08/10/10 – Cindy Sheehan – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio Chaos, 95.9, and LRN.
FM, Liberty Radio Network.
Simulcasting, I think they call that, I guess.
Alright, so our first guest on the show today is the heroic antiwar activist, Cindy Sheehan.
Hi Cindy, welcome back to the show.
Hey Scott, it's great to be on again.
I'm really happy to have you here.
Geez, I guess it's been five years since we first met.
You had your protest at Camp Casey outside of Bush's pretended ranch in Crockett, Texas.
Right.
Back in 2005.
Right.
And he never did answer your question, what noble cause, I know that.
But I wonder, what have you learned, if not what noble cause he claimed your son died for?
Well, you know, I've learned, oh, in the last five years, I think I've learned, I can't even measure how much I've learned.
But I know in the last five years I've learned more than the previous years I lived put together.
And I've learned Republicans will be Republicans.
And, you know, they're very unapologetically pro-war.
Not every Republican, but, you know, most Republicans are unapologetically pro-war.
But the faction that I've learned the most about, I think, would be the antiwar movement or the so-called antiwar movement.
The people who are supposedly on the left are progressive.
And, you know, it's just very disheartening that all of my colleagues, most of my colleagues or friends or associates that I worked with before Obama was elected, have basically, you know, fallen off the face of the earth, or they support now what Obama is doing, or they're not as energetically against it as they were when Bush was president.
And so the major thing that I've learned, I think, is that we have a one-party system in this country, and it's the war party.
And it just depends on, you know, if you have an R or a D after your name, if you support what's happening or if you're against what's happening.
So that's what I've learned.
And, you know, there's no noble cause for war.
There never has been.
There never will be.
And, you know, we just have to stop being such hypocrites and such, you know, supporters of empire, depending on who is president.
It doesn't matter who's president.
The empire is what has the momentum, not political parties.
Well, you know, I think one of the things about your story that really captured everybody's attention is the specificity of your complaint, particularly that your son was sent off to die in a war that should have never been fought, that he was betrayed.
And, you know, I read, and, you know, me, Cindy, I'm into this.
I read about it all day.
And yet still the casualty reports come in.
A couple of soldiers died in Iraq today.
That's still going on, the summer of 2010 here, if you're listening to this on MP3 format years from now, doing your thesis on it.
Soldiers still dying.
Soldiers still dying, obviously, more than ever in Afghanistan as the war escalates there.
And oftentimes, even for those of us who deliberately try to not think this way or whatever, you know, a number's a number.
Some soldiers died.
Some soldiers died.
But, you know, I've been reading, you know, you get desensitized to it.
It's not a scene that you see.
It's words in a headline.
You know what I mean?
That's what you get to picture is the shape of the news article, not the event that actually happened.
So I've been reading The Good Soldiers by David Finkel, which is about a group of guys, a battalion, that were part of the surge in 2007 in Baghdad.
And they were basically part of the ground unit from that collateral murder video, actually.
But anyway, it's the story of, hey, these are real people driving around in aluminum Humvees, getting their bodies torn apart by EFPs and IEDs on the side of the road, getting their brains sniped out by some guy hiding behind a wall.
These are, you know, their names are Gary and Dave and Bob and Deshaun and, you know, Juan and whoever.
They're our friends and our neighbors.
Their names are Casey.
And they're out there dying for nothing.
Real people, individuals, crippled for life, their brains scrambled by shockwaves and by the things that they've seen.
And that's if they're lucky.
You know, that's if they come home with their arms and legs and their life intact.
This is not playing around.
It's not some movie scene we're talking about here.
These are people's sons and brothers and brand-new husbands and fathers in a lot of cases as well.
Well, I just got the very first anti-war thing I ever did after Casey was killed was on Mother's Day, exactly four weeks after Casey was killed.
And my husband, Casey's dad, and I drove down to Santa Barbara to go to Arlington West.
The Veterans for Peace were putting one cross for every soldier who had been killed in Iraq on the beach in Santa Barbara.
And at that time there were less than 800 crosses.
Now it's up to 4,400.
But I just got an email from the founder of Arlington West.
It was his idea.
It was the person with the vision and the commitment and the energy to do it.
