Cindy Sheehan's heart is in the right place. I'm just not sure where her head is. Seriously though, the well-intentioned but inarticulate founder of Gold Star Families for Peace is demanding immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite her quick recitation of facts, neatly (and I might add, quite soundly) decrying the American engagements in the Middle East, she and her followers seem to be ignoring the immediate consequences of an all-out withdrawal.
Such a withdrawal would be disastrous for the United States' already low esteem worldwide, and reminiscent of the withdrawal from Lebanon in the 1980s following a few hundred casualties. Since coalition forces invaded in search of illusory weapons of mass destruction and ties to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, just short of 1,900 U.S. soldiers have been killed. In context, that is the graduating class of three or four large high schools.
Imagine if Pyongyang or Tehran manages to produce actual weapons of mass destruction (although President Bush has somehow overlooked their earnest efforts thus far). Will their leaders hesitate to attack a country that has its armed forces home for Christmas when they lose a tiny fraction of an all-volunteer army?
Most of the rest of the world is hardened to losing its favorite sons for cruel, stupid reasons. If we cannot steel ourselves to military casualties, we'll soon be forced to steel ourselves to collateral damages.
The fledgling draft of the new Iraqi constitution seems to almost deliberately pit the Shiite and Kurds against the Sunni majority, who are already calling for civil war rather than submit to the disproportionate resource distribution proposed. Quite simply, an immediate U.S. withdrawal means an Iraqi civil war, which is no exit strategy.
However immoral a war, however unnecessary an invasion and however gross its casualties, an immediate withdrawal could mean hundreds of Iraqi deaths for every American that otherwise might not come home.
Sheehan and her contemporaries do a good service to the public discourse by calling to attention the secretive and muddled policies pursued thus far by the U.S. Department of Defense.
They rightly label the war as ill conceived and illegal. But U.S. dispossession of Iraq at this point will not equal lives saved. At this point, we have no choice but to admit our mistakes and work diligently for a stable Iraq.
To Ms. Sheehan: I respect and cannot imagine your grief. But we mustn't recall American boys at the blood-cost of far more Arabs!
And to Mr. Brian Began, who imagined in his recent letter to The State News what Sheehan's fallen son must be wondering (SN 8/29): How dare you presume to know a dead man's perspective? Were I ever to be killed under such laughably false pretenses, I only hope my mother would be so vigilant.
Cody Zoppa
English senior
