I liked this one, found it in Google today.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GH16Aa01.html


I do wish someone could force our administration into a higher level of 
honesty and accountability, and replace the bumbling politicians with 
(or at least force them to listen to) someone with an actual achievable 
plan, rather than a political strategy.   But I'm unclear as to how to 
achieve that objective in our current democracy.



DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Cindy, Don and George
By Tom Engelhardt

Retired four-star Army General Barry McCaffrey said to Time Magazine: 
"The army's wheels are going to come off in the next 24 months. We are 
now in a period of considerable strategic peril. It's because [Pentagon 
chief Donald] Rumsfeld has dug in his heels and said, 'I cannot retreat 
from my position.'"

Cindy Sheehan testifying at Representative John Conyers' public 
hearings on the Downing Street Memo:

     My son, Spc Casey Austin Sheehan, was KIA [killed in action] in 
Sadr City Baghdad on 04/04/04. He was in Iraq for only two weeks before 
[Coalition Provisional Authority head] L Paul Bremer inflamed the 
Shi'ite militia into a rebellion which resulted in the deaths of Casey 
and six other brave soldiers who were tragically killed in an ambush. 
Bill Mitchell, the father of Sergeant Mike Mitchell, who was one of the 
other soldiers killed that awful day, is with us here. This is a 
picture of Casey when he was seven months old. It's an enlargement of a 
picture he carried in his wallet until the day he was killed. He loved 
this picture of himself. It was returned to us with his personal 
effects from Iraq. He always sucked on those two fingers. When he was 
born, he had a flat face from passing through the birth canal and we 
called him "Edward G", short for Edward G Robinson. How many of you 
have seen your child in his/her premature coffin? It is a shocking and 
very painful sight. The most heartbreaking aspect of seeing Casey lying 
in his casket for me was that his face was flat again because he had no 
muscle tone. He looked like he did when he was a baby laying in his 
bassinet. The most tragic irony is that if the Downing Street Memo 
proves to be true, Casey and thousands of people should still be alive.

Rumsfeld testifying before the House Armed Services Committee in March: 
"The world has seen, in the last three-and-a-half years, the capability 
of the United States of America to go into Afghanistan ... and with 
20,000, 15,000 troops working with the Afghans do what 200,000 Soviets 
couldn't do in a decade. They've seen the United States and the 
coalition forces go into Iraq ... That has to have a deterrent effect 
on people." (Ann Scott Tyson, "US Gaining World's Respect From Wars, 
Rumsfeld Asserts", the Washington Post, March 11.)

Bush on arriving for a meeting with families of the bereaved, including 
Cindy Sheehan and her husband on June 17, 2004: "So, who are we 
honoring here?"

A teaser at the "careers and jobs" screen of GoArmy.com: "Want an extra 
$400 a month?" Click on it and part of what comes up is: "Qualified 
active army recruits may be eligible for AIP [assignment incentive pay] 
of $400 per month, up to 36 months for a total of up to $14,400, if 
they agree to be assigned to an army-designated priority unit with a 
critical role in current global commitments."

Who is in that ditch?
Casey Sheehan had one of those small "critical roles" in the "current 
global commitment" in Iraq that, in Rumsfeld's words, "has to have a 
deterrent effect on people". As it happens, Sheehan was one of the 
unexpectedly deterred and now, along with 1,846 other American 
soldiers, is interred, leaving his take-no-prisoners mother Cindy - a 
one-person antiwar movement - with a critical role to play in awakening 
Americans to the horrors and dangers of the Bush administration's 
"current global commitments".

Over the past two years, administration officials, civilian and 
military, have never ceased to talk about "turning corners" or reaching 
"tipping points" and achieving "milestones" in the 
Iraq-war-that-won't-end. Now it seems possible that Cindy Sheehan in a 
spontaneous act of opposition - her decision to head for Crawford, 
Texas, to face down a vacationing president and demand an explanation 
for her son's death - may produce the first real American tipping point 
of the Iraq war.

As a million news articles and TV reports have informed us, she was 
stopped about five miles short of her target, the presidential "ranch" 
in Crawford, and found herself unceremoniously consigned to a ditch at 
the side of a Texas road, camping out. And yet somehow, powerless 
except for her story, she has managed to take hostage the president of 
the US and turned his Crawford refuge into the American equivalent of 
Baghdad's Green Zone. She has mysteriously transformed August's news 
into a question of whether, on his way to meet Republican donors, the 
president will helicopter over her encampment or drive past (as he, in 
fact, did) in a tinted-windowed black Chevrolet SUV.

