(no subject)

[sethrak]

Well, as of Friday, Slate.com reports that Cindy Sheehan has developed selective amnesia about her prior anti-Semitic comments regarding the current Iraq war. Link here: http://www.slate.com/id/2124788/fr/nl/

Quote: "After Slate published her real opinions on politics last Monday (a weird confection of pacifism with paranoid anti-Zionism) last Monday, she was eventually asked about her statement that her son Casey had been killed in a war for Israel, and she denied ever having made it."

She's also trying to claim she never wrote those words, and that someone hacked the e-mail in question to make her look bad. ::sigh:: From CNN.com and her blog. For the CNN link you'll have to scroll down a bit and skim past the other stories that were in the show transcript. Yet, Slate has a pretty convincing case that she did indeed write it, long before she was famous and therefore long before anybody had reason to falsify the email.

How are her supporters responding to all this? It makes the anti-war movement look enormously bad. Damn it. This kind of crap makes it so easy for the pro-war people and the right wingers to bash us as idiots. It acts as a smokescreen against the real issues that make us dissatisfied with the war.

I'm against war in general. I'm against this war in specific because the reasons stated for entering it were not well-grounded in what was actually going in in Iraq, nor were they the reasons now being given for our being in Iraq. Hell, I've heard people on tv talking about the current reasons for the war "We want to create a democratic republic in the Middle East so it will have a ripple effect across the region! And we wanted to save the Iraqis from the evil regime of Saddam!" as if they were *always* the reasons we went to war, and not merely the mission-shift that became necessary when we couldn't find much solid evidence of the WMDs. We were told that our President wanted to go to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein was consistently and flagrantly flouting the UN resolutions. We were told our President had good solid evidence that Saddam wasn't just denying the UN inspectors access to areas they dearly wanted to see because he enjoyed yanking Hans Blicks' chain. We were told Iraq had an active WMD program that was a grave threat to national and world security. We were also told, or at least it was strongly suggested, that there was a connection between the Hussein regime and Osama bin Laden's plot for 9/11. I could have backed this war 100% if replacing an oppressive regime with democracy and unseating an evil sadistic mass-murderer had been the initial reasons for war. But they weren't. And it's disingenuous to claim so.

So it pisses me off to no end when someone like Cindy Sheehan, who makes pacifism and critics of the Bush admin. look enormously bad, gets so damn much publicity. It pisses me off that she really doesn't have a very clear idea of what would *happen* if she got her way, and Bush pulled everyone out of Iraq as swiftly as possible, aside from a sharp reduction in the numbers of military casualties on Iraqi soil.

I feel we need to finish what we started, or Iraq will become a hotbed of terror support after we leave. We need to finish what we started to show the world that we mean what we say about human rights and democracy. We need to finish what we started so that we can repay the sacrifice of Casey Sheehan and his fellow fallen soldier.

And we need to make accountable those who started this war on faulty intel and flimsy pretexts so that it doesn't happen again.


Okay, enough political rambling. You can go back to your regularly scheduled web-crawl.

Comments

[dragondelhielo.livejournal.com]

I'm mostly angry at her for abusing the name of her deceased son to meet her own ends. He's probably rolling in his grave quite violently as she abuses and batters his name in her attempts to gain her "political goals".