Cindy Sheehan spent part of her Memorial Day posting a farewell of sorts at the Daily Kos. That’s right - the grieving mother who morphed into an anti-war icon is exiting the stage.

“I have spent every available cent I got from the money a ‘grateful’ country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then,” Sheehan writes. “I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings.”

She also writes, “The most devastating conclusion that I reached [on Memorial Day morning], however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which [sic] cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.”

In general, any parent who has lost a child in Iraq or Afghanistan deserves the nation’s respect and sympathy. The scars from that sort of loss to a family are deep and permanent, to put it simply. But, unfortunately for Cindy Sheehan, being a Gold Star mom doesn’t grant her immunity from criticism when she comes off as a self-aggrandizing opportunist or dishonors her son’s service.

Full disclosure here: Sheehan’s efforts have served me personally. She made me realize - for all my frustration and displeasure over the activities of the Bush administration and for all the cutting edge music I’ve downloaded in recent years - I’m still no liberal. You see, to truly be a liberal in America today you have to cast yourself as an all-caring, all-feeling being while at the same time demonstrating utter disdain for those who dare to hold strong convictions that differ from yours.

And that’s why she’s leaving the arena: For all of her stunts, for all of her happenings, for all of her soundbites, the majority of this nation doesn’t agree with her - on anything she says. So she’s doing what every good and modern liberal does when things get tough: She’s taking her floppy sun hat and going home . . . wherever that is. You see, she lost her husband and her money and nearly her remaining kids . . . but you know that because she told you. And she told you because this joke of a movement she concocted a few years ago is all about her. As her name recognition and star power increased in anti-war circles, she grew into the typical American celebrity: cocky, pompous and self-absorbed. She was the show - a big draw, a headliner. What she said mattered because she said it. Just ask her; she’d tell you.

But as with most who attempt to trade on public sentiments, the arc of fame is swift and impartial. Cindy quickly went the way of Andrew Dice Clay. The crowds stopped showing up. The planners stopped asking her to be a headliner. (And she can’t appear if she’s not the headliner, can she?) She became a parody of herself faster than she could cheer, “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!”

It wasn’t her fault. It couldn’t have been. After all, she was Cindy Sheehan, rally headliner. Well, read on, Daily Kos readers. It was those damn conservatives and their hate squads and those weak Democrats who were supposed to pull the plug on the war. (Yes, as Sheehan swings at the pinata that is her exit from the public eye, she actually takes aim at the party that made her.)

Then in a (hopefully) final act of perceived defiance, she goes from embarrasing to inexcusable. She stains her son’s honor once and for all by claiming he died for nothing - a shameless and desperate attempt to one-up her critics. She would sell her son out in death to try and win an argument and in so doing she fades into the sunset as nothing more than a pathetic joke - a wholly unsympathetic character.

But there’s more. At the end of the requiem of sorts she takes another three pedantic steps back and chucks a Hail Mary of a liberal cliché, writing, “You are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it. It’s up to you now.”

Thanks, Cindy; we’ve got it. If you would have taken the time to stop listening to yourself and push away from the podium at some point in the last three years you would have realized we had it all along. You see, we who differ from your point of view didn’t come into our beliefs arbitrarily. We earned them - a concept foreign to most liberals who have more ego than life experiences. And while we’re at it, we’ll go ahead and preserve Casey’s honor in spite of you, honor that is timeless and exists outside of the political spectacle you’ve attempted to make it. Regardless of how callous you demonstrate yourself to be, those who understand the notion of service over self will never accept the idea that he died for nothing.

(Cross-posted at Military.com)

Man, the U.S. Army’s taking a lot of fire these days, aren’t they?  And I don’t mean the Iraq and Afghanistan War kind of fire, I mean the bad press kind - you know, the kind that really matters.  Scandal after scandal - from the Jessica Lynch thing to the Pat Tillman thing to the Jessica Lynch thing to the Pat Till - ah, hold one.  How many things are we talking about here exactly?

First off, I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of the transgressions, alleged or otherwise.  Government institutions, certainly those charged with waging war, cannot abuse the nation’s trust.  Clearly, in both the Lynch and Tillman cases, some creative license was taken during the course of socializing the story to the world.  And among the ironies (and tragedies) is that manipulating information in that sort of way does nothing toward honoring those who made the ultimate sacrifice.  Those who create leaps in logic, bend the truth, or outright lie must be punished.