Faced with the power of the Bush political and media machine, Cindy 
Sheehan has engaged in an extreme version of asymmetrical warfare and, 
in her person, in her story, in her version of "the costs of war", she 
has also managed to catch many of the tensions of our present moment. 
What she has exposed in the process is the growing weakness and 
confusion of the Bush administration. At this moment, it remains an 
open question who, in the end, will be found in that ditch at the side 
of a Texas road, her - or the president of the United States.

Confusion in the ranks
Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post reported last week that "a US 
general said ... the violence would likely escalate as the deadline 
approached for drafting a constitution for Iraq". For two years now, 
this has been a dime-a-dozen prediction from American officials trying 
to cover their future butts. For the phrase "drafting a constitution" 
in that general's quote, you need only substitute "after the killing of 
Saddam Hussein's sons" (July 2003), "for handing over sovereignty" 
(June 2004), "for voting for a new Iraqi government" (January 2005) - 
or, looking ahead, "for voting on the constitution" (October, 2005) 
and, yet again, "for voting for a new Iraqi government" (December 
2005), just as you will be able to substitute as yet unknown similar 
"milestones" that won't turn out to be milestones as long as our 
president insists that we must "stay the course" in Iraq, as he did 
only recently as his Crawford vacation began.

After each spike of violence, at each tipping point, each time a corner 
is turned, Bush officials or top commanders predict that they have the 
insurgency under control, only to be ambushed by yet another spike in 
violence. In May, for example, more than three months after violence 
was supposed to have spiked and receded in the wake of the Iraqi 
election, chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers offered a 
new explanation - the "recent spike in violence ... represents an 
attempt to discredit the new Iraqi government and cabinet". When brief 
lulls in insurgent attacks (which often represent changes in tactics) 
aren't being declared proof that the Iraqi insurgency is 
faltering/failing/coming under control, then the spikes are being 
claimed as "the last gasp" of the insurgency, proof of the impending 
success of Bush administration policies - those last throes that Vice 
President Dick Cheney so notoriously described to CNN's Wolf Blitzer as 
June ended.

Recently in a throw (not throe) up-your-hands mode, Army Brigadier 
General Karl Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, 
which oversees Baghdad, offered the following, taking credit for having 
predicted the very throe his troops were then engulfed in: "If you look 
at the past few months, insurgents have not been able to sustain 
attacks, but they tend to surge every four weeks or so. We are right in 
the middle of one of those periods and predicted this would come ... If 
they are going to influence the constitution process, they have only a 
few days left to do it, and we fully expect the attacks to continue."

You would think that someone in an official capacity would conclude, 
sooner or later, that Iraq was a spike in violence.

It's an accepted truth of our times that the Bush administration has 
been the most secretive, disciplined, and on-message administration in 
our history. So what an out-of-control couple of weeks for the 
president and his pals. His polls were at, or near, historic lows; his 
Iraq war approval numbers headed for, or dipping below, 40% - and polls 
are, after all, the message boards for much of what's left of American 
democracy. As he was preparing for his record-setting presidential 
vacation in Crawford, Bush and his advisors couldn't even agree on 
whether we were in a "global struggle with violent extremism" or in a 
"global war on terror". (The president finally opted for war.) He was, 
of course, leaving behind in Washington a special counsel, called into 
being by his administration but now beyond its control, who held a 
sword of judicial Damocles over key presidential aides (and who can 
probably parse sinking presidential polls as well as anyone).

Iraq - you can't leave home without it - has, of course, been at the 
heart of everything Bushworld hasn't been able to shake off, at least 
since May 2, 2003. On that day (when, ominously enough, seven American 
soldiers were wounded by a grenade attack in Fallujah), our president 
co-piloted a jet onto the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier 
halted off the San Diego coast (lest it dock and he only be able to 
walk on board). All togged out in a military uniform, he declared 
"major combat operations" at an end, while standing under a White 
House-produced banner reading "mission accomplished". Ever since then, 
Bush has been on that mission (un)accomplished and Iraq has proved 
nothing if not a black hole, sucking in his administration and the 
American military along with neo-conservative dreams and plans of every 
ambitious sort.

