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Natives with spears block the highway during a barricade at the entrance to Yurimaguas city, in the Amazon region of northern Peru, June 11, 2009. Peru's Congress on Wednesday suspended two land-use laws that sparked clashes in which 60 people were killed last week, but indigenous people opposed to development in the Amazon jungle vowed to keep protesting. Photo: Reuters/Enrique Castro-Mendivil

Manifest Destiny

In 1845, an American columnist, John O’Sullivan, writing about the proposed annexation of Texas, claimed that it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent.” Later in the same year, referring to the ongoing dispute with Great Britain over Oregon, he wrote that the United States had the right to claim “the whole of Oregon.”

And that claim is by the right of our Manifest Destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent that Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

The westward expansion did not originate with O’Sullivan’s theory. In 1803, the United States acquired 23 percent of its existing territory through the Louisiana Purchase. Seeing land as a source of political power, the government began to actively pursue aggressive expansion of its territories through the 19th century. The idea of Manifest Destiny was one component of the process which captured the popular imagination. This was further fueled by the discovery of gold and other minerals in the West attracting Easterners acting on their conviction in their right and duty to expand.

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The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) exists for a reason captured in a study by Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., author of the “definitive history of the Marine Corps,” published in Armed Forces Journal in 1971. The U.S. military in Vietnam was at that moment at the edge of chaos. As Colonel Heinl put it, it was experiencing “widespread conditions… that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917.”

In fact, statistics flowing back to Washington about the American war machine in Vietnam then pointed toward an unimaginable nightmare. Drug use was rampant; desertions stood at 70 per thousand, a modern high; small-scale mutinies or “combat refusals” were at critical, if untabulated, levels; incidents of racial conflict had soared; and strife between “lifers” and draftees was at unprecedented levels. Reported “fraggings” — assassination attempts — against unpopular officers or NCOs had risen from 126 in 1969 to 333 in 1971, despite declining troop strength in Vietnam. According to Colonel Heinl’s figures, as many as 144 antiwar underground newspapers were being published by, or for, soldiers. And most threatening of all, active duty soldiers in relatively small numbers (as well as a swelling number of Vietnam veterans) were beginning to actively organize against the war.

When, in January 1973, before the war was even over, President Richard Nixon announced that an American draft army was at an end and an all-volunteer force would be created, this was why. The U.S. military was in the wilderness without a compass, having discovered one crucial thing: you couldn’t fight an endless, unpopular counterinsurgency war with the kind of conscript army a democracy had to offer. What resulted, of course, was the AVF, a moniker that, as Andrew Bacevich has written in his book The New American Militarism, was but “a euphemism for what is, in fact, a professional army… [that] does not even remotely ‘look like’ democratic America.” Citizenship and the obligation to serve were now officially severed and, from the 1980s on, most Americans would ever more vigorously cheer on the AVF from the sidelines, while it would be a force theoretically purged of possible Vietnam-style dissent and refusal.

In that sense, it could be considered a success. We’ve now been at war seven and a half years in Afghanistan and more than five in Iraq, two catastrophic counterinsurgency struggles, and yet a Vietnam-style movement has neither arisen in the military, nor for that matter in the streets of what’s now called “the homeland.” But as TomDispatch regular Dahr Jamail indicates below and in his new book, The Will To Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, dissent has proved irrepressible. With the generous support of the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, Jamail has produced a report on the seeds of refusal and dissent in the military that may — in a quagmire future in Afghanistan and possibly Iraq — grow into something far larger. –Tom Engelhardt

Refusing to Comply

The Tactics of Resistance in an All-Volunteer Military
By Dahr Jamail

[Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.]

On May 1st at Fort Hood in central Texas, Specialist Victor Agosto wrote on a counseling statement, which is actually a punitive U.S. Army memo:

“There is no way I will deploy to Afghanistan. The occupation is immoral and unjust. It does not make the American people any safer. It has the opposite effect.”