But haven’t we been through this already with respect to both of these cases?  Didn’t the GAO release its detailed findings on the Tillman case a couple of months ago, which was basically a restatement of all the issues that had been made known well before that?  Didn’t we already watch the expose a few years ago that intimated the Jessica Lynch rescue was staged to a certain degree?  Didn’t we already rough the Army up over these things? 

And is there some sense that the Army (outside of a few misguided souls in certain chains of command) is okay with leaping logic, bending truth, or lying?

 Yet here these stories are again, dominating the airwaves and jumping out of headlines above the fold.  Where did they come from?

The usual place stories come from on slow news days:  Congress.

That’s right, the Fightin’ 110th, the same organization that promised leadership, bi-partisanship, and the right kind of change in Washington once they got there continues to prove they have no interest in any of that.  They’d rather recycle the same old scandals by inviting perhaps unwitting (I’ll be generous here) media icons to testify the same testimony they gave last time (except it was on a different channel, of course).  It’s like watching Ozzy’s umpteenth farewell tour.  I half-expected the folks in the back of the caucus room to raise lighters and scream, “Iron Man!”

Meanwhile the real issues, ones that need oversight and leadership are left unattended.  Are we winning or losing the war?  Damned if I know.  But we’re sure not making any progress by beating the Army up over and over again about the same things.

I could blame the media for being party to this illusion, but that would be like blaming an infant for looking at the shiny object above the crib.

So as we refuse to accept an institution that doesn’t uphold the highest traditions of military service, so too should we demand more from our lawmakers.  After all, they promised us more.

(Cross-posted at Military.com)

It seemed like perfect theater four years ago:  “The Iraq Show.”  Such a tidy plot to keep the western world entertained during the dull, post-holiday dark ages in the winter of 2003.  The American military had blitzkrieg’d across Iraq and taken the capital in 21 days.  And the embeds had been there to capture it all in real-time.  And what a climax, huh?  The images of Saddam’s statue being pulled from its perch in Baghdad livened up homes across the planet.  And at that brief moment, as the world watched the city’s denizens jump on the wrecked form and smack it with their sandals, all - even America’s most strident TV critics (both foreign and domestic) - paused and nodded.

What a show, “The Iraq Show.”  The ratings were off the page, and the ad dollars flowed.  The screens faded to black; the credits rolled (Best Boy - Paul Wolfowitz, Gaffer - Douglas Feith).  As the Halliburton trucks rolled to retrieve the production gear, it was time to turn the channel and surf the web for that perfect summer vacation destination.

But “The Iraq Show” wasn’t over.  It had an epilogue, one that even those who drove their widescreen HD satellite systems past Channel 521 couldn’t ignore.  And this epilogue went on and on.  The arc of the plot was completely lost, but the story just kept coming.

A lot of special effects, especially explosions.  A lot of killing.  No more smiles from the locals.  TV critics started wondering aloud what the point of the show was and when it might end.

The Network told viewers all was well:  “This is a good story,” they said.  “And we’re sticking with it.  All good television watchers will do the same.”

In time “The Iraq Show” audience split into camps of those who really liked the show and those who really hated it.  But the ratings were good, or good enough, so the Network added another season, and then another.

Then some artsy-type - a PBS watcher, no doubt - did a little “research” and made a big deal out of the fact that the show’s premise (bad guy about to attack America) was flawed.  The Network ignored the criticism, saying, “It might not be the show we started to write, but it’s still a good one.”

Ratings started to go south.  Television watchers were growing weary.  They didn’t want explosions; they wanted smiles again.  The Other Network saw the trend and made it’s move.  “We have a new show,” their executives said.  “It’s about good things like building houses in New Orleans and saving polar bears.”  The large portion of the audience said that was a show they’d want to watch.

But the Network countered by adding a new star to “The Iraq Show,” a real hero.  “People of Iraq,” the hero wrote in a letter to Iraqis during this season’s Episode Two, “it would be great if you smiled more.”

But The Other Network wasn’t buying it.  “Although I admit I liked ‘The Iraq Show’ at the beginning,” The Other Network’s director of programming said, “it has turned into a bad show.  It needs to end by August of 2008.”