The Iraqi insurgency that should never have happened, or should at 
least have died down after unknown thousands of its foot soldiers were 
killed or imprisoned by the American military, inconveniently managed 
to turn the early days of August into a killing zone for American 
soldiers. Sixteen Marine Reservists from a single unit in Ohio were 
killed in a couple of days; seven soldiers from the Pennsylvania 
National Guard were killed, again in a few days. Thirty-seven Americans 
were reported to have died in Iraq in the first 11 days of the 
presidential vacation, putting American casualties at the top of the TV 
news night after night. And yet the administration has seemed capable 
only of standing by helplessly, refusing to give an inch on the 
"compassion" president's decision - he and his advisors are still 
navigating by the anti-Vietnam playbook - not to visit grief-stricken 
communities in either Ohio or Pennsylvania, or ever to be caught 
attending the funeral of one of the boys or girls he sent abroad to 
die. He did manage, however, to fly to the Sandia National Laboratories 
in New Mexico to sign the energy bill and also left his ranch to hobnob 
with millionaire Republican donors.

In this same period, cracks in relations between an increasingly angry 
military command in Iraq and administration officials back in 
Washington began to appear for all to see. The issue, for desperate 
military officers, was – as for Cindy Sheehan - how in the world to get 
our troops out of Iraq before the all-volunteer military goes over an 
Iraqi cliff, wheels and all.

As July ended, our top general in Iraq, George W Casey, announced (with 
many conditional "ifs") that we should be able to start drawing-down 
American troops significantly by the following spring - that tens of 
thousands of them were likely to leave then and tens of thousands more 
by the end of 2006, and Rumsfeld initially backed him up somewhat 
edgily. Then, as Rumsfeld hedged, more military people jumped into the 
media fray with leaks and comments of all sorts about possible Iraqi 
drawdowns and there was a sudden squall of front-page articles on 
withdrawal strategies for a hard-pressed administration in an 
increasingly unpopular war. At the same time, confusingly, reports 
began to surface indicating that, because of another of those 
prospective spikes in violence, the administration would actually be 
increasing American troop strength in Iraq before the December 
elections by 10,000-20,000 soldiers.

Finally, after a war council of the Rumsfeld and Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice (Pentagon and State Department) "teams" in Crawford 
last week, the president held a news conference (devoted in part to 
responding to Cindy Sheehan) and promptly launched a new, ad-style 
near-jingle to explain the withdrawal moment to the American people: 
"As Iraqis stand up," he intoned, "we will stand down."

But in a week in which the American general in command of 
transportation in Iraq announced that roadside bomb attacks against his 
convoys had doubled over the past year, such words sounded empty - 
especially as news flowed in suggesting that, while the insurgents 
continued to fight fiercely, the new Iraqi military seemed in no rush 
whatsoever to "stand up" and that our own commanders believed it might 
never do so in significant numbers. At his news conference, our 
never-never-land president nonetheless spoke several times of being 
pleased to announce "progress" in Iraq. ("And we're making progress 
training the Iraqis. Oh, I know it's hard for some Americans to see 
that progress, but we are making progress.")

He spoke as well of attempts to ease the burden on the 
no-longer-weekend warriors of the National Guard and the Reserves (who 
are taking unprecedented casualties in August). He said: "We've also 
taken steps to improve the call-up process for our Guard and for our 
Reserves. We've provided them with earlier notifications. We've given 
them greater certainty about the length of their tours. We minimized 
the number of extensions and repeat mobilizations." Unfortunately, at 
just this moment, Joint Chiefs head Myers was speaking of the 
possibility of calling soldiers back for their third tours of duty in 
Iraq: "There's the possibility of people going back for a third term, 
sure. That's always out there. We are at war."

"Pulling the troops out would send a terrible signal to the enemy," the 
president insisted as he turned to the matter of withdrawal in his news 
conference. He then dismissed drawdown maneuvers as "speculation and 
rumors"; and, on being confronted by a reporter with the statements of 
his own military men, added, "I suspect what you were hearing was 
speculation based upon progress that some are seeing in Iraq as to 
whether or not the Iraqis will be able to take the fight to the enemy."

