Cindy Sheehan’s Women’s March on the Pentagon took place this last Sunday. It was a foregone conclusion that it would be small because her politics are so factional, elitist, & rooted in grandstanding rather than in building a massive inclusive social movement. She built the march on the rotting remnants of the corrupted antiwar movement which supports the Assad dictatorship & Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians & only opposes, without understanding, US intervention in Syria. Judging by the endorsers & speakers at the rally, it was mostly a gathering of Assadist forces in the US. It’s hard, if not impossible, to garner massive public support, even in the US, for a repressive dictatorship carpet bombing civilians & hanging thousands of dissidents in its jails. She also built the march in counterposition to the Women’s Marches of 2017 & 2018 where over three-million women marched on every continent raising every demand under the sun which relates to peace, justice, & women’s rights. What rankled her about those marches was their inclusiveness when she–who often appears to support Trump or at least opposes protests against him–wants Democrats excluded from marches. As if there were proprietary rights to social movements. She has a sectarian, elitist, perspective which is dead-end politics.
It’s not the point to gloat over the size of Sheehan’s march which probably numbered about a thousand. What’s important is to assess the growing isolation, sectarianism, & corruption of the antiwar movement. It’s not irrelevant that among the march’s chief supporters were the “retired” CIA, FBI, State Department, & military officials (Ann Wright, Coleen Rowley, Ray McGovern) who openly admit to ongoing collaboration with CIA & other government agents. It needs to be asked how minions of US militarism ended up in 2018 leading the antiwar movement? But of course, they are leading it into oblivion. It is time to build a regenerated antiwar movement rooted in principles & international solidarity with an uncompromising, unequivocal stand against all military interventions, including those of the US, UK, Russia, Syria, Israel, India, Burma, China.