Can Cindy Sheehan End the War?

[sintax]

Can Cindy Sheehan End the War?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

You can tell in five-minutes channel surfing how Cindy Sheehan frightens the pro-war crowd. One bereaved mom from Vacaville, camped outside Bush's home in Crawford, reproaching the vacationing President for sending her son to a pointless death in Iraq has got the hellhounds of the right barking in venomous unison.

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Serious resistance, of the sort Sheehan calls for, has to throw the threat of popular sanction over both Democrats as well as Republicans. What leadership is available for this task? The obvious candidate is the United for Peace and Justice coalition, which mounted the huge anti-war protests of 2003 and which has been conducting peace actions ever since.

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What truly frightens governments is mutiny or the threat of mutiny. It was soldiers shooting their officers and sailors pushing planes off air craft carriers that prompted the Pentagon to run up the white flag in Vietnam. Along that same spectrum is draft resistance, and the refusal to go to war. Already that's had an effect. The Pentagon says the reserve system is in ruins.

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Cindy Sheehan frightens the right and stirs them to venom, and she frightens the Democrats too, because she's so clear. Contrast the timeline of Sheehan as against that of even a relatively decent Democrat like Russ Feingold. Feingold calls for a start to withdrawal from Iraq maybe sixteen months from now. How many dead troops and new Gold Star moms can you fit into that calendar. A thousand or more? Sheehan's Out Now call should be the bright-line test for any antiwar spokesperson.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08202005.html

[wli]

1. it's really an exercise in blunting popular will

Either they're going to erect a military dictatorship to cow people by force, or they'll set up more whitewashes and put away a few patsies to put up a veneer of Potemkin justice.