Washington As the Iraq war continues to produce growing U.S. casualties and shrinking public support, President George W. Bush was forced yesterday to confront the protest of a grieving mother of a soldier killed in the war. But he still won't meet her.
As Cindy Sheehan camped out on a road leading to Mr. Bush's ranch near Crawford, Tex., for the sixth consecutive day, insisting she wants to speak to the President personally, Mr. Bush said he sympathizes with her plight, but rejected her call to pull the troops out of Iraq.
Ms. Sheehan's 24-year-old son, Casey, was killed in an ambush in Sadr City, Baghdad's sprawling Shia neighbourhood, last year, just five days after he arrived in Iraq.
"I begged him not to go," says Ms. Sheehan, 48, who travelled from her home in California to try to speak with Mr. Bush as he spends his summer vacation at his Prairie Chapel Ranch. "I said, 'I'll take you to Canada,' but he said, 'Mom, I have to go. It's my duty. My buddies are going.'
"I don't believe his phony excuses for the war," Ms. Sheehan has said of the President. She said she believes the war is really about oil and making Mr. Bush's friends richer. "I want him to tell me why my son died."
Anti-war activists are converging on Crawford, eager to seize on Ms. Sheehan's newfound notoriety and telegenic appeal to get their message across.....
Yet there was no sign Mr. Bush intends to meet Ms. Sheehan. In fact, there were reports he is travelling solely by helicopter when he leaves the ranch in an effort to avoid racing past the protester in a limousine.
"The President says he feels compassion for me," Ms. Sheehan said, "but the best way to show that compassion is by meeting with me and the other mothers and families who are here.
"All we're asking is that he sacrifice an hour out of his five-week vacation to talk to us before the next mother loses her son in Iraq."
Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who has studied Mr. Bush's rise, said: "For him, meeting this woman face to face would be blinking. His whole game is to be confident and to appear never to doubt and never to waiver. It's this idea of determination."
And unlike government leaders in a parliamentary system who are challenged directly by their political opponents, Mr. Bush can easily shelter himself from such confrontations.
"He would not trust himself in a face-to-face meeting and neither would his staff. These guys like control," said Prof. Jillson, who added that Ms. Sheehan's protest in itself may not be that significant but it comes at a time when many Americans are reconsidering their views of the Iraq war.
Approval of Mr. Bush's handling of the conflict has dropped to as little as 34 per cent of people surveyed, according to a recent poll conducted for Newsweek magazine.
I think there would be a complaint about these 40 deaths no matter where the President was or what he was doing. I suppose, Professor, that you support the Jimmy Carter School of Being a President -- lock yourself in the Oval Office and micro-manage everything?
