All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, Anti-War Radio on Chaos in Austin.
It's my pleasure to welcome Dar Jamal back to the show.
He's a reporter from Iraq and writes for Interpress Service, Le Monde Diplomatique, another outlet.
He is the author of Beyond the Green Zone, Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, and the forthcoming book, The Will to Resist, Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His website is DarJamalIraq.com.
Welcome back to the show, Dar.
How are you?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
And so, wow, this whole article is just the beginning of a book, huh?
Well, it really is a prelude of the book, which actually was just released a couple of days ago.
Oh, great.
It's a book about soldiers that are in all branches of the military who either have or are currently refusing orders to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan.
And the book really goes through, or I'm sorry, the particular article that we're talking about really goes through several instances of methods soldiers have been using specifically in Iraq to, for example, avoid doing patrols and other ways to resist the occupation.
Now, the article is A Secret History of Dissent in the All-Volunteer Military.
It's at TomDispatch.com.
I'm not sure if we ran it at AntiWar.com yet, or what, I can't keep up.
Refusing to Comply, the Tactics of Resistance in an All-Volunteer Military.
You can find it, I know for sure, because I'm looking right at it, TomDispatch.com.
Now, yes, as you say, you focus in here mostly on tactics for avoiding combat in Iraq.
Right, and actually the article was run on AntiWar.com just a couple of days ago, I guess.
Oh, was it?
Okay, I couldn't find it because the switch with the original dot and all that.
Anyway.
Right, it was highlighted, I think it was a title, given a different title.
Yeah, the article does really outline, just for example, you know, really kind of where the article came from, and really where the entire book idea came from, is I was actually on tour for the first book, Beyond the Green Zone, back in October of 2007, and I went to upstate New York, and one of the tour dates I had was to give a talk at a GI resistance cafe up on the outskirts of Fort Drum, a cafe called A Different Drummer, and I was picked up by a man named Phil Ayliff, who was currently an active duty corporal with the 10th Mountain Division, which is based up there at Fort Drum, up in Watertown, upstate New York, and I was driving in a truck with Phil, he was driving me up to the cafe, where I was going to meet with some other veterans, and we started talking about Iraq, as we always do, you know, when I've been over there, and if I run into anyone who's, you know, like casual conversation, where were you, what were you doing, were you based, what was it like, that kind of thing, and it turns out, he started talking to me about, well, you know, our morale was so low, and we were basically going around doing patrols, and me and all my colleagues realized that, you know, we're just driving around to get blown up, this isn't serving anything, it's not helping us, it's not bringing any security to the Iraqi people, and, you know, we're just not going to do this anymore, and he said that literally what we started doing is we would drive to the end of our patrol route, we would find a big open field, we'd park in the middle of the open field, and we'd sit there and listen to music, and smoke cigarettes, and then call in every hour and say, tell headquarters, yes, we're still on patrol, we're still searching the field for weapons caches, we'll find someone every hour.
Yeah, sounds like going to work to me.
Right, yeah, it was like a good post office job or something, but these guys were doing it in Humvees in a row.
Yeah, well, all joking aside, though, I mean, we talked about this for years and years on the radio show, Dar, and, you know, obviously, people remember, of course, that you were there and you wrote about all your unembedded travails, and we've talked on this show.
This is a policy that lasted for years, I mean, it may, as far as I know, it may very well have been the ascent of General Petraeus that finally put an end to all this search and destroy nonsense.
They used to call it the IED lottery, yeah, me and my friends, it's time to go out and play the IED lottery.
They're not doing anything productive, simply being blown up by homemade landmines.
I mean, how many thousand guys were killed by IEDs in Iraq while in the middle of basically doing nothing, because they were ordered to go out there and do nothing and get killed?
Well, exactly, I mean, I think, you know, faithfully, I don't know the exact statistics, but I think if we're being very conservative, of the just over 4,000, I think it's 300 now troops that have been killed in Iraq, I think conservatively, we could say at least half of them have been killed playing the IED lottery.
And so, you know, it doesn't take a genius to figure out, look, if I'm over there as a soldier in this bogus war based on lies and this bogus occupation, and I'm basically just driving around waiting to get blown up and killed or blown up and maimed for the rest of my life, you know, I don't think I want to keep doing that.
