Ms. Cindy Sheehan

Anyone who prefers to gloat over the ‘resignation’ of Ms. Cindy Sheehan from the protest campaign she started in August 2005 over the Iraq war after her son Casey, an Army specialist lost his life in an ambush in Baghdad, Iraq the previous year, does not actually understand some of the issues at play in this war and why it hasn’t generated and may not ever generate a de facto protest movement. Going by the angry tone of her blog posting in which she announced her ‘resignation’, it doesn’t even seem like Ms. Sheehan understands some of those issues any better herself.

Ms. Sheehan is obviously distraught over the way the Democrats who won control of the Congress with a slight majority last November approved a no-strings-attached funding for the war last week. One would wish that she understands that her efforts to galvanize America to protest the war in large numbers failed not just because she is not loved by America and its politicians. Or that they do not feel her pain. Love and feeling someone else’s pain are radically different from feeling one’s own pain. It's mostly because only a tiny insignificant number of Americans have suffered a loss like hers.

At the most, even as George W. Bush’s troop surge is still underway, the total number of US troops in Iraq at this point in time does not exceed 160,000. The expectation is that the number will come to about 179,000 when the surge attains a peak. In a country of 300m people, one would not need a fortune teller to conclude that 179,000 soldiers do not constitute a significant proportion of that population. Even if you were to multiply 179,000 by ten and use the quotient to represent the network of family, friends, and peers in the general US population who are connected to the troops serving in Iraq, you will not have difficulty to conclude that such a network is indeed highly confined. There’s no critical mass there at all. The other thing is that because of the present all volunteer force, AVF structure, most Americans do not feel the imminent threat of having a family member, friend, or peer shipping off to Iraq on military service duties. It wouldn’t therefore be illogical to infer that as an AVF, the US military is technically a ‘mercenary’ force that lacks the demographic peculiarities of the society it serves. It is composed in the main of the sons and daughters of poor families from America’s inner cities and the hard-scrubble midlands of America who opted for military service particularly because it seems to be their only ticket out of the grim economic situation that stands in their way in a globalized economy that evaporates well-paying manufacturing jobs to Asia and Latin America, and brings low-paying Walmart-type jobs in return. This military hardly contains and is not meant to attract the children of upper middle class and rich families in great numbers. Most, if not all of what happens in Iraq comes through to the larger society as a story, which is watched on television with the detachment that is associated with Hollywood thrillers. It is therefore because of some of these reasons that this war in Iraq is not like the one that was fought in Vietnam. No matter how long it lasts, no matter how much the casualties mount, it may not hit home as Vietnam did, if at all.

Ms. Sheehan’s greatest undoing in her struggle to rekindle an anti-war movement over the death of her son stems directly from the AVF. The AVF is also George W. Bush’s greatest benefactor in his unflinching resolve to achieve what he calls victory in Iraq. One does not want to be misunderstood, but the harsh truth is that in the light of the AVF, the mounting casualties in Iraq will not even resonate in the larger population sufficiently to threaten political careers in the Congress. Although people are pained by the mounting casualties in Iraq, the pain is still not theirs. That feeling of relative deprivation that stems from Iraq war casualties is still restricted to the handful of grieving parents like Ms. Sheehan who have already lost or who will loose a child in Iraq. These do not in any way imply that the lives that are being lost in Iraq are worthless. One wouldn't go as far as echoing someone who recently opined that given a population of 300m people, those lives are indispensable. It's just that rebellions are not made out of restricted feelings of relative deprivation. There has to be that critical mass, the AVF structure would not allow that critical mass to evolve and coalesce into an anti-war movement.