08/26/10 – Cindy Sheehan – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey y'all, Scott Horton here from Antiwar.com filling in for Gustavo Arellano today on Pacifica for you.
And now we're going to go live to the peace mom, Cindy Sheehan.
I'm sure you people remember five years ago, the giant Camp Casey event out there outside of George Bush's Crawford quote-unquote ranch when Mrs. Sheehan, whose son died in the Iraq war, was attempting to get George Bush to answer the question, what noble cause did her son die for?
Since he said it was a noble cause, it was a noble cause.
As his brush off, she said, well, can you be a bit more specific?
And he refused to answer.
And it's funny because occasionally you can read news articles that say, whatever happened to Cindy Sheehan?
Well, the truth is she's been fighting for peace this entire time.
And those news people need to ask themselves how come they haven't been following around the way we have at Antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Cindy.
How are you?
I'm pretty good.
How are you?
I'm doing okay.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Oh, no problem.
It just is really disheartening to me lately that people think that the Iraq war is over and that all of our struggle has been successful when it's just so far from being over and our struggles are far from being over.
But it seems like there's so few of us still left in the struggle.
Well, and the less coverage of the movement that there is, the more the average person might be left to conclude that everything must have been taken care of.
After all, Barack Obama said he was going to end the Iraq war and TV said he did.
And so what's to protest?
Well, you know, exactly.
But this week I've been super busy with interviews.
People wanting to interview me about how I feel about the end of the Iraq war.
So I hope the word is spreading around that it's not really over.
At least 91 people were killed in Iraq yesterday and at least 13 separate incidents.
So the violence is still continuing.
We just really need to have a much stronger, bigger movement than we currently do.
Well, yeah.
You know, I saw too that those bombings were everywhere from Mosul down to Basra.
It was like a miniature Tet Offensive.
Nothing powerful enough to take down the Iraqi government that America has created there.
But certainly enough to send a message that the predominantly Sunni-based insurgency is not done resisting yet.
Well, the power struggle for control of Iraq is going to happen whether U.S. troops are there or not.
And, you know, I would like to really see Iraq be put back in the hands of the Iraqi people, not the puppet U.S. government that's there.
I think that they need to have control over their natural resources and the wealth that comes from it and that we should trust the place where civilization started to be able to handle their own problems.
But, you know, it's the empire.
It's not about the wars.
It's about the empire.
And many people want to make it about partisan politics.
Well, so is it a partisan thing one way or the other, a Republican or a Democrat thing, to rename infantry troops from combat forces to transitional forces?
And if one is to rename forces, one thing then another, does it actually change what they are?
Does it matter whether it's a Republican or a Democrat that's doing the renaming, Cindy?
How does that work exactly?
Well, we know that George Bush liked to rebrand things to, you know, call torture enhanced interrogation methods and things like that.
No, it's not.
It's not a partisan issue.
It's a military industrial complex issue, and that is going to go on whether there's a Democrat or a Republican office.
And so we rebrand troops in Iraq.
We rename them.
But many of the troops that got taken out have just been redeployed to Afghanistan.
And so the violence is intensifying.
The Pentagon is getting better funded since Barack Obama has come into power, but yet the anti-war movement appears to be in some kind of hypnosis.
Well, you know, it's certainly true that partisanship plays a very poisonous role in the entire anti-war movement.
But, you know, it seems to me like maybe an opportunity we have would be to, you know, if these people can rebrand everything all the time, maybe we can finally get it through people's heads that supporting the troops means demanding an end to the wars and demanding that their home is safe on their bases instead of rolling around in a Humvee waiting to get blown up in a war that makes no sense.
And, in fact, Cindy, there's a brand-new article in Wired today on Wired.com by Spencer Ackerman who's on location out there embedded with the soldiers in Afghanistan.
And he says when they're sitting around talking, they're talking about how the policy makes no sense, how they have no idea what they're doing there and how they would rather just go ahead and be back here if that's the way it's going to be.
And I was thinking, well, maybe we can emphasize that.
You know, what if Casey had never been sent to war?
Or what if they'd turn around and march right back out of the country as soon as Saddam Hussein had fallen instead of trying to pick a fight with Muqtada al-Sadr in March of 2004?
Right.
You know, yeah, exactly.
I mean, but that's what the U.S. military has never made sense of.
You look at people in World War II.
They had a lot of creative ways to voice their dissent with their superiors also.
It's actually just the working class and less-advantaged people who pay for the greed and the power and sanity of the people, quote-unquote, in charge.
Now, you've written the foreword to the new edition of Smedley Butler's War is a Racket.
Can you tell us very briefly about that?
Well, my organization, Peace of the Action, P-E-A-C-E of the Action, and Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox collaborated to publish the 75th anniversary edition of War is a Racket.
And Major General Smedley Butler, a U.S. Marine, was involved in many foreign wars for profit while he was a Marine, and he wrote it in 1935, and not much has changed.
So people can go to warisaracket.net for more information about how to order.
I think it should be in every family home, every school library, every peace organization library.
We should get it in the hands of every junior high and high school student.
I just saw an article where in South Carolina there's one high school that's putting every incoming freshman into a JROTC class for P.E. credit.
This is like marching fascism, and it's coming to a school near you.
So we have to be the ones to prevent our children from joining the military to be misused, like my son was and like millions of others have been throughout our history.
Well, showing them War is a Racket might be one heck of a way to do that.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today, Cindy.
I really do appreciate it.
Okay.
Thank you, Scott.
It's always good talking to you.
Everybody, that's the legendary Peace Mom, Cindy Sheehan.
Her website is cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com.
Also, look up Peace of the Action, spelled like peace.
I'm Scott Horton.
I've been filling in for Gustavo Arellano here on KPFK.
I appreciate you all listening.
See you next time.
They won't admit I must be some kind of creature if they haven't been.