Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother whose anguished protests pioneered the US anti-war movement, is quitting her public role, saying that the US was becoming a San Francisco - Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother whose anguished protests pioneered the US anti-war movement, is quitting her public role, saying that the US was becoming a “fascist corporate wasteland” facilitated by a two-party system in which both parties were equally to blame.

Sheehan announced the move in a letter posted on her weblog. On Tuesday she left the protest camp she purchased outside President George W Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and headed home to California to be with her family.

“I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost,” she wrote.

The move came just days after the Democrats backed down from a war-funding bill that would have placed a timeline on US withdrawal from Iraq. The move was widely seen as capitulation to Bush and sparked widespread anger in the anti-war movement.

“I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party,” Sheehan wrote. “When I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of ‘right or left’, but ‘right and wrong’.”

Sheehan also blasted the peace movement for its petty infighting, and argued that the country as a whole appeared unready to take the steps needed for peace.

Sheehan started protesting the war in June 2004, following a meeting with Bush three months after her son Casey died. As a bereaved mother, her criticism garnered worldwide attention and became a focal point as discontent with the war grew.

But in her emotional resignation letter, Sheehan said the toll of the protest had overwhelmed her personally, politically and financially, draining all her savings, destroying her 29-year marriage and leaving her other children without a mother close by.

“Casey did indeed die for nothing … killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. 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.

“I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither,” she wrote. “Good-bye America … you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it. It’s up to you now.”