After Cindy Sheehan

The antiwar movement was dominated by lefties and ineffective -- until a grieving mother from California became its symbol. With Middle America now asking the same angry questions she is, will the movement finally take off?

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Politics, News, Farhad Manjoo, Iraq War

Aug. 19, 2005 | The day before he was killed in a helicopter crash near Ar Rutbah in western Iraq, John House, a 28-year-old hospital corpsman in the Navy, told his wife that the worst was over and he'd be coming home in a matter of weeks. "He said, 'We've got one more thing to do, providing security for the elections,'" recalls Melanie House, who's now a 27-year-old widow and single mother living in Simi Valley, Calif. "It seemed too good to be true that he was going to be leaving Iraq." Two days later, "I got a knock on the door," House says. "It was every military wife's worst fear."

Melanie House is no radical. Both she and her husband had initially supported the war, and their attitude toward the effort shifted slowly, over the course of his deployment, as the endeavor began to look increasingly like an unwinnable mistake. Still, when John died, on Jan. 26, 2005, Melanie did not feel compelled to publicly oppose the war; her grief, she says, was too deep.

A few weeks ago, House heard about Cindy Sheehan, the 48-year-old woman who's demanding to meet with the president to discuss the death of her son Casey in Iraq. House too had questions to ask George W. Bush: "Why did my husband die? Why are we over there? Is there an end in sight? What is the plan?" So House decided to join the antiwar movement. On Tuesday, she told her story to reporters in a conference call organized by liberal advocacy groups, and on Wednesday MoveOn.org featured House in an e-mail encouraging its members to attend candlelight vigils around the country to protest the war.

House, Sheehan and dozens of other members of military families opposed to the war represent the new face of the American antiwar movement -- a movement that has, over the past two years, managed to stage a few massive street demonstrations, but has otherwise had little success convincing Democrats, not to mention Republicans, to take up its cause. Indeed, as the war has grown increasingly unpopular in recent months, the antiwar movement has been virtually silent -- or, as its leaders insist, the movement was ignored by the media, which amounts to the same thing: Few Americans were aware of any active opposition to the war.

Sheehan's stand has changed all that. Not only are reporters now listening, but antiwar warriors are energized. Just about every antiwar group, from the farthest left to the most moderate, is moving to associate itself with Sheehan. In her, opponents of the war see an authenticity -- the symbolic value of a mother grieving for her son -- that they say resonates with the American mainstream. It's too soon to tell whether this will actually happen -- but opponents say they're confident that the antiwar ethos has reached a "tipping point." Sheehan's story -- as well as House's, and that of others who've lost loved ones in Iraq -- could prove highly effective at pushing Americans to oppose the Bush administration's policies in Iraq.

Wednesday's candlelight vigils highlighted the born again movement. According to MoveOn, tens of thousands of protesters gathered at more than 1,600 locations across the nation to support Sheehan's demand for a meeting with the president. (Sheehan left the Bush estate in Crawford on Thursday after her mother suffered a stroke, but she vowed to continue her protest as soon as possible.) If the numbers are true, that would be the largest antiwar mobilization in a year. At the vigil I attended in Oakland, Calif., more than 200 people clustered along both sides of a busy intersection under a BART train station, a few of them carrying signs -- "Stop the War" was the most popular -- but most simply cupping a candle and standing silently. The effort, said Sally Hutchinson, a middle-aged woman in the crowd, was reminiscent of the protests held during the very earliest days of the war, when people came out in droves to oppose the invasion. "After that, no one -- people sort of gave up and went home," she said. But now hundreds were out, and every second car that passed by honked loudly in support. "I really think she has made the difference," Hutchinson said of Sheehan.

But if Sheehan's protest has reinvigorated the antiwar movement, so too has it exposed the central dilemma that people opposed to the war now face: What should America do about a war in which every option looks bad. Saying that we should stop the war raises all kinds of questions about what you mean, notes Todd Gitlin, the former Vietnam activist and Columbia Journalism School professor. "If you say withdraw, then how many? What pace? Starting when?"

Next page: Could Sheehan's public opposition backfire?