I think I want to instead do what has become known in Iraq as search and avoid missions, where we're going to instead, we're going to go park in a field and listen to music instead, but we're going to instead go hang out with Kurdish Peshmerga and drink tea instead of going around and playing the IED lottery, and that's what I'm seeing, and it's been rampant.
I interviewed people in different parts of Iraq, in different units, in different times of the occupation, from as early as late 2003 on up to as recently as just this past December, all saying the same thing, just basically sharing with me different ways that they were engaged in these search and avoid missions because they didn't want to play the IED lottery anymore, they didn't believe in the occupation, and they sure did not believe the reasons given by the Bush administration and continue to not believe the reasons given by the Obama administration for both of these occupations.
It's always interesting to me the way the incentive structure works and so forth, like what is it that gets, I mean, I try to, it's like when I watch a really insulting commercial on TV, I sort of imagine all the douchebags at the board of directors meeting or whatever, where they come up with that campaign, you know?
And I wonder about the conversations that go on between a lieutenant colonel and a lieutenant general.
General, my men are dying out there, and it seems like what we're doing is not productive.
Could we please make a change?
And the general says, no, we're going to keep doing this for another unlimited number of years in a row until another general above me comes in and changes everything around or whatever.
There's no, the fact that guys are getting blown apart for nothing apparently doesn't have anything to do with the decision-making process about, I mean, I remember especially at the beginning of the war, you had guys in tanks giving out soccer balls to little kids and guys in Humvees made out of aluminum patrolling in the most dangerous areas.
Like the whole thing is just, it has been this whole time, the army you have is the one you go to war with, you know?
It really has, you know, and I think that that has really been the fertilizer for this, what we're seeing is a growing trend of people who are either already in Iraq and Afghanistan saying, look, you know, we don't want to be part of that anymore.
This is a messed up system.
And I actually quote a guy named Josh Simpson, who is a veteran, he was in Iraq doing counterintelligence and intelligence gathering, i.e. interrogations with Iraqis, and he said that he basically woke up and realized, you know what?
This whole thing, the whole war is based on lies and we're interrogating people trying to get information to support lies, basically to support a theory that doesn't even exist in reality, and we realized, and he said, he told me personally, he said, look, I realized that I'm doing something that just doesn't make any sense to support something I don't believe in, to support, you know, this whole occupation that's based on lies, and I realized, look, if we're gathering intelligence that's based on lies to support something that's based on lies, I don't want to be any part of this anymore, and so I'm not going to do it.
Well, no, he was talking about weapons of mass destruction, is that what they were after in the interrogations?
Right, right, yeah, leads on weapons of mass destruction, leads on people affiliated with folks in the Iraqi resistance, all of this, and he's like, look, I don't support it, because I actually believe there should be an Iraqi resistance, and, you know, if someone invaded my country, I'd fight against them, too, and so I don't want to be a part of this, and so he literally said, look, I'm just not going to do it, and he came back home from Iraq from his deployment and realized, look, I'd rather go, you know, if they're going to lock me up for refusing to redeploy, then I'd rather go to jail than go back to Iraq, and that's a sentiment that is becoming more and more widespread, and I think, you know, I'm not saying there's an organized resistance movement right now within the U.S. military, there's not, there's not anything that we can compare to what happened during Vietnam where we had a GI resistance movement that basically helped bring an entire end to the war, but what we are seeing, there are seeds in the military in all branches right now as we speak of dissent and people that are refusing to participate in these, and that there is a potential now that that could grow, especially when we look at the fact that as of yesterday, the first major military offensive under the Obama administration in Afghanistan is now underway.
Yeah, well, and sticking with Iraq for a minute here, do you know the date of the referendum about whether to approve the Status of Forces Agreement?
I think it's in about a month from right now, I don't know the exact date off the top of my head.
Yeah, toward the end of this month or something, yeah.
Yeah, very good.
Because I wonder about that, because, you know, on one hand, I've read that, you know, they call it the Withdrawal Agreement, and that the people are generally for it because they see it as a mandate for the Americans to get the hell out, but then on the other hand, if they vote it down, then what does that mean, because that means there's no law, so-called law, governing the occupation at all.
Would that mean they have to get out faster, or what do you think that would mean if the referendum failed?
Do you know?
Well, it's a very interesting situation.
The reality is that, you know, having just been over in Baghdad a few months ago, if we have a legitimate referendum, i.e. a non-rigged vote, and it's put up for referendum, you know, do we want the Americans to stay or go, overwhelmingly, the vote will be that Americans should leave the country.
