Guest, G

One would be an idiot to expect the majority of soldiers currently serving in Iraq to be courageous enough to take a stand against this war. Their job, after all, is to fight any and every war their political leaders send them into, without question. That is how they have been educated by their military trainers and the isolated military culture to live and breathe in day after day.

However, there are, as I suggested in posting the Brecht poem above, men and women who will always retain their critical thinking skills as a survival mechanism. And they retain those human faculties and think for themselves, regardless of how hard the military, the political establishment, and those institutions' sycophant media tries to "re-educate" them not to.

You are also making an erroneous suggestion: that the families and friends of those who have chosen to put themselves in the military, and hence "in harm's way" must all agree with their military loved one's beliefs and choices. That also is ridiculous. The way for family members and friends to "support the troops" is simply to love them unconditionally, and do what they think is right, even when it is at cross-purposes with their loved ones in the military.

It isn't a sign of love or support to privately or publicly go against one's own moral beliefs, especially on such grave matters of moral importance as war and the waging of it, simply to appease and mollify those who "support the mission". If you believe what the US & UK military is doing is causing grievous harm to themselves, to others (like the Iraqi people), and creating social, economic, and political instability and a state of perpetual violence in the process at home and in the theatre of war, then why would you shut up and be silent in the face of what is happening?

The tone and content of your posting suggests you may not be much more than a pawn of neo-con conservatism, who can't or won't think for themselves. I say this because you don't even grasp the fact that we can easily detect that you are simply parroting the Republican party line on Cindy Sheehan's protest. You strike me as yet another brand loyal Republican, who refuses to think critically for themselves and instead parrots whatever the pundits and politicians say. People like that, be they Republican or Democrat brand loyalists never think critically, much less rationally, of what is best for the nation and the world, which is what our actual duty is as citizens of this supposedly free republic.

It isn't our duty to blindly support unjust wars fought by the poor to enrich the wealthy elite. And thankfully, the lazy American public is starting to wise up to the fact that is what the Iraq war is really all about. It doesn't take a Democrat, Republican or a rocket scientist to look at the price of oil before George Bush and Dick Cheney's war, and to look at the price of oil today. The worse the violence in Iraq, the higher the oil companies raise the price at the pump and get away with robbing the people and the planet of their future.

Cindy Sheehan is living proof of someone who regrets not taking a stand against the war BEFORE it happened, because she knows that if enough people in her position as a mother of a soldier being sent into harms way might just have been able to prevent the war from ever happening in the first place.

I can't imagine how haunted she and her husband must be by their inability to convince their son not to go to Iraq. Anyone who attempts to silence her raw rage at the cause of her son's death is just plain playing partisan Republican games of the most despicable sort.

This woman is genuine. The real deal. She once chose to keep silent about her opposition to the war, in order to conform to the tremendous pressures put upon military families to silence dissent in order to "support the troops", which as any thinking person knows, is merely a euphemism used by the military and political neo-con propagandists unquestioningly go along with the policies of the political establishment. Her rage is morally justified, which is why the Republican neo-con right is cowering in fear of her. They would do well to remember the Shakespeare adage of "hell hath no fury..." and stop scorning her and the other family members of the military now protesting the war.

People like these few good men for instance.

Or the Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Or Veterans for Peace.

Or the military families group Bring Them Home Now.

Or Military Families Speak Out.

Now, perhaps you haven't heard that there is a considerable movement of military families and members of the military who are united in their opposition to this war. That is understandable, considering the the mainstream media has heretofore refused to cover this burdeoning movement for fear of being "swift boated" by a well oiled neo-con propaganda machine. The political brilliance of this particular woman's strategy is breathtaking though: she went straight to the gates of Mordor, knowing that the entire White House press corps couldn't ignore her. She was right about that, even though it appears it was only her and one other woman who decided to storm the gates last Saturday after leaving the Veterans for Peace convention in Dallas. Not even the longest, most hardened veterans of the peace movement saw her coming.

Those facts, and the fact that she will not temper her rage and anger, and DEMANDS answers to the tough questions our political and media establishment should have been asking years ago before the US sent in the troops, is what gives this woman such tremendous power.

And I note that Senator John Kerry's name was NOT on the list of Democratic lawmakers who wrote a letter to Bush, urging him to honor this citizen's right to petition her government and express her views to the commander in chief about the execution of the war that took her son from her. Which speaks volumes about both him, and the mainstream Democrats. At least Joe Trippi had the woman on his radar.