be taken seriously. And it would mean that those 1,840 lives have just been wasted for no good reason. We did that once in Vietnam, ensuring that 55,000 lives were wasted for no good reason. Are we to do it again? Is that what "peace" means these days?