And he said that the Veterans for Peace in that area have decided they're going to stop putting the crosses for the Iraq War dead, and they're only going to put the crosses for the Afghan War dead because they said that the Iraq War is now old news.
And I just responded, you know what?
It's never going to be old news to me.
And one of my goals is to personalize these wars.
Like you just said, Casey's not a number.
He was a son and a brother and a friend and a Catholic, and he loved world wrestling entertainment.
Sometimes I got worried about him because he liked it so much.
And, you know, he was, yeah, just like your neighbor, just like any other person you see going down the street.
And so I think that's one thing that we've lost.
We've lost the personalization.
There's no sacrifice.
I don't want anybody to have to sacrifice for wars for empire.
But if the empire is in a war, then it should be shared.
And it just, you know, breaks my heart that even the Veterans for Peace are moving on from it because, you know, Obama declared the war over, even though he really just changed the name.
It's not over.
He just changed the name.
Well, and in the most transparent way, too.
Let's not, you know, mince words about this or whatever.
He said, we're going to call the troops that are there something other than combat troops so that we can keep combat troops there.
All right, good.
At least he's honest about what a liar he is, Cindy.
And, well, you know what?
If they're not combat troops, then take away their weapons.
Yeah.
You know, that's my thing.
Well, yeah, that is sad to hear.
I didn't know about that.
And, you know, any regular reader of antiwar.com for sure can see on a daily basis that people are dying in massive bombings in Iraq all the time, and including American soldiers, and that war is not over yet.
And, of course, they're in a major political crisis there.
They had an election in March, and it's now August, and they still can't form a government of any kind, which is why the violence is getting worse and worse as people are resorting back to warfare again over political power there.
It's madness to call off attention to Iraq.
But that's the way it is.
You know, I saw Chris Matthews interviewing Sebastian Junger about his new movie and his book about the war in the Korengal Valley there in Afghanistan.
And Chris Matthews had a whole soliloquy.
He sounded like you, Cindy.
It was funny.
Well, not really, but he was saying, it's just not right that the media doesn't pay any attention to the war anymore.
And whatever.
He went on and on and on.
This is a guy who talks about nothing but, you know, red and blue counties with Chuck Todd all day every day on his stupid show, who hadn't said the word Iraq on his show since his one day of coverage of the purple-fingered election in March, and then nine months or ten months before that he hadn't said the word Iraq, or even Afghanistan for that matter.
Other than maybe what a Republican and a Democrat said about each other about the issue of the war.
Never about the war itself.
Never.
Well, you know, it's not just the mainstream or corporate media anymore either.
You know, Amy Goodman was being criticized for not talking about the wars, and then she had me on one day, and she had me on for about 90 seconds.
So, you know, it's just something that...
I'm sorry, hold it right there, Cindy.
We've got to go after this break.
Bumper music's playing here.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Cindy Sheehan.
CindySheehanSoapbox.blogspot.com is her website.
Check it out.
Check out her show, too.
This is the Liberty Radio Network, broadcasting the latest Liberty-oriented audio content 24 hours a day at LRN.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton.
I'm talking with Cindy Sheehan, the heroic anti-war activist who, for some reason, is still anti-war, even though the Democrats won an election a couple of years ago.
I guess maybe it has something to do with the wars have continued to rage on this whole time.
And, you know, Cindy, here's the thing.
I think, well, and it goes back to the book I'm reading about these kids that were in the surge in Baghdad in 2007.
And it's that none of them joined up to go fight in Iraq.
None of them joined up to go, I want to go help the Iraqi people, or I want to go defeat the Iraqi people.
They all joined up for reasons that are, I mean, to my ears, just sound silly because they're meaningless.
Things like, well, I just wanted to defend my country.
I just wanted to, you know, help America.
You know, America is the government, is the military.
And, you know, it's just all these kind of unproven but accepted premises that the democracy would never send us off to a war that wasn't worth it.
Of course it's worth it, or else why would I be here?
You know, it's how people rationalized.
They figured Saddam must have done 9-11, or else why were we invading Iraq?
Of course he did 9-11.
And people, they just make up these things.
Even though we're in the middle of the era of the phony wars, people can't differentiate.
They go, well, my dad was in the military, and his dad was in the military, and we're a proud American military family, and I'm going to go join the military.
