Looks like some Iraqis have been "Sheehanitized"

Well, Cindy Sheehan is still at it. It should culminate this Saturday when she marches onto Washington. Didn't Billy Jack and George Galloway already beat her to it? (Video debate here between Galloway and Hitchens on the war in Iraq. Or try here).

Why is it that pacifists are so obnoxiously vocal and in some instances, so violent and abusive in getting their message of peace across? I realize they don't have a monopoly on foul language and violent tempers, but, they certainly are large shareholders of it. Someone should go around and hand out pacifiers to these bellicose pacifists and put a plug in their bawling behavior. Where was their pacifism when this was happening? It wasn't pacifism that ended it; it was moral violence in removing Saddam that ended his reign of terror.
Read this account of one military wife who attended one of these "Bring them Home Now Tour" rallies.

Check out this morning's LA Times article on Cindy Sheehan having an Iraqi Audience that is willing to listen to her drivel with a straight face.

Key paragraph:

Forty years ago, during the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh and his top deputies kept a close eye on U.S. public opinion and the antiwar movement. Now on the streets of Baghdad, Najaf and Mosul, even ordinary Iraqis have heard of Cindy Sheehan and formed opinions about her and her movement.



Apparently television and newspapers such as Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and Al Sharqiya, are reporting on the Sheehan march for this saturday; and Iraqis are very much aware of the anti-war movement in the U.S. I'm sure the terrorists are as well.

People on the Left of this seem to take offense if there is any suggestion of being anti-Patriotic or anti-American. Freedom to dissent is very American, they say. I agree, to a degree. But I also feel there is a responsible and an irresponsible manner in which to engage in disagreement. The kind advocated by the likes of Jane Fonda pretending to take aim from behind a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery gun for a North Vietnamese war propaganda photo-op; Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry (who likened Ho Chi Minh to George Washington) when he called his fellow American soldiers "baby killers" as he testified falsehoods before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, because, as he put it, back then he was "an angry young man"; and Senator Dick Durban on Gitmo, earning himself the top spot in Al Jazeera news headlines for a couple of weeks, and without substantiated proof, successfully poured fuel onto an already inflamed Arab world. It is this kind of reckless behavior that I deem irresponsible and ultimately gives aid and comfort to the enemy. The anti-war peace activists are proud of themselves over Vietnam; yet they, 60 Minutes, and Jane Fonda did not come away from it, learning the right lessons of Vietnam. It's funny (no...not really) how Jane Fonda goes in front of the 60 Minutes camera right around the time her new book, "My Life So Far", comes out, to apologize, not for her actions during a time of war (she still says she's proud she went to Vietnam), but for how her actions might have hurt soldiers, inadvertently. She takes no personal responsiblity, though, for the likelihood that her anti-war propaganda actions might have gotten soldiers killed, by prolonging the North Vietnamese resistance, and resulted in POWs brutalized further. And just a mere month or so ago, she had planned an anti-Iraq war tour in a bus fueled by vegetable oil; she has since canceled the spring tour, stating she didn't want to steal the limelight away from Cindy Sheehan. Riiiiiiiight. (The truth: she saw what a losing strategy Cindy Sheehan was engaged in....oh, and doesn't Hanoistan Jane have a movie coming out? What impeccable timing and planning....).

They don't acknowledge that abandoning our allies over there resulted in a million Vietnam refugees, a quarter of whom died from drowning and victimization by pirates. Those who did not flee were engaged in a bloodbath. A fifth of the Cambodian population was slaughtered by the Communists.


Former North Vietnamase colonel Bui Tin, wrote a book about how even though the Viet Cong knew they were losing the war after the Tet Offensive, news of the anti-war movement in the U.S. gave them the morale and fortitude needed for them to hang in there, and wade it out.

"Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9am to follow the growth of the anti-war movement." He wrote that visits to Hanoi by the likes of Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark, gave them confidence that they should keep fighting even while losing horribly on the battlefield.

So what major battle have we lost in Iraq? Where have American and Coalition Forces been routed? And yet the media makes it sound like we are losing horribly with soldiers dropping like flies when all MSM ever prefers to focus on is tragedy news and anything negative. Is it any wonder morale for the war is low here at home, even while most soldiers serving over there don't feel like we are losing; are highly motivated; and re-enlistment rates are at an all-time high?


More from the LA Times article:

To some Iraqis, Sheehan's stand at Bush's ranch and her continuing opposition to the war make her a hero. "The president doesn't have the credibility to face the mother of the U.S. soldier who was killed in a war that many in the U.S. say was a fatal mistake," columnist Muthana Tabaqchali wrote in the Iraqi daily Azzaman, which the U.S. Embassy considers hostile to the American mission in Iraq. "Sheehan was a lady who stood like a lioness with her lofty staff in front of the president," he wrote. "She collected all her strength and motherhood to face the strongest president in the world to tell him enough!" Others, however, view her with cynicism. "This might be a part of a political game, like when pictures of prisoners' abuses in Abu Ghraib prison were published, just to harm President Bush's reputation," said Hameed Shabak, 35, a Mosul resident. In front of the Faqma ice cream shop in Baghdad's Karada district, Fathel Saad, a silver-haired professor of philosophy and theology at Babel College south of Baghdad, debated a friend about Sheehan while finishing up an ice cream cone. "I think she is misguided," Saad said. "What the Americans have given Iraq is the greatest gift: the freedom to think." His friend, schoolteacher Fares Mukhlis, disagreed. "This is a brave woman standing up for her principles that are correct," he said. Nabeal Mohammed Younis, a professor of political science at Baghdad University, recalled seeing Sheehan's image on Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel, while having lunch at a Baghdad hotel with colleagues. "We said that this woman is not very different from the women in Iraq who've lost their sons," Younis recalled. "We started talking about Cindy Sheehan and started to distinguish between how the women are affected by the war and how the men are affected." With thousands of Iraqis killed in violence since the March 2003 invasion and with the legacy of Saddam Hussein's tyranny still haunting them, Iraqis are inclined to sympathize with a grieving mother, regardless of their political views, Younis said. "Most of them are with her and share her misery for losing her son," he said. Sheehan's plight, as well as the news of thousands of Americans voicing concern about the troubles in Iraq, helped Haqqi Fathulla, a 33-year-old Mosul resident, feel personally connected to Americans. "The stand of this woman emphasizes the fact that there are no hostilities between Iraqi and American people," he said.