[Mb-civic] 5,500 US deserters: We won't fight in Iraq

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Green Left Weekly - Mar 16, 2005
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/619/619p14.htm

5,500 US deserters: We won't fight in Iraq

by Doug Lorimer

On February 25, US Army officials at Fort Stewart, Georgia, announced
that Sergeant Kevin Benderman, a 40-year-old army mechanic who 
refused to deploy to Iraq for a second tour of duty, will be court-
martialed
on desertion charges. If convicted, he faces up to seven years in
prison.

After having spent 10 years in the US military, Benderman missed his
unit's deployment flight to Iraq on January 7. Ten days earlier, he
had given his commanders notice that he planned to seek a discharge 
as
a conscientious objector, saying he had become opposed to the war
after having served eight months in Iraq in 2003.

Benderman joins a growing number of soldiers who are protesting the
Iraq war by refusing orders, going AWOL, fleeing to Canada or 
speaking
out. CBS News reported on December 8 that the Pentagon has 
admitted
that at least 5500 US military personnel have deserted since the war
started in Iraq.

Furthermore, Steve Morse of the GI Rights Hotline says that the 
number
of calls they have received has grown from 17,000 in 2001 to more than
32,000 in 2004. He says that about 30% are from soldiers who are 
AWOL
or are thinking about deserting.

"Many people don't [desert] lightly, and they would like to do right
by the country. But they see what's going on, and they can't do it",
Morse told the February 20 St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

That is what motivated 39-year-old US Army veteran Carl Webb to
desert. "I won't kill if I feel I'm on the wrong side. This is a war
about oil and profits", he told the St Louis Post-Dispatch.

Unemployed and facing eviction from his home in Austin, Texas, Webb
enlisted in the Texas National Guard in 2001, after a seven-year break
from the US military. He expected to serve for only three years. But
in July 2004, less than two months shy of his service completion date,
the military told Webb that under the "stop-loss" program he would
serve 525 more days and that his unit was being deployed to Iraq.

The "stop-loss" program, which made its first appearance in the Gulf
War of the early 1990s, keeps US soldiers scheduled for deployment to
Iraq or Afghanistan from leaving when their term of service ends.
"This policy is practically an unofficial draft", Webb told the
February 10 Workers World weekly. "It is conscription against a
person's will."

Webb said he had ruled out seeking conscientious-objector status
because he couldn't meet the military's criteria for such status --
basically, opposition to all wars. "I'm not a pacifist... I'm refusing
to go to war because I do not believe the US is on the right track. I
think this war is not about liberating people, it's about oppressing
them."

When his National Guard unit reported for training in August, Webb
stayed away. He did the same when the unit left in January for Iraq.
He is now a fugitive with a federal warrant out for his arrest.

"My case is different from some of the other soldiers who have
deserted, either because they just don't want to go, or because they
think these `stop-loss' orders are illegal", Webb told Workers World.
"I tell people that even if there was no stop-loss policy, even if the
government wasn't illegally using the reserves and National Guard and
retirees as they are, I would still be opposed to this war. I don't
think it matters what category of service you're in -- whether you're
in the reserves, National Guard or the regular army -- I think all
military personnel should oppose fighting in this war of imperialism."

An anti-war soldier who has attracted international attention is
28-year-old Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, who was released on 
February
15 after being sentenced to one year in a military prison for refusing
to return to Iraq.

Mejia joined the US Army in 1995. Following a three-year stint with
the regular army, he joined the Florida National Guard partly because
he was promised tuition assistance at Florida's state universities.

Mejia's National Guard unit was called up for active duty in January
2003, and then deployed to Iraq in April 2003. He spent six months in
combat in Iraq, then returned for a two-week furlough to the US. In
March 2004 he turned himself in to the US military and filed an
application for conscientious objector status, declaring that his
experiences in Iraq had convinced him the war was illegal and immoral.

"The justification for this war is money, and no soldier should go to
Iraq and give his life for oil", Mejia told the New York-based Citizen
Soldier anti-war website. "I have witnessed the suffering of a people
whose country is in ruins and who are further humiliated by the raids,
patrols, curfews of an occupying army. My experience of this war has
changed me forever.

"One of our sergeants shot a small boy who was carrying an AK-47
rifle. The other two children who were walking with him ran away as
the wounded child began crawling for his life. A second shot stopped
him, but he was still alive. When an Iraqi tried to take him to a
civilian hospital, army medics from our unit intercepted him and
insisted on taking the injured boy to a military facility. There, he
was denied medical care because a different unit was supposed to treat
our unit's wounded. After another medical unit refused to treat the
child, he died.

"Another time, my platoon responded to a political protest in Ramadi
that had turned violent. My squad took a defensive position on a
rooftop after some protesters started throwing grenades at the mayor's
office. We were ordered to shoot anyone who threw anything that 
looked
like a grenade.

"A young Iraqi emerged from the crowd carrying something in his right
hand. Just before he threw it, we all opened fire, killing him. The
object turned out to be a grenade, which exploded far from everyone. I
know that the man we killed had no chance of hurting us -- he was too
far away. My platoon leader later told us that we killed three other
Iraqis during this same protest although I didn't see them die.

"Going home on leave in October 2003 provided me with the 
opportunity
to put my thoughts in order and to listen to what my conscience had to
say. People would ask me about my war experiences and answering 
them
took me back to all the horrors -- the firefights, the ambushes, the
time I saw a young Iraqi dragged by his shoulders through a pool of
his own blood, the time a man was decapitated by our machine-gun fire
and the time my friend shot a child through the chest.

"Coming home gave me the clarity to see the line between military duty
and moral obligation. My feelings against the war dictated that I
could no longer be a part of it. Acting upon my principles became
incompatible with my role in the military and by putting my weapon
down I chose to reassert myself as a human being."

While there are not as many deserters and anti-war soldiers as during
the peak of the US movement against the Vietnam War in the early
1970s, soldiers and their families are organising against this war
much earlier on than their counterparts did during the Vietnam War.
Thus, Iraq Veterans Against the War was founded in July 2004, a little
over a year after the war began. Vietnam Veterans Against the War 
was
created in April 1967, about five years after the US war in Vietnam
officially started.

And unlike the Vietnam War, military families have been at the
forefront of demonstrations against the Iraq war. More than 2000
families belong to Military Families Speak Out, which was formed in
November 2002, four months before the US invaded Iraq.

Stan Goff, a former career soldier with the US Special Forces, whose
son is an army mechanic in Iraq, has played a prominent role in the
organisation of antiwar military families through the Bring Them Home
Now! movement. "We're not saying bring the troops home because 
they're
suffering hardship and danger", he told In These Times magazine in
September 2003. "Most soldiers know that hardship and danger are 
part
of their job. What we're saying is bring the troops home because they
are facing hardship and danger in a war that is immoral and illegal."

***
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