Well, but what's the trick, though, is the referendum is on the sofa, which says they should stay until the end of 2011, and then they should all be gone by then.
Right, but the thing is, like, there is a lot of talk right now in Baghdad that, okay, we're going to have a referendum and vote for these people, you know, all troops to leave, not just combat troops, etc., but all troops to leave, and by which date.
So what does happen, then, if we have a legitimate referendum and all the Iraqis vote to end the occupation, that that's going to put the Obama administration in quite the interesting conundrum where they're going to have to, you know, how are you going to deal with that internationally?
How are you going to politic that, where the newest U.S. colony, i.e., Iraq, the people there are asking you to leave, it's going to be an interesting thing, and I'd have to say that, you know, they're going to probably find some slippery way to try to get around that, because, you know, that'd be the equivalent of basically, you know, what empire in history has taken over a country and colonized it, and then the people of that new colony all of a sudden have a referendum and say, no, actually, you know, Mr. Empire, we want you to leave the country.
You know, they're not just going to up and leave, because the people of Iraq want them to leave.
So it's going to be a very interesting situation to see how does the Obama administration handle this situation, because it's a very real political possibility that this referendum, I think, you know, it's a no-brainer at this point, that if we have a vote on the status of forces agreement, the people of Iraq are, of course, going to vote to have the occupation ended in their country.
It's funny, you know, a friend of mine has a nephew over there in Iraq, and he forwards me emails from time to time, and one that I got was, he talked about how no one with an IQ under 70, which I guess meant all his buddies, enlisted guys, is for this.
But all the officers are, every one of the officers has drank the Kool-Aid of freedom and liberation and democracy and all this nonsense, and they are all true believers, but none of the grunts apparently believe it.
Well, and this really goes back to what you were talking about earlier, Scott, which I think you did a really good job of outlining, you know, really the dysfunction of the entire system where you have, you know, the people sitting behind the banks of computers and the people going on the foxes and the CNN and talking to the higher-ranking generals and folks talking about how great everything is, where really their job, they're basically acting like a politician, but they're wearing a military uniform, when actually the people having to go drive around and wait to get blown up are the people that actually have some interaction with the Rockies and really see, hey, these people actually don't want us here, and actually, what we're doing isn't actually helping them, and it's not helping us either.
And when we really look at that overall situation, the fact that, you know, the people on the ground that are actually in touch with what's actually happening and seeing what should happen, you know, there's this huge disconnect between them and the higher-up, so it really, you know, underscores the fact that, you know, again, I mean, I think that really is the groundwork of why we have dissent in the military and why I think that as both occupations carry forward into the future, with really no real true end in sight for either one of them, I think that, you know, there's a very, very real possibility for a growing and more organized youth resistance movement, because the folks on the ground, the folks actually having to carry out these bogus orders that keep coming from above, they see clearer than anyone that, look, this isn't working, this isn't working for me, it's not helping these people, this is not what I signed up for the military to do, and I think I'm going to start to choose not to do it.
Darjah Mill, Interpress Service, tell me, how many estimated wounded American soldiers are there from the Iraq occupation?
Well, the military did a very interesting thing, because just a couple of years into the occupation of Iraq, they realized there were so many wounded piling up, at the time it was over 30,000, that instead of keeping it all in one group, they started to split it up into three different types of wounded soldiers, and so right now, when you see overall wounded, like they quote one of those statistics, and it's still around 30-something thousand, but in reality, if we add up the three different categories that they split it up in, we have actually the most conservative, or actually, I'm going to say a conservative estimate, because I haven't checked the recent statistics, but the last time I checked, it was over 72,000 wounded, when we include psychologically wounded, when we include non-combat related wounded, when we include combat, directly combat related wounded, and we add all the categories up, we're looking at well over 72,000 soldiers have been wounded in Iraq alone, and we're not even talking about Afghanistan.
Yeah, you know, it's almost shocking to even hear you using the term wounded instead of injured, which is the official government television corporate collusion euphemism for somebody getting their legs blown off, or their brain so severely concussed that they have permanent physical and emotional defects from it for the rest of their lives, etc.