“Artificial deadlines play into the hands of foreign markets,” the Network’s vice chief executive said.  “And I, for one, do not want to watch shows with subtitles.”

So how long will ‘The Iraq Show’ go on?  In spite of ever-sagging ratings The Network remains sanguine on its future.  “Besides,” The Network’s chief executive said, “we’ve already beaten the odds in this business.  ‘The Iraq Show’ lasted four years already.”  He grew a wry smile as he added, “That’s four years longer than ‘Joey.’”

But one TV critic, who requested anonymity, suggested that the Network’s chief should have learned from how his father ran The Network.  “Just look at the first version of ‘The Iraq Show’ that ran back in the early ’90s,” the critic said.  “That program was a smash.  Say what you will about The Network back then, his father knew when to end a show.”

(Cross-posted at Military.com.)

The recently-released Defense Department Inspector General’s report on the Pentagon’s prewar intelligence effort has dragged a name back into the public debate regarding the justification for the invasion of Iraq - a name we haven’t heard for awhile:  Douglas Feith.  And Feith’s obtuse response to the report speaks volumes about where waging war fits within his personal concerns.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post, Feith, now a professor at Georgetown University, made the point that while his activities were characterized by the IG’s report as “inappropriate” they weren’t illegal.  He went on to state that what he presented in lighting the fuse of war was merely “a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community,” and in presenting it he “was not endorsing its substance.”

In other words, the whole drill was an exercise in semantics - a game.  And in this game the playing field was bounded by lines between things that were technically “legal” and “illegal.”  Missing from this game was any sense of the gravity and consequences of committing American forces to war.

In the end we found no WMD.  And the tie between the Baathists and al Qaida was, as the IG report states, “not a mature symbiotic relationship.”  A neocon’s response?  Professor Feith shrugs and tweaks his pedagogy.  After all, regardless of what he did to reverse engineer the evidence into what the Vice President wanted to hear, his efforts weren’t “illegal.”

So the neocons fade into the woodwork only to emerge occasionally to let us know the whole thing was a lark in the first place.  The war is no skin off Douglas Feith’s tenure-protected nose.  What does that mean to the rest of us?  More importantly, what does that mean to those in harm’s way, those brave American servicemembers who continue to put duty over self?

In his State of the Union address a few weeks ago, President Bush said, “Hindsight alone is not wisdom, and second-guessing is not a strategy.”  True, indeed.  We are in the middle of a conflict we must not lose.  By our presence our enemies have revealed themselves in ways we did not anticipate.  To a large degree we’re fighting a foe unforeseen when our forces stepped off the line of departure on March 20, 2003.

Nonetheless, it is a foe that must be defeated. But the way to victory includes a wide-eyed assessment of what got us here.  To do other than that is to perpetuate denial - a denial that in turn perpetuates the cavalier methodology employed by the likes of Douglas Feith. 

American history is littered with foreign policy missteps (to put it mildy) due to bad intel or, worse, intel that was morphed into fiction.  Admiral James Stockdale, famed Vietnam POW and Medal of Honor recipient, was a classic example of a warrior with this sort of wide-eyed approach.  Both in person and in the book he co-wrote with his wife Sybil, In Love and War, he was quite candid with his disdain for how the Johnson administration used half-truths and bogus facts to justify America’s entry into the war.  (He was airborne during the supposed patrol boat attacks on two American destoyers and saw nothing of the sort.)  But he carried out his orders convinced that the North Vietnamese were his enemy - and, arguably, history has validated his motivation.  Stockdale always fought to win, even throughout his years of captivity.

American history is also littered with doctrines that were created in the wake of foreign policy failures.  The Weinberger Doctrine came after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.  The Albright and Powell Doctrines followed the conflict in the Balkans.  These doctrines have one theme in common:  Don’t commit American forces without good reason.  It’s fair to suggest that theme assumes we know the reason going in and we don’t stumble upon it once the war is well underway.

Civilian control of the military exists for good reasons, but the American people should demand a reckoning, one less binary than matters separated by “inappropriate” and “illegal.”  Otherwise the lessons risk going unlearned.

The Iraq War will certainly result in another doctrine; let’s see that it’s not the Feith Doctrine.

(Cross-posted at Military.com’s “The Passdown.”)