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Four cynical and somewhat uncharitable thoughts
I suppose the big news today is not however many Iraqis died as a result of the American-led attack on their country, but that Cindy Sheehan has "resigned" from the "anti-war movement." No apologies for the scare quotes—I am unconvinced of the existence of such a movement, and I'm not sure how one would resign from a movement anyway, beyond becoming pro-war.
Her criticisms of the Democrats are fair enough, and I can only hope that some of the more idealistic types among us take them to heart. The other day at a demo, someone standing next to me mentioned that more people voted in American Idol than in the American elections. My fellow demonstrator seemed to feel that this was a bad thing. I suspect that's because American Idol is a process that significant amounts of Americans still feel that they have some power within, some say about.
I was in Seattle during the midterm elections, and at the time I remember being struck by the pure joy among remarkably intelligent people who suddenly realized that if they didn't like their leaders, they could vote for new ones—as though, up until that point, they had forgotten and simply taken a Republican government as an unfortunate inevitability. Sheehan's "resignation" (can't we just call it "activist burn-out"?) illustrates another one of those things that should be obvious. Electoral politics and symbolic protest don't really count for all that much. Some of us learned this after our first few years of rallies—it doesn't matter what your placard says or how loudly you shout or even how many Starbucks windows you smash if you're not doing anything between weekend gatherings at the American consulate.
I've long been uncomfortable with the way the North American anti-war movement privileges the experiences of white Americans over the piles of dead Iraqi bodies. And regardless of how much sympathy I feel for her on a personal level, Sheehan has always typified that sort of thinking. Not that it's her fault, or that she hasn't suffered, but this ought to be a wake-up call to anyone who thought that we could end corporate America's adventure wars in the Middle East by painting peace symbols on our faces and camping out in the grass while listening to hand-picked celebrity spokespeople.
My issue is not with her story being highlighted (or Rachel Corrie's, for that matter), out of some sort of indie-kid "I was protesting before you thought it was cool" attitude, but rather of the tendency of the left to proclaim how it's more patriotic, more white-bread American than those Republican traitors, even given the long history of such wars under various other governments. Sheehan was used to further this agenda, this othering of the majority of victims. Bush was a killer not because his war murdered 700,000 Iraqis, but because his war murdered Casey. It's so much more comfortable to think that it's only the leadership that needs to be adjusted, not the underlying political and economic structures, not the thrust of 500 years of barbaric history.
The "face of the anti-war movement" will, for me, always be a photo, published in the British press but not the North American papers, of an Iraqi soldier who'd been burned to death. I was about twelve when I saw it, at a time when, by watching North American television and reading North American newspapers, it was entirely possible to conclude that the only deaths on either side in the first Gulf War had been by friendly fire. Back then, those were the only deaths that got reported. Seeing that photo, in all its ghastly glory, brought the war home for me. This is the reality of Western imperialism, ugly and brutal and vicious, and most of its victims cannot simply choose to retire.
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