Well, and this is an important topic, Scott, and I'm really glad that you bring it up, because people, you know, we had a lot of information in the media a few years ago, particularly when John Murtha was talking about, look, we have a broken military, it's stretched thin, there's a real problem here, we're having breakdown, we can't continue on with both these occupations, the military can't keep bearing the strain that it's under right now, and the reality is what we need to remember is that has not changed.
We're still looking at people on multiple deployments, we have a case in point at the end of May when we had the soldier in Baghdad in the PTSD clinic basically lose his mind and go ballistic and kill five other fellow soldiers, that's because this guy was on the end of his third deployment, and that is not going away, that has not changed.
We've had, since September 11, 2001, we've had over 185,000 soldiers stop loss.
Over 185,000, meaning they've reached the end of their contract, and then instead of actually being allowed to leave the military and not continue to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, they've literally been in situations where they're having to redeploy and go back over against their will because the military is forcing them to do that.
That has not changed.
And then when we look at the situation, as you said, all of these wounded, and when we total up the number of wounded and dead just in Iraq alone, we're looking at well over 75,000 soldiers have been wounded or killed during the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
I mean, these are really staggering numbers, add that up to the number of stop loss and the fact that of all the troops in Iraq today, over 50% of them are on their second deployment or third or fourth or fifth.
I mean, you know, this is a situation that's not changing, and this is another very important component when we look at dissent in the military and the fact that more and more people are starting to refuse orders to deploy or coming back from a deployment and going AWOL.
We've had figures range from 25,000 to 40,000 soldiers have gone AWOL since 2003, depending on which Pentagon report you read.
Still, at a minimum, how many?
20,000?
25,000 at a minimum.
Yeah, wow.
That's more than I thought, so if it's anything like your high-end estimate there, then that's really something.
I was just about to say, it doesn't seem like there's, well, and you mentioned at the beginning and in your article, there's not really an organized movement, but that's still a lot of dissent.
Why do you think, I mean, it's obvious that it's different from the days of Vietnam because you don't have anti-war people who really mean it and are anti-war conscripted and forced by the government to join and then spreading all their views throughout the enlisted ranks and that kind of thing and getting parents and family members more angry, but what about all the guys, the families and the victims in the all-volunteer force?
As you're saying, and everybody knows, these wars are completely illegitimate.
These guys are dying not for freedom, but for empire and nonsense, mostly, strategies on paper are ridiculous even.
Where is the organization?
Isn't somebody's dad going to head up some kind of thing to try to provide people inside the military with some sort of movement they can latch onto to rebel against this?
Well, there's not, frankly, and there's really two main reasons why there isn't an organized GI resistance movement like we saw during the Vietnam era.
One, of course, the primary reason being that there's no draft, so you don't have a government policy that's forcing people to join the military against their will.
You would have instant GI resistance movement and massive organization if we had a draft, and that's simply not the case and it's simply not going to be the case.
The second reason is economics.
We all know, of course, this country's in a massive economic meltdown and this won't continue for a long time, and so you have people who've joined the military and they know firsthand, look, both of these occupations are bogus, they're illegitimate.
What we're being forced and asked to do is completely illegitimate.
I'm opposed to it, but I cannot afford to refuse orders because I cannot afford to be court-martialed and then get a dishonorable discharge because this is the only job in town.
And plus, my wife and kids, what would happen to them?
And I need these benefits, et cetera, et cetera.
We don't make the mortgage payments if I'm not in the military, if I'm not on the paycheck.
So this is another key component.
But the thing is, I want to be real clear about, and I actually end the article with a quote from Lieutenant Aaron Matata, who at the time, when he refused orders to do that deployment to Iraq, was the highest-ranking commissioned officer at the time he did it back in 2006, and he refused to go because he said, look, I swore an oath to the Uniform Code of Military Justice to protect the Constitution, and part of that, part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice means it's my duty.
I am duty-bound not to follow an unlawful order, and that's why I'm not going to go, because this invasion and occupation contravened international law, which, of course, the U.S. being an employee to the Geneva Conventions, meaning that would mean I would be going against the Constitution of the United States as well, and as a soldier, it's my duty not to do that.
So he was literally following the soldier's code to a T, and ironically, or not so ironically, just this past May, the Justice Department dropped their charges against, all the major charges against Lieutenant Matata.
So my point is that this is an individual who, at the time, he was the highest-ranking commissioned officer to refuse a combat deployment to Iraq, and he, at the end of the day, is not going to spend one day in Iraq, nor one day in jail.
