War & Peace Quote by Cindy Sheehan

Sheehan yanks the “war on terror” slogan inside out, treating it less like a description than a brand name meant to anesthetize. The first sentence is passive by design: “I was told” captures how official language arrives pre-packaged, with grief processed through talking points. It’s also a small accusation about power: institutions narrate your loss for you, then expect your consent.

The pivot is the knife. She repeats “killed” to refuse euphemism, then swaps the preposition that props up the entire post-9/11 framework. Her son wasn’t killed in a war on terror; he was killed by “George Bush’s war of terror on the world.” That’s not just dissent from the Iraq War. It’s a rhetorical reversal that reassigns the role of terrorist violence to the state itself, collapsing the moral distance between “us” and “them.” The phrase “on the world” widens the indictment from a single battlefield to a global posture: invasion, occupation, “shock and awe,” indefinite detention, the normalization of fear as policy.

The intent is moral reclassification. Sheehan wants the audience to feel that the officially sanctioned story of her son’s death is itself part of the machinery that caused it. Coming from a bereaved mother turned activist, the line leverages an uncomfortable authority: grief as credibility, motherhood as a shield against easy dismissal, and plainspoken rage as a counterweight to Washington’s abstract nouns. It works because it’s not arguing policy; it’s refusing the narrative terms that make policy palatable.