It was wonderful to hear all those additional mothers on Amy Goodman this morning. Cindy's been doing a great job handling the media mobs but more voices make it more threatening to Bush and impressive to the American people.
The grieving mom's elemental demand to know the "noble mission" for which their children died has met with a resounding silence, not only from the President but from the Democratic Party, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the networks, the "best and the brightest" architects of this madness.
Here's one, for example, who makes undisclosed bucks as a pundit, Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution. You've seen him everywhere ever since the invasion. Now he writes for the New York Times that "it's time for the Bush Administration to bite the bullet." Does he mean meet with the grieving moms? No, Pollack meets deploying more troops to Iraq [those four hands clapping are Hillary and Biden]. Pollack even calls for "a rationale that the American people would buy." Having searched for weapons of mass destruction, now these people are searching for an American purpose to market. Maybe that's why the meeting with Cindy is put off, the focus groups are still staring blankly at their moderator.
Pollack is a good example of the delusional expert mentality that brought us to this point. He wrote last month that the Pentagon needs to "relearn the lessons that the marines and Green Berets learned in Vietnam and the British learned in Northern Ireland, [that] American troops need to be on the streets patrolling on foot with the Iraqis to reassure civilians." First, the US forces were forced to withdraw from Vietnam, and the British troops are barracked in Northern Ireland while the IRA retired soldiers are leafletting for Gerry Adams. Allowing American troops to walk the streets like sitting ducks for the next three to five years [Pollack's estimate] will only multiply the Cindy Sheehans by thousands more. It could be very painful "politically", says Pollack reassuringly.
And if the counter-insurgency tactics fail, he has another plan: "buy off the Sunni sheiks" by "paying them protection money." He goes on: "Buying your enemies may sound un-American, but it is a time-honored tradition in Iraq."
Good to know. But if one billion dollars a week for another three years is not enough...well, Pollack will have more comments then.
Few Americans have heard of Kenneth M. Pollack. But this is the kind of insight that is highly-prized, not to mention well compensated, as "expert opinion" among the war planners and war correspondents. That is why people like Cindy Sheehan, not the experts, have to bear so much of the burden of ending the war.