The Will To Resist

volunteer, 26.09.2009 00:00

The Will to Resist:
Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan

Dahr Jamail, an Arab-American journalist, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq, will discuss his new book, The Will to Resist, in Ashland on September 30th.

Jamail's lecture about his experiences in Iraq and his interviews with dozens of American soldiers, who are refusing to be deployed or refusing to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, promises to be riveting. The lecture is free and open to the public. Ashland is one stop on Jamail's National Lecture Tour in support of his new book.

Who: Dahr Jamail, independent, award-winning war correspondent
What: Lecture on his book, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan
When: 7 pm Wednesday, September 30th
Where: Meese Auditorium, Southern Oregon University, 1250 Siskiyou Blvd, Ashland (adjacent to the Schneider Art Museum)

Sponsors: Ashland chapter of Women's International League for Peace & Freedom, Citizens for Peace & Justice of Medford, Collateral Repair Project, KSKQ 94.9FM, Peace House, Rural Organizing Project, SOU Department of History and Political Science, SOU Office of International Programs, and Veterans for Peace - Rogue Valley Chapter 156

More about the book: From a review at Amazon.com:
By Jon D. Letman

For those who thought the anti-war movement in America was dead, independent journalist Dahr Jamail shines a brilliant, revealing light on an under-reported, overlooked segment of the resistance in his second book The Will to Resist: Soldiers who refuse to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jamail, a former mountain guide in Alaska, was so dissatisfied by the lack of critical reporting in the early days of the Iraq war, he decided to head for the conflict and dig for the truth on his own, unembedded. The result was a hard-hitting look at the U.S. military's devastating impact on Iraqi civilians in Beyond the Green Zone (2007).

In The Will to Resist, Jamail examines the U.S. military's impact on the very people fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - the soldiers themselves. What he describes is a brutal system that teaches young recruits to dehumanize "the enemy" and each other.

From a military culture of misogyny, homophobia, racism, and intimidation to a system that "chews `em up and spits `em out," (battle wounds, stop-loss, and veteran's benefits be damned), Jamail interviews scores of veterans and active duty soldiers who've come to realize they can't "be all they can be" if they are killing civilians, dodging bombs, struggling with traumatic brain injuries, or plagued by suicidal urges.

Jamail documents the soldiers' experiences in their own blunt language, giving the war, and swelling internal resistance, an immediacy and realism the U.S. Military would rather go unexamined, but is increasingly hard to ignore.

With detail and clarity, Jamail describes how a growing number of soldiers are resisting by refusing orders, speaking out, acting up, coming out (of the closet), writing, blogging, demonstrating, and just plain saying "no" to wars in which they find themselves being used as disposable pawns.

Some of the stories Jamail tells are shocking, some are depressing, while others are inspiring, irrepressibly human and unexpectedly brimming with promise. The soldiers in The Will to Resist offer hope at a time when America's war-making seems to be accepted as "just one of those things." Even if the American public is too busy, too indifferent, or too desensitized to offer any meaningful resistance to the ongoing American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, there are a growing number of military personnel who will.

More about Dahr Jamail:

Jamail is a 4th generation Lebanese-American, who grew up in Houston and graduated from Texas A&M University and later moved to Alaska. He went to Iraq to cover the war in 2003 and his first book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Iraq was published in 2007. His dispatches have appeared in TruthOut, the Inter Press Service, Le Monde Diplomatique, and many other outlets. His stories have also been published by The Nation, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, Al-Jazeera, the Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, and the Independent to name just a few. Dahr’s dispatches and hard news stories have been translated into French, Polish, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic and Turkish. On radio as well as television, Dahr reports for Democracy Now!, has appeared on the BBC and NPR, and numerous other stations around the globe. Dahr is also special correspondent for Flashpoints.

Dahr’s reporting has earned him numerous awards, including the prestigious 2008 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism, The Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage, and four Project Censored awards. Read more about his work at his Website:  http://dahrjamailiraq.com/

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Ehren Watada to Resign from Army 27.09.2009 - 22:01 post on Seattle IMC:  http://seattle.indymedia.org/en/2009/09/274103.shtml author: via other sources Sep 26, 2009 16:26 Various sources indicate that the U.S. Army is "allowing" Lt Watada to resign in "other than honorable" conditions. The Associated Press reports that the Army is "allowing" the first commissioned officer to tried in court-martial for refusing to go to Iraq, to resign from the service. Watada's attorney, Kenneth S. Kagan, said in a statement Friday that the Army plans to grant 1st Lt. Ehren Watada a discharge “under other than honorable conditions.” Watada refused to deploy to Iraq with his Fort Lewis-based unit in 2006, indicating that the war is illegal and that he would be a party to war crimes if he served in Iraq. His court-martial ended in mistrial in February 2007. The Army wanted to try him a second time, but a federal judge ruled such a trial would violate the soldier’s constitutional protection against double jeopardy; a second court-martial would violate Watada’s Fifth Amendment rights by trying him twice for the same charges. The attorney said Watada had handed in his resignation before, but the Army refused to accept it. This time, however, it was accepted, when the Army realized it could not defeat him in a courtroom, Sun> Homepage:: http://