Antiwar icon pulls out of movement

WASHINGTON -- Cindy Sheehan, who became an icon of the antiwar movement after she set up a protest camp near President Bush's Texas home, said yesterday that she would resign as the "face" of the movement out of frustration with a Democratic-led Congress unable -- or unwilling -- to get the United States out of Iraq.

In an online diary entry laden with sadness and bitterness, Sheehan said she could no longer sustain the full-time antiwar effort she mounted after her son, Casey, was killed in Iraq in 2004.

"Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives," Sheehan wrote on the Daily Kos, a liberal blog. "It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most."

Sheehan's decision reflects a growing frustration among antiwar activists, who hoped that the new, Democratic-run Congress would force the United States out of the war.

But after a failed effort to impose a schedule for troop withdrawals, Congress voted last week to approve about $100 billion for the war effort.

"There's anger out there," said Representative James McGovern , Democrat of Worcester and author of a measure to withdraw US troops within six months. "I think maybe there was an expectation that was not totally unreasonable, that somehow the Democrats would be able to end this [war] quickly once they won" control of Congress, he said. "I wish that was the case."

Many Democrats -- including the entire Massachusetts congressional delegation and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , Democrat of California -- opposed the war-funding measure, saying they could not vote to fund a war that they are determined to end. Democrats did not have enough votes to force Bush to accept a measure imposing a phased withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, a measure Bush vetoed May 1 and vowed to veto again and again if Congress kept sending it to his desk.

But antiwar forces said they were disappointed with Democrats for not standing up to the president -- a complaint Sheehan expressed in her parting diary entry.

"Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on," Sheehan said, noting that she endured "slurs" from the left when she criticized Democrats as well as Republicans on the war.

"If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?" Sheehan said.

Antiwar activists initially focused their criticism on Bush and GOP backers of the war. But in the past months they have targeted Democrats as well, accusing them of lacking the political will to simply refuse to approve any money to pay for the war.

"They're basically funding George Bush's work," said Tina Richards of Salem, Mo., who successfully fought to prevent her war-wounded son from being sent to Iraq a third time. Richards herself was in a verbal scuffle in March with Representative David Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, when she approached the lawmaker about cutting off funds for the war in Iraq.

Representative Michael Capuano , Democrat of Somerville and a longtime foe of the war, said antiwar forces need to keep the pressure on GOP lawmakers to force a change in Iraq policy. "In some ways, she's an American hero," Capuano said of Sheehan.

"I hope the message she is sending now is not, 'If I don't get my way in the time frame I want, I'll pick up my marbles and go home.' If that's going to be the case for the antiwar movement, we'll be in Iraq for generations," Capuano said.

Sheehan camped out near Bush's Crawford, Texas, home for 26 days during the president's August 2005 vacation, demanding to talk to Bush about the death of her son in Iraq. Subsequently, Sheehan became a globe-trotting opponent of the war, drawing plaudits from antiwar activists and derision from critics who called her a pawn of the left and criticized her for meeting with leftist Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez , a Bush nemesis.

"In some ways, she's served her purpose. But because of the radical politics she adopted, she's marginalized herself with her former allies in the Democratic party," said Kristinn Taylor, a spokesman for FreeRepublic.com, a conservative blog that has featured critical comments about Sheehan over the years.

"The biggest concern a lot of us had -- outside her radical politics -- was that they were keeping her in a perpetual cycle of anger. They weren't letting her heal," Taylor said.

Sheehan's compatriots wished her well and said they would continue the fight to stop the war.

"The [congressional] leaders don't get it. They think they're going to be tarred with the 'weak on defense brush' " or be accused of not supporting the troops if they refuse to pay for the war, said Ellen Barfield , an Army veteran active in Veterans for Peace. "We just have to keep pushing them," she said.