Ten days later, he refused to obey a direct order from his company commander to prepare to deploy and was issued a second counseling statement. On that one he wrote, “I will not obey any orders I deem to be immoral or illegal.” Shortly thereafter, he told a reporter, “I’m not willing to participate in this occupation, knowing it is completely wrong. It’s a matter of what I’m willing to live with.”

Agosto had already served in Iraq for 13 months with the 57th Expeditionary Signal Battalion. Currently on active duty at Fort Hood, he admits, “It was in Iraq that I turned against the occupations. I started to feel very guilty. I watched contractors making obscene amounts of money. I found no evidence that the occupation was in any way helping the people of Iraq. I know I contributed to death and human suffering. It’s hard to quantify how much I caused, but I know I contributed to it.”

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It is important to draw our attention to this article by my co-recipient of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer. -DJ

June 26, 2008 is a day I will never forget. For the events of that day irrevocably changed my life. That day I was detained, interrogated, strip searched, and tortured while attempting to return home from a European speaking tour, which culminated in independent American journalist Dahr Jamail and I sharing the Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize in London — an award given to journalists who expose propaganda which often masks egregious human rights abuses.

I want to address the denials from Israel and the inaccurate reporting by a few journalists in addition to requesting state of Israel to acknowledge what it did to me, prosecute the members of the Shin Bet responsible for it and put in place procedures that protect other journalists from such treatment. [Read more →]

Most of the Sioux's land has been taken, and what remains has been laid waste by radioactive pollution. (Photo: Library of Congress)

The Fort Laramie Treaty once guaranteed the Sioux Nation the right to a large area of their original land, which spanned several states and included their sacred Black Hills, where they were to have “the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the land.

However, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, President Ulysses S. Grant told the army to look the other way in order to allow gold miners to enter the territory. After repeated violations of the exclusive rights to the land by gold prospectors and by migrant workers crossing the reservation borders, the US government seized the Black Hills land in 1877.

Charmaine White Face, an Oglala Tetuwan who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation, is the spokesperson for the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council (TSNTC), established in 1893 to uphold the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. She is also coordinator of the voluntary group, Defenders of the Black Hills, that works to preserve and protect the environment where they live.

“We call gold the metal which makes men crazy,” White Face told Truthout while in New York to attend the annual Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations in late May. “Knowing they could not conquer us like they wanted to … because when you are fighting for your life, or the life of your family, you will do anything you can … or fighting for someplace sacred like the Black Hills you will do whatever you can … so they had to put us in prisoner of war camps. I come from POW camp 344, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. We want our treaties upheld, we want our land back.”

Most of the Sioux’s land has been taken, and what remains has been laid waste by radioactive pollution.

“Nothing grows in these areas - nothing can grow. They are too radioactive,” White Face said. [Read more →]

In Baghdad's al-Fadel district, Iraqi Special Forces troops round a corner. (Photo: Getty Images)

At least 20 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq in May, the most since last September, along with more than 50 wounded. Iraqi casualties are, as usual - and in both categories - at least ten times that number.

Attacks against US forces are once again on the rise in places like Baghdad and Fallujah, where the Iraqi resistance was fiercest before so many of them joined the Sahwa (Sons of Iraq, also referred to as Awakening Councils), and began taking payments from the US military in exchange for halting attacks against the occupiers and agreeing to join the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq. In early April I wrote a column for this website that illustrated how ongoing Iraqi government and US military attacks against the Sahwa, coupled with broken promises of the Sahwa being incorporated into the government security apparatus or given civilian jobs, would likely lead to an exodus from the Sahwa and a return to the resistance.

Slowly, but surely, we are seeing that occur. While US liaison Col. Jeffrey Kulmayer has called this idea, along with the ongoing controversy from the Iraqi government - led by US-pawn Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - not paying most of the Sahwa members, while continuing government arrests of and attacks on Sahwa members “overblown,” this does not change reality. Let us recall the telling words of the reporter Caud Cockburn, father of journalist Patrick Cockburn, “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.”

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