While that may sound vague, it was, nonetheless, the sound of a 
president (who, along with his secretary of defense, has always 
promised to abide by whatever his generals in the field wanted) 
disputing those commanders in public. General Casey was also reportedly 
"rebuked" in private for his withdrawal comments. Our commanders in 
Iraq are, of course, the official realists in this war, having long ago 
given up on the idea that the insurgency could ever be defeated by 
force of US arms and worrying as they do about those "wheels coming 
off" the American military machine.

In fact, the Bush administration's occupation of Iraq - as Howard Zinn 
put the matter recently, "We liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein, but 
not from us." - is threatening to prove one of the great asymmetric 
catastrophes in recent military history. A rag-tag bunch of insurgents, 
now estimated in the tens of thousands, using garage-door openers and 
cell phones to set off roadside bombs and egg-timers to fire mortars at 
US bases (lest they be around when the return fire comes in), have 
fought the US military to at least a draw. We're talking about a 
military that, not so long ago, was being touted as the most powerful 
force not just on this planet at this moment but on any planet in all 
of galactic history.

Previously, such rumors of withdrawal followed by a quiet hike in troop 
strength in Iraq might have been simply another clever administration 
attempt to manipulate the public and have it both ways. At the moment, 
however, they seem to be a sign not of manipulation but of confusion, 
discord and uncertainty about what to do next. If the public was left 
confused by such "conflicting signals" about an Iraqi withdrawal, wrote 
Peter Baker of the Washington Post, "it may be no more unsure than the 
administration itself, as some government officials involved in Iraq 
policy privately acknowledge." An unnamed "military officer in 
Washington" typically commented to Anne E Kornblut of the New York 
Times, "We need to stick to one message. This vacillation creates 
confusion for the American public."

Even administration officials are now evidently "significantly lowering 
expectations" and thinking about how exactly to jump off the sinking 
Iraqi ship. The president, beseeching "the public to stick with his 
strategy despite continuing mayhem on the ground", is, Baker commented, 
"trying to buy time". But buy time for what? This is the question that 
has essentially paralyzed Bush's top officials as they face a world 
suddenly not in their control.

Cindy and the media
And then, if matters weren't bad enough, there was Cindy Sheehan. She 
drove to Crawford with a few supporters in a caravan of perhaps a dozen 
vehicles and an old red, white and blue bus with the blunt phrase 
"Impeachment Tour" written on it. She carried with her a tent, a 
sleeping bag, some clothes and evidently not much else. She parked at 
the side of the road and camped out - and the next thing anyone knew, 
she had forced the president to send out not the Secret Service or some 
minor bureaucrat, but two of his top men, National Security Adviser 
Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin. For 45 minutes, 
they met and negotiated with her, the way you might with a recalcitrant 
foreign head of state. Rather than being flattered and giving ground, 
she just sent them back, insisting that she would wait where she was to 
get the president's explanation for her son's death. ("They said they'd 
pass on my concerns to George Bush. I said, 'Fine, but I'm not talking 
to anybody else but him'.")

So there she was, as people inspired by her began to gather - the hardy 
women of Code Pink; other parents whose children had died in Iraq; a 
former State Department official who had resigned her post to protest 
the onrushing Iraq war; "a political consultant and a team of public 
relations professionals"; antiwar protestors of all sorts; and, of 
course, the media. Quite capable of reading administration weakness in 
the polls, trapped in no-news Crawford with a president always 
determined to offer them less than nothing, hardened by an 
administration whose objective for any media not its own was only 
"rollback", and sympathetic to a grieving mother from Bush's war, 
reporters found themselves with an irresistible story at a moment when 
they could actually run with it.

Literally hundreds of news articles - almost every one a sympathetic 
profile of the distraught mother and her altar-boy, Eagle-Scout dead 
son - poured out; while Sheehan was suddenly on the morning TV shows 
and the nightly news, where a stop-off at "Camp Casey" or the "Crawford 
Peace House" was suddenly de rigeur. And the next thing you knew, there 
was the president at his news conference forced to flinch a second time 
and, though Sheehan was clobbering him, offer "sympathy" to a grieving 
mother at the side of the road five miles away whom he wasn't about to 
invite in, even for a simple meeting, but who just wouldn't leave. 
("And so, you know, listen, I sympathize with Mrs Sheehan. She feels 
strongly about her - about her position. And I am - she has every right 
in the world to say what she believes. This is America. She has a right 
to her position ... ").

