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 Comes Home” with Ft. Hood Shootings
PHOENIX, Arizona – While investigators probe for a motive behind the mass shooting at the Fort Hood military base in Texas Thursday, in which an army psychiatrist is suspected of killing 13 people, military personnel at the base are in shock as the incident “brings the war home.” “Fort Hood is pretty much a ghost
BNet Reviews ‘Will to Resist’
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
The fight of their lives
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.
Soldiers Who Just Say No
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
Endless War: The Suicide of the United States
“We hear war called murder. It is not: it is suicide.” – Ramsay MacDonald, British prime minister 1931-1935 Sergio Kochergin, back home from his second deployment in Iraq, held a gun in his mouth, trying to muster the courage to pull the trigger. Untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and accompanying nightmares and insomnia, heavy substance
Book Excerpt, The Will to Resist
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
Iraq as “Actor and Stakeholder”
“If the Iraqi forces require further training and further support, we shall examine this then at that time, based on the needs of Iraq,” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki recently informed President Barak Obama in Washington. While Iraqi and US government officials continue to insist the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq is currently on
Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Twenty-First-Century Colonialism in Iraq
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
The Dirty War
On Friday, June 12, Harith al-Obaidi, leader of the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni bloc in the Iraqi Parliament, was shot dead outside a mosque just minutes after giving a sermon condemning the Maliki government for human rights abuses. Obaidi, who was a leader in the opposition movement against the government and had strong