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Political Media Review has given its take on The Will to Resist:
The Will to Resist
Dahr Jamail
Haymarket Books (2009)
Reviewed by Paul J. Comeau
Haymarket Books’ 2009 release, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Dahr Jamail, is the most important nonfiction book published this year. In Will, Jamail captures the lives of our men and women in uniform, in their own uncensored words, as they relate the true situation of the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He underscores the burgeoning resistance movement within the ranks of the armed forces.
Soldiers consistently face attacks from insurgents, supply shortages, and confusion about the purpose of their mission in Baghdad or Kabul. They question the ability of the US Military to push the restart button in Afghanistan, and Iraq is still a dismal place to be. Occupation duty is still in a dangerous region with a lack of infrastructure, clean water, or decent food.
The Obama White House promised to withdraw US forces from Iraq. That hasn’t happened to the extent people demanded. And while Defense Secretary Gates promised to review ’stop loss’ policies last year, the program continues to mean one deployment after another, longer tours, and exhaustion for men and women who have lost homes, spouses, and jobs in America.
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Cultural Cleansing in Iraq
Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered
Edited by Prof. Raymond W. Baker, Shereem T. Ismael and Tareq Y. Ismael
(With Chapter 6 “Killing the Intellectual Class” contributed by Dahr Jamail.)
Why did the invasion of Iraq result in cultural destruction and killings of intellectuals? Convention sees accidents of war and poor planning in a campaign to liberate Iraqis. The authors argue instead that the invasion aimed to dismantle the Iraqi state to remake it as a client regime. Post-invasion chaos created conditions under which the cultural foundations of the state could be undermined. The authors painstakingly document the consequences of the occupiers’ willful inaction and worse, which led to the ravaging of one of the world’s oldest recorded cultures. Targeted assassination of over 400 academics, kidnapping and the forced flight of thousands of doctors, lawyers, artists and other intellectuals add up to cultural cleansing. This important work lays to rest claims that the invasion aimed to free an educated population to develop its own culture of democracy.
Buy the book
Interviewed by Christian Avard for Air America:
Today is Veteran’s Day and every year, veterans are honored on television, in the newspapers, with parades and so on. We salute the American flag, wear yellow ribbons in honor of the troops, listen to “Taps,” watch 21-gun salutes and hear speeches about those who gave their lives for freedom and democracy.
But what about those who sacrificed and served their country and speak against the horrors of war? What about those who come back from war never the same? Why do we honor the silent, dead warriors, but not those who have been harmed by war and feel the need to speak out?
Dahr Jamail is an award-winning independent journalist whose work has appeared on National Public Radio, in The Guardian, The Nation, The Progressive, and more. In his latest book, The Will to Resist: Soliders Who Refuse To Fight In Iraq And Afghanistan, Jamail brings his readers inside the movement of military resistance to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
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From the Australian online magazine The Ember.
Winter Soldiers — The Will to Resist
The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan
by Dahr Jamail.
Haymarket Books, 2009.
Soldiers who refuse to fight have a type of moral authority which, oddly enough, a pacifist who refuses to fight will somehow always lack. Experience is a compelling authority. A pacifist is always struggling against implications of cowardice and self-interest, but soldiers who’ve seen action, who’ve taken lives and risked their own, are in a much better position to face down such insinuations. As Chris Hedges puts it in his foreword to Jamail’s book, “These returning veterans know the essence of war, which is death, and have been maimed by the trauma of industrial warfare.” I don’t know the essence of war – I hope I never will. Somewhere in between the soldiers who refuse to fight and the people like me, there are people like Dahr Jamail.
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Praising The Will to Resist as “an eminently readable account that, once started, cannot be put down,” online business journal BNet provides a short write-up:
Award-winning independent journalist Dahr Jamail’s The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan is the true story of those within the U.S. military service whose consciences prompt them to resist the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. From battalions that refuse orders, to active-duty soldiers who sign antiwar petitions, individual soldiers who refuse redeployment, those who dare to take a public stand against the occupation, and more, The Will to Resist is a fascinating examination of what motivates such opposition amid the United States’ loyal defending force. The Will to Resist is not a politically neutral book; chapters reflect a decidedly negative and critical view of the American occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the heart of The Will to Resist is not its politics, but rather the true stories of the men and women who serve–and who choose to resist what they perceive as unjust, whether it be sexism, discrimination, or apparent crimes of war. An eminently readable account that, once started, cannot be put down.
Order the book from Amazon.
From socialistworker.org
Iraq war veteran Phil Aliff reviews independent journalist Dahr Jamail’s new book on the soldiers’ resistance to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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by Jon Letman | IPS
KAUAI, Hawaii - Six months into Barack Obama’s presidency, the U.S. public’s display of antiwar sentiment has faded to barely a whisper.
Despite Obama’s vow to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq before September 2011, he plans to leave up to 50,000 troops in “training and advisory” roles. Meanwhile, nearly 130,000 troops remain in that country and more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers occupy Afghanistan, with up to an additional 18,000 approved for deployment this year.
So where is the resistance?
In independent journalist Dahr Jamail’s “The Will to Resist: Soldiers who refuse to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan” (Haymarket Books), Jamail profiles what may ultimately prove to be the United States’ most effective anti-war movement: the soldiers themselves. [Read more →]
The following is reprinted from Foreign Policy in Focus.
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Dahr Jamail’s The Will To Resist: Soldiers who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books). The testimonies below were collected at a national conference, “Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan,” held by Iraq Veterans Against the War.
The name “Winter Soldiers” refers to people who stand up for the soul of their country, even in its darkest hours. Thomas Paine, the revolutionary who rallied George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge, trying to keep them from deserting in the face of a bitter winter and mounting defeats at the hands of the British, said: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
The phrase “Winter Soldiers” was adopted by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) when they organized the first Winter Soldier event in response to the human rights violations that were occurring in Vietnam. The event, called “Winter Soldier Investigation,” was held in Detroit from January 31, 1971, to February 2, 1971, and was intended to publicize war crimes and atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. Armed Forces in the Vietnam War. VVAW challenged the morality and conduct of the war by exposing the direct relationship between military policies and war crimes in Vietnam. The three-day gathering of 109 veterans and 16 civilians included discharged servicemen from each branch of military service, civilian contractors, medical personnel, and academics, all of whom presented testimony about war crimes they had committed or witnessed during 1963–1970.
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And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
By Chalmers Johnson
from TomDispatch.com
However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.
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One of the earliest metaphors President George W. Bush and some of his top officials wielded in their post-invasion salad days in Iraq involved bicycles. The question was: Should we take the “training wheels” off the Iraqi bike (of democracy)? Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for example, commented smugly on the way getting Iraq “straightened out” was like teaching your kid to ride a bike:
“They’re learning, and you’re running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you’re just barely touching it. You can’t know when you’re running down the street how many steps you’re going to have to take. We can’t know that, but we’re off to a good start.”
That image (about as patronizingly colonial as they come) of the little pedaling Iraqi child with an American parent running close behind, was abandoned when around the first corner, as it turned out, was an insurgent with an rocket-propelled grenade. Many years and many disasters later, though, Americans, whether in the Obama administration, the Washington punditocracy, or the media are still almost incapable of not being patronizing when it comes to Iraq. Take a typical recent piece of “news analysis” in the New York Times by a perfectly sharp journalist, Alissa J. Rubin. It was headlined in print “America’s New Role in Iraq Prompts a Search for Means of Influence” and focused, in part, on Vice President Joe Biden’s recent trip there supposedly to “assuage” Iraqi feelings that they are being “moved to the bottom shelf.” [Read more →]
