Cindy Sheehan Quotes
The war in Iraq will end, our troops will come home, Bush will be impeached and he will be brought to justice.
Sheehan, Cindy. Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism. Atria Books, 2006, p. 154.
This quotation is a good example of how tolerant some nations can be in terms of maintaining diplomatic relations and trade relations with other countries. The American and English governments chose to simply protest and condemn the slanderous statement but decided that the Prime Minister was pandering to his political local Islamic base, so took no further action and kept open diplomatic relations. Mahathir had a history of being very accusatory of the West with respect to anything that affected the Arab Muslims. The number of Muslims killed by the Americans and British in the Iraq War was very small compared to the huge number of Muslims killed by other Muslims in their Sunni Shiite civil war. While Bush and Blair both generated support for the Iraq invasion by making claims of WMD development in Iraq that were false, it is not clear whether or not they knew their statements were false, should have known that they were false, created an atmosphere against Iraq that was likely to produce false accusations, or were simple misled by poor intelligence. Mahathir, of course, chose to assume the worst case, and claim it was true, which is what many people think Bush and Blair did in analyzing the intelligence on Iraq.
Abu Ghraib was the major prison in Iraq during the Iraq War. American military committed many crimes on prisoners ranging from murder to sexual humiliation. The actual perpetrators claimed that the higher ranks of officers knew what was ongoing and provided the policies, rules and culture of the prison. The president and the Vice President many thought were the officers responsible and violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Their administration had issued a legal memorandum that for the first time in American history would allow some kinds of torture of prisoners in the War on Terror. A few enlisted personnel were punished and a general was transferred but no senior military or civilian personnel were held responsible or punished.
The Germans had comitted some terrible war crimes in Belgium at the begiining of WWI. They had torpedoed passanger ships with some Americans getting killed, Public opinion was such that Wilson worried that some atrocity by any small german detachment could pressure his administration to enter WWI to satisf American public opinion.
Cindy Lee Miller Sheehan is an American anti-war activist, whose son, U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed by enemy action during the Iraq War. She attracted national and international media attention in August 2005 for her extended antiwar protest at a makeshift camp outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch—a stand that drew both passionate support and criticism. Sheehan ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008. She was a vocal critic of President Barack Obama's foreign policy. Her memoir, Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism, was published in 2006. In an interview with The Daily Beast in 2017, Sheehan continued to hold her critical views towards George W. Bush, while also criticizing the militarism of Donald Trump.