And, jeez, it's the detail of like, well, wait a minute.
Am I going to be patrolling people's neighborhoods, killing them for no reason, for, you know, daring to resist my foreign occupation of their neighborhood in the first place?
These kinds of questions aren't part of the decision-making process of joining.
It has nothing to do with it.
Well, you know, exactly.
And you have to remember, too, that a lot of our young people are joining now because they feel like they don't have any other options or opportunities, with unemployment probably hovering, real unemployment hovering around 20%, and higher in other areas of our country and in other populations.
And coupled with the fact that they believe that Barack Obama is different from George Bush, the military recruitment has the recruiters and all the branches are meeting and exceeding their recruitment goals, when for the last six years under the Bush administration, they weren't.
They were failing.
They weren't meeting their recruitment goals.
And this is, I think, a good opportunity for some shameless promotion on my part, but my organization, Cindy Sheehan Soapbox and Peace of the Action, P-E-A-C-E of the Action, we've collaborated to publish a 75th anniversary edition of Medley Butler's War is a Racket.
And people can go to CindySheehanSoapbox.blogspot to get information on that.
But we think that this book has to get in the hands of every young person, every school library, every library, you know, everywhere where our children are preyed on.
And our children, basically, in this empire are preyed on by the media, by these myths that you were talking about, defending America.
War has never been for that.
And, you know, Medley Butler talked about that in between World War I and World War II.
And he said clearly, and now our nation is embarking on another misadventure, you know, to paraphrase him, talking about World War II, which we're taught is, you know, the good war and, you know, the war to defeat fascism and Nazism and everything without, you know, even talking about why those things were able to flourish in Europe at that time because of World War I.
Anyway, you know, I think that we have to do it one person at a time now because the forces that are arrayed against us are just so, so powerful in trying to upset the apple cart.
You know, if we get everybody who's anti-war stand down during a democratic administration, every four to eight years the anti-war people are taking a break.
And so, you know, we only become activated if there's a republican warmonger, and then we, you know, deactivate during a democratic warmongering regime.
So we have to do this, I think.
We have to be anti-empire in a very grassroots way if we're going to have any chance for success.
And we're going to have to gauge our success at very small, one person at a time instead of millions of people now.
Well, you know, it's so ironic to me that what I know is so obvious to you is just right in front of our eyes.
You alluded to it earlier, a real unemployment rate of 20%.
And I hope people will, in fact, you can check out my Facebook page, facebook.com slash anti-war radio, and you'll find a link to this post anti-Americanism.
Europe can't even be bothered to hate America anymore.
And it's about how in Europe it's the view from Europe of America's imperial collapse.
And they see us just as overextended and fat and stupid and committing suicide like all empires do.
And they're watching it from the other side of the ocean there.
You know, sort of the same civilization.
But they're watching us repeat their mistakes.
And they're just pitying us, basically.
And watching as America completely falls apart.
And they can see, of course, that the number one reason why is our attempt to occupy the entire planet Earth.
This is the name of our disease, is our empire.
It's what's killing our society back here at home.
And then, as you say, people are so broke they got nothing to do but join the military.
Well, self-licking ice cream cone and on down the path to hell we go, you know?
And it's so obvious and yet it'll be the last thing they ever abolish.
You know, they'll get rid of every government program they got that set the Pentagon.
That'll be the last thing.
Well, you know, the insidious where they don't have to have a draft.
People always tell me, oh, Cindy, it'll be awful if they have a draft.
They don't need a draft.
You know, they have all these other forces working for them to basically funnel our children into the military.
Casey joined just for the very bare reason that he wanted to get college help.
That's the reason that Casey joined.
And, you know, if Casey had to spend four years in, quote, unquote, service for the country, you know, he didn't mind that as long as he was going to, you know, be able to pay for his university.
And we didn't even know that that's a myth, that less than 15 percent of recruits join because of their education benefits and bail themselves of their education benefits.
All right.
I'm sorry we're out of time.
We've got to leave it there, Cindy.
But thank you so much for your efforts.
You're doing the yeoman's work here.
We need you and we appreciate you and we love you and we're thinking about you.
Well, I love you guys, too.
Thank you.
Thanks.
We'll be back, y'all.
It's Anti-War Radio.