Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain soldier who has been camping outside President Bush's Texas ranch, is an impassioned witness but an imperfect messenger. Her leftist foreign policy agenda is as unlikely to draw majority support as the militant unilateralism of the hard-core neoconservatives.
But Sheehan will have done the nation a service if she inspires, or shames, both parties to resume debate over the direction of the Iraq war.
Few mainstream analysts in either party believe Sheehan's solution -- withdrawing all U.S. troops immediately -- is the right answer.
But no one should expect a grieving mother camping in a field to "solve" the Iraq war. She's not a military strategist. She is a citizen with an inherent right to demand answers from her government. And she is doing so at a time when too many others have stopped asking questions.
Serious debate about the war has practically vanished in Washington. It's difficult to find many people outside the administration who are satisfied with either the costs (in American lives) or the benefits (the progress toward establishing a secure, pro-Western Iraqi state) of current policies. It is even more difficult to find any major figure willing to publicly offer a significant alternative.
This amounts to a political dereliction of duty.
When casualties in Iraq are rising even as stability recedes, political leaders are obligated to ask every possible question about the strategy, tactics and goals that have placed our forces in harm's way.
The response might be to withdraw troops, or to temporarily add more, or to change our expectations of what might be achieved in Iraq. Maybe Bush's approach of maintaining a large U.S. presence while training Iraqis and working to sustain as much national unity as possible will prove the best of imperfect alternatives.
But most Democrats and Republicans are abandoning their responsibilities by leaving the problem solely to Bush without addressing any of these issues.
Admittedly, on each side, the political incentives for silence are strong. Many insiders say that in private, more elected Republicans are growing uneasy about the war; after all, GOP politicians are the ones most likely to bear the brunt, in 2006 and 2008, if public disillusionment with the conflict ignites a backlash.