Talk about asymmetric warfare. One woman against the massed and proven 
might of the Bush political machine and its major media allies (plus 
assorted bloggers) and though some of them started whacking away 
immediately, Cindy Sheehan remained unfazed. After all, she had been 
toiling in the wilderness and this was her moment. Whatever the 
right-wing press did, she could take it - and, of course, the 
mainstream media had for the time being decided to fall in love with 
her. After all, she was perfect. American reporters love a one-on-one, 
"showdown" situation without much context, a face-to-face shoot-out at 
the OK Corral. (Remember those endless weeks on TV labeled "Showdown 
with Saddam"?) In addition, they were - let's be honest - undoubtedly 
angry after the five-year-long pacification campaign the administration 
had waged against them.

But they had their own ideas about who exactly Cindy Sheehan should be 
to win over America. They would paint a strikingly consistent, quite 
moving, but not completely accurate picture of her. They would attempt 
to tame her by shearing away her language, not just the profanity for 
which she was known, but the very fierceness of her words. She had no 
hesitation about calling the president "an evil maniac", "a lying 
bastard" or the administration "those lying bastards", "chickenhawks", 
"warmongers", "shameful cowards" and "war criminals". She called for 
the president's "impeachment", for the jailing of the whole top layer 
of the administration (no pardons). She called for American troops to 
be pulled out of Iraq now. And most of this largely disappeared from a 
much-softened media portrait of a grieving antiwar mother.

And yet Sheehan herself seems unfazed by the media circus and 
image-shaping going on around her. In a world where horrors are 
referred to euphemistically, or politely, or artfully ignored, she does 
something quite rare - she calls things by their names as she sees 
them. She is as blunt and impolite in her mission as the media is 
circumspect and polite in its job, as most of the opposition to Bush is 
in its "opposition". And it was her very bluntness, her ability to 
shock by calling things by their actual names, by acting as she saw 
fit, that let her break through, and that may help turn a set of 
unhappy public opinion polls into a full-scale antiwar movement.

What will happen next? Will the president actually attend a funeral? 
Will Cindy Sheehan force him from his Green-Zone world? Suddenly, 
almost anything seems possible.

However the media deals with her, she embodies every bind the 
administration is in. As with Iraq (as well as Iran), the 
administration can't either make its will felt or sweep her off the 
landscape. Bush and his officials blinked at a moment when they would 
certainly have liked to whack her, fearing the power of the mother of a 
dead son from their war. And then, completely uncharacteristically, 
they vacillated and flip-flopped. They ignored her, then negotiated. 
They sent out their attack dogs to flail at her, then expressed 
sympathy. Officials, who have always known what to do before, had no 
idea what to do with Cindy Sheehan. The most powerful people in the 
world, they surely feel trapped and helpless. Somehow, she's taken that 
magical presidential something out of Bush and cut him down to size. 
It's been a remarkable performance so far.

The tipping point?
Casey Sheehan died on April 4, 2004, soon after he arrived for his tour 
of duty in Iraq. His mother had never wanted him to go to a war that 
was "wrong", a place where he might have to "kill innocent people" and 
where he might die. ("I begged him not to go. I said, 'I'll take you to 
Canada' ... but he said, 'Mom, I have to go. It's my duty. My buddies 
are going'.") In her grief - always beyond imagining for those of us 
who have not lost a child - this woman found her calling, one that she 
would never have wanted and that no one would have ever wished on her.

For more than a year, having set up a small organization, Gold Star 
Families for Peace, she traveled the country insisting that the 
president explain, but in relative obscurity - except on the Internet, 
that place where so much gestates that later bursts into our mainstream 
world and where today, at Technorati.com, which monitors usage on 
blogs, her name is the most frequently searched for of all. As she has 
said, "If we didn't have the Internet, none of us would really know 
what was truly going on. This is something that can't be ignored."

In March, she appeared - thanks to prescient editors - on the cover of 
the Nation magazine for an article, The New Face of Protest?, on the 
developing military and military-family inspired, antiwar movement. She 
was giving a speech at the Veterans for Peace national convention in 
Dallas when she evidently decided that she had to head for Crawford, 
and the rest you know.