But I also bring him up because he effectively, in a speech at a Veterans for Peace National Convention in Seattle, 2006, really outlined what would need to happen if we were going to have a real GI resistance movement, and he said, look, it's economics, and people are not resisting because they cannot financially afford to take that risk.
He said, but if you, you being people who are anti-war and opposed to both occupations and people who are really serious about trying to support a real GI resistance movement, he said, if you can find these individuals in your community, and this is very possible for you to do, you call the GI Rights Hotline, you call other groups like Courage to Resist in Oakland, and you find out, okay, where are these people that are wanting to resist, and you contact them as a community and say, look, as a community, if you're going to take a stand against refusing to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, we will support your family, we will help make sure your kids stay in school, we will help, as a community, cover any medical bills, et cetera, we will have your back if you're going to take a stand.
And he said, if people started doing that and organizing around that on a national level, you would have an instant GI resistance movement.
And so that really leaves an open-ended question, you know, people listening, how serious are you about ending these occupations?
Are you serious enough about doing this?
Would you be willing to find one of these soldiers and support them and their families financially and really make the sacrifices necessary to bring both of these bio-occupations to an end?
Because that's what it would take.
And I think the onus at this point is on all of our shoulders.
Are we willing to find these people and make some sacrifices and help them take these stands?
And it means, you know, especially during this economic downturn, you know, we would all feel it, but that's what it's going to take.
It would take real commitment, real sacrifice from all of us to find these people and do what we can to support them.
Now as far as Afghanistan goes, it seems like it'd be a little bit different because of, you know, al-Qaeda was there back a long time ago, years and years and years ago now.
But then again, your article starts with a guy saying, no, I'm not going to Afghanistan because that's just as illegitimate of an occupation as that of Iraq.
Are you finding much difference between perceptions in the military between those two wars and how justified they are or not?
There's definitely a huge difference in perception, although it was a difference in perception that was much more pronounced even just a year ago, where up until fairly recently, most people, and especially in the military, have viewed Afghanistan as the so-called good war.
Look, this is legitimate.
You know, this is the country where the people were based that launched attacks on the United States, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's ripe for us to go attack there and occupy that country.
But that, over time, has shifted and, you know, thanks in large part to the fact that, you know, what happened to the hunt for Osama bin Laden?
What happened to going and trying to single out al-Qaeda and take them out?
Now all of a sudden it's become just a simple occupation against the Taliban.
You know, and you know what?
It's, you know, people in the military are getting that, look, the Taliban weren't directly responsible for this.
They weren't the ones that directly launched attacks against the United States.
And so what happened to our mission, and what happened to trying to find people responsible for those attacks?
It's become more and more clear, again, coming back to what we were talking about earlier.
The people on the ground, driving around in Afghanistan, playing the IED lottery, and this is becoming more and more commonplace in that country, and that resistance is really picking up on even a weekly basis at this point against occupation forces.
They're the ones that, you know, clearer than ever can say, look, you know, we're not looking for Osama bin Laden.
What are we doing?
We're actually just, you know, building these massive bases here that just so happen to coincide right along the proposed pipeline route.
The four major bases in Afghanistan are right by a proposed pipeline route.
What are we doing?
This really doesn't exactly have a lot to do with the national security of the United States.
This is not why I joined the NULTR, and so I think over time, considering the fact that this is even an occupation that's a couple of years longer already than that of Iraq, they're seeing that, look, this isn't what's, you know, what are we doing here?
And so there is now more and more resistance against that occupation, and, you know, the individual that I started the article with is a specialist, Victor Augusto, based at Fort Hood in central Texas, in Killeen, Texas, and he's already spent 13 months in Iraq and then was about to be deployed to Afghanistan, and he's refusing orders because, as he says himself, this has nothing to do with the national security of the United States.
It's not going to make the American people any safer, and I am opposed to this occupation as well.
Oh, and you say the book just came out, right?
It did.
It just came out this day.
The Will to Resist, Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Dar.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Dar Jameel from Interpress Service.
You can find this article at, somehow, I guess if you go to the Viewpoints page at Antiwar.com, we've kind of changed our format around with archives there, but if you go to the Viewpoints page at Antiwar.com, you can find it, Refusing to Comply, the Tactics of Resistance in the All-Volunteer Military.
