reflections

Cindy Sheehan, it is time to "moveon".

Cindy Sheehan has become the focal point for all of the built up anger about the War in Iraq. Rightly or wrongly, her individual protest has galvanized everyone who thinks that George W. Bush is in league with the devil, or at least with "Fascist" Don Cheney and his oil company cronies. Among here supporters are one of the founders of Ben and Jerry's icecream and the political leadership of moveon.org.

Personally, I don't buy Ben and Jerry's icecream, but it has to do with the quality of the product and not their politics. Good politics is not a reason to buy a bad product. Still, Ben Cohen, through his organization, TrueMajority, has every right to hire a public relations firm to support Sheehan.

I am not a supporter of Bush's War. I think that his policies in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular have been short sighted, arrogant and, in the long run they will hurt the cause of freedom and equality more than they will help. Even such "neocons" as historian Francis Fukuyama voted for John Kerry for this very reason.

My concern arises from the fact that Cindy Sheehan's protest and moveon.org represent both all that is good about progressive movement and simultaneously all that is bad about it. The goodness arises from the fact that individuals still have the ability to grab the attention of the public and galvanize opinion into taking some action. The bad is the fact that that action is always negative, protesting the latest evil without providing a positive policy to substitute. Yes, we need to stand up for what we believe. But we also have to take some responsibility for our actions. In the case of Iraq, were we to bring the troops home now, as Sheehan and Cohen and moveon.org and all of the Camp Casey supporters want, then the question is what should we do next?

I don't even hear the sound of wind in the trees.

I went to the TrueMajority WWW site. They laud Sheehan's efforts, try to register you in the "peace movement" and offer you some "cool stuff to buy." It alsmost feels as if the latter is the purpose of the site. What they do not do is define a policy for the Middle East other than to go away and leave it alone.

Equally, I went to the moveon.org site. It has the benefit of not being so blatantly commercial. They have a wider agenda and, in the area of domestic policies have a taken positive positions to protect some of the benefits that Americans have come to enjoy, including Social Security and public broadcasting. In the area of foreign policy, they are just as silent as the TrueMajority, bring the troops home and button up the doors.

At the very time that Sheehan is grabbing headlines and focusing opposition on the failure of Bush's policies, we have the opportunity to see the result of these policies played out in Gaza. The scale is smaller but the impacts is just as great, if not more so. Since it's inception, Israel has followed a policy of meeting armed violence by armed intevention and pre-emptive assignation of the most violent of oppostion leaders. What Israel has not done is to provide for a viable future for their Arab and Palestinian citizens and neighbors. The result has been nearly continuous warfare and violence without an end. It is clear that Israle's policies have failed. It is equally clear the the Bush Middle East policy has failed for the very same reason.

Had we taken the money spent on the Iraq war and used it to support the concept of the right of return for Palestinian refugees, at least to provide a financial compensation for the land that they lost, it is very likely that economic development would have given Palestinian men jobs instead of guns and that the United States would have been in the position of showing moral leadership in an area that has lacke such leadership for many years. Yes, the organization surrounding Arafat was corrupt. That is one reason why Hamas could gain so much support. Hamas is providing the humanitarian support that the Arafat government did not. But the reason that Hamas could remain so violent in it's actions over the years is directly tied to Israel's policies and the fiction that the land is somehow tied to religious orthodoxy.

To leave Iraq without and alternative, to say to the world that "we were wrong to come so we are going home and you can clean up the mess we made is both stupid and immoral. Yet, that is what moveon and Sheehan want to happen. We ask criminals to take responsibility for their action and laud them when they turn to positive works. If we make the same analogy for foreign policy, then we need the same program of positive action. I do not see it happening.

It is so hard to mount a protest as Sheehan has done. It is even more difficult to lay out an alternative. After all, that is what we pay the staff at the State Departement to do, or the National Security Council. We have seen the policies that they have given us and don't like them. So what now? I don't hear any alternative from Joe Beiden or Hillary Clinton or any of the Democratic wanna-be-presidential contenders. They are not acting very presidential yet.

I would expect that Medea Benjamin could come up with a better policy than Beiden-his-time has.