As our president likes to speak about "our mission" in Iraq and "our 
mission of defeating terrorists" in the world, so Cindy Sheehan has 
found herself on a mission. Our president speaks resolutely of "staying 
the course" in Iraq. That's exactly what Cindy Sheehan is planning to 
do in Crawford (and undoubtedly beyond). Bush prides himself on not 
flinching, giving ground, or ever saying he's sorry. But he also had 
remarkably good luck until he ran into Cindy. Whether in his 
presidential runs, in Congress, or elsewhere, he really hasn't come up 
against an opponent who was ready to dig in and duke it out blow for 
blow, an opponent ready never to flinch, never to apologize, never to 
mince words, never to take prisoners.

Now he's got one - and like so many personal demons, she's been called 
up from the Id of his own war: a mother of one of the dead who demands 
an explanation, an answer, when no answer he gives will ever 
conceivably do; a woman who, like his neo-con companions, has no 
hesitation about going for the jugular. And, amazingly, she's already 
made the man flinch twice.

No matter how the media surrounds her or tries to tame her, the fact is 
she's torn up the oppositional rule book. She's a woman made in the 
mold of Iraq war vet Paul Hackett, who ran in a hopelessly Republican 
congressional district recently. He didn't hesitate to call the 
president a "chicken hawk" or a "son of a bitch", and to the surprise 
of all won 48% of the vote doing so, leading Newt Gingrich to say that 
the race "should serve as a wake-up call to Republicans" for the 2006 
elections.

There's a lesson in this. Americans are not, generally speaking, your 
basic turn-the-other-cheek sorts of folks. They like to know that the 
people they vote for or support will, at the very least, stand there 
and whack back, if whacked at. Whatever she may have been before, Cindy 
Sheehan was beaten into just that shape on the anvil of her son's 
death. ("I was stunned and dismayed when the United States invaded 
Iraq. I didn't agree with it. I didn't think it was right, but I never 
protested until after Casey was killed.") Some of her testimony at the 
Conyers hearings on the Downing Street Memo catches this spirit and 
it's well worth quoting:

     There are a few people around the US and a couple of my fellow 
witnesses who were a little justifiably worried that in my anger and 
anguish over Casey's premeditated death, I would use some swear words, 
as I have been known to do on occasion when speaking about the subject. 
Mr Conyers, out of my deep respect for you, the other representatives 
here, my fellow witnesses, and viewers of these historic proceedings, I 
was able to make it through an entire testimony without using any 
profanity. However, if anyone deserves to be angry and use profanity, 
it is I. What happened to Casey and humanity because of the apparent 
dearth of honesty in our country's leadership is so profane that it 
defies even my vocabulary skills. We as Americans should be offended 
more by the profanity of the actions of this administration than by 
swear words. We have all heard the old adage that actions speak louder 
than words and for the sake of Casey and our other precious children, 
please hold someone accountable for their actions and their words of 
deception.

Last week, the Pentagon relieved a four-star general of his command 
allegedly because he had an affair, while separated from his wife, with 
a woman not in the military or the government; and yet not a single top 
official or high-ranking officer (except for scapegoat Brigadier Gen 
Janice Karpinski) has suffered for American acts at Abu Ghraib, or 
murder and torture throughout our imperium, or for torture and abuse at 
our prison in Guantanamo, or for any of the disasters of Iraq. In such 
a context, the words "please hold someone accountable" by the mother of 
a boy killed in Iraq, a woman on a mission who doesn't plan to back 
down or leave off any time soon - well, that truly constitutes going 
directly for the president's political throat. It's mano a mano time, 
and while I would never underestimate what this administration might 
do, I wouldn't underestimate the fierce power of an angry mother 
either. The Bush administration is in trouble in Iraq, in Washington, 
and in Crawford.

Note on sources: Cindy Sheehan is first and foremost an Internet 
phenomenon. Those of you who want to read her writings since 2004 
should visit her archive at the always lively libertarian site, 
LewRockwell.com. (Rockwell seems to specialize in strong women, 
publishing as well the writings of retired Lieutenant Colonel Karen 
Kwiatkowski.) For the Sheehan phenomenon in its present incarnation, 
check out a new website www.meetwithcindy.org, but then go to the 
must-visit site, Afterdowningstreet.com, which has a fascinating, 
ever-updated Sheehan subsection.

Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the author of The End of 
Victory Culture. (Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by permission.)

(Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt)