Nick Coleman: New pro-war ad cynically exploits families’ grief

02/17/2006

Nick Coleman
Star Tribune

Another pro-war ad is getting a trial run on some Twin Cities TV stations, repackaging the same deceptions that I deconstructed last Sunday. The first ad was bad enough, but the newest installment in this expensive effort to shore up support for the war in Iraq is not honest about a mother’s grief.

Ad No. 2 began airing Wednesday and features the mothers and fathers of four dead soldiers. The final mother figure in the ad tells the camera: “We have to finish this job to remember Erik’s sacrifice, and all of the other fallen heroes.” She is identified as M. J. Kesterson, and many viewers will assume she is the mother of Chief Warrant Officer Erik Kesterson, 29, a helicopter pilot killed in 2003 who figures prominently in the ad.

But she’s not his mom.

M.J. Kesterson is married to Erik’s father, who also appears in the ad, and she’s Erik’s stepmother. His mother is Dolores Kesterson, and the distinction is important because Dolores Kesterson is opposed to a war in which she believes her son died to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist and to avenge 9/11, which was not connected to Iraq.

Dolores, who is a member of Gold Star Families for Peace, voiced her opposition when she was granted a brief meeting with President Bush in 2004 and gave Bush a letter in which she wrote: “The label ‘Iraqi Freedom’ doesn’t work for me. Iraq is not free. It is occupied, and now, after all the loss of life on both sides, they don’t want us there.”

Bush didn’t want to hear it. Neither did a soft-money group called Progress for America, which raised almost $40 million for the Bush campaign in 2004 and is spending half a million dollars or more here to test whether pro-war propaganda can stop the slide in public support for the war (the latest CNN/USA Today Poll shows 56 percent of Americans oppose the war).

I could tell you more about Progress for America and “Astro-turfing” (artificially created “grass-roots” politics) if the Washington-based group had answered e-mailed requests for information. But it didn’t. Nevertheless, according to the conservative and helpful National Journal (which is where the half-million-dollar figure for the Twin Cities TV ads comes from), Progress for America set up a local group of Iraq war veterans and families in January and now is using them to front for its commercials, calling them Midwest Heroes. (Half of the soldiers in the ad, including Kesterson, hailed from Oregon, so the group should be called “Pacific Midwest Heroes.")

Let’s pause for a second.

My intent here is to expose the agitprop tactics of a political group campaigning on the bodies of fallen soldiers in a transparent attempt to cover the war’s lies. It is not my desire to discount the grief of the families—including the stepmothers—of the 2,274 soldiers who have died following orders.

Folks who would do that kind of despicable thing are the folks who attacked Cindy Sheehan as a “tragedy pimp” and mocked her grief over the loss of her soldier son, Casey.

Americans are divided about this war. But there are patriots on all sides of the debate and there are many families, including those in mourning, praying for an end to it.

These cynical ads ignore that. They exploit the fallen and are a disservice to the troops. More than that, they are lies.