YACSP (Yet Another Cindy Sheehan Post)

I had thought better of posting about Cindy Sheehan.

She's been getting well-deserved but overdone lumps from the center-right blogosphere and undeserved publicity from the August-bored MSM.

Hitchens got it right. Losing a son is horrible, but it doesn't make one wiser about strategy or foreign policy. If we took a vote of the Gold Star mothers (hardly a way to run a railroad, or a war) or Sheehan's relatives, we'd get a policy quite different from the one Sheehan proposes. That wouldn't change the mind of the vigilers, and it won't create an exit strategy.

I supported the war, because getting rid of Saddam seemed both prudent and morally justified. The political planning has been muddled, as it so often is. The failure to shoot looters on sight at the beginning, and the quick dissolving (rather than slow purging) of the Iraqi Army were critical mistakes.

As was the failure to do anything to create a mood of sacrifice on the home front. Lyndon Johnson made the same mistake.

That said, staying the course remains a wiser and juster course than pulling out precipitously.

The Wilsonian aspect of the war (creating an artificial democratic national state, a la Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia--or Iraq, for that matter) may go no better than it did after World War I. However, we got rid of Saddam, and if Iraq divides in two, or three, it's not the end of the world, provided we remain involved enough to prevent the emergence of a Baathist or Zarqawist terror center.

None of this matters to Sheehan and her ilk. They hate America, and whether they understand it or not, they are helping the enemy. (BTW, a lot of people are going to the rallies who don't share Sheehan's politics. They're just expressing frustration and their dislike of Bush. If they don't wake up, the left will run the Democratic party, they'll nominate another McGovern and elect another Republican).

I could natter on. And I will, later.