“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” – George Orwell On July 4 in Baghdad, Vice President Joe Biden, who campaigned with Barack Obama on a platform of ending the occupation of Iraq, found himself in one of former Iraqi
Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, A Secret History of Dissent in the All-Volunteer Military
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
THE WILL TO RESIST
Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan By Dahr Jamail An award-winning, unembedded journalist tells the hidden story of American soldiers turning against military occupation. “Dahr Jamail’s human portrait of the men and women who turned away from the project of empire should serve as a beacon…The truth they tell demands that we
The Return of the Resistance
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
Colonizing Culture
Transgress The geo-strategic expansion of the American empire is an accepted fact of contemporary history. I have been writing in these columns about the impact of the US occupation on the people of Iraq in the wake of the “hard” colonization via F-16s, tanks, 2,000-pound bombs, white phosphorous and cluster bombs. Here I offer a
Provoking the Inevitable
On Monday, Iraqi government security forces arrested two prominent Sunni leaders in Iraq’s volatile Diyala Province. One of them, Sheikh Riyadh al-Mujami, not coincidentally, is a prominent leader in the local Sahwa (Sons of Iraq), the 100,000-strong Sunni militia that was set up by the US military to quell attacks against occupation forces and launch
Engineering ‘Trust of the Indigenous Population’: How Some Anthropologists Have Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving the Army
Anthropologist Audrey Roberts works for Human Terrain System (HTS), a Pentagon program. Referring to the information produced by HTS scholars, she says, “If it’s going to inform how targeting is done – whether that targeting is bad guys, development or governance – how our information is used is how it’s going to be used. All
Unfit for Combat
This Monday at 2 PM Baghdad time, a US soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counseling center at a US base in Baghdad. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon that the shootings occurred in a place where
Laying the Groundwork for Violence
Throughout history, those who collaborate with the occupiers of their country tend to end up hung out to dry, or dead. The occupation of Iraq is no different – collaboration and the poison fruits that come of it are on full display for the history books once again. Only now, the rapidity with which this
Combat Operations in Fallujah
Indicative of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq, on May 1 the US military reported the death of a Naval petty officer who was killed “on April 30 while conducting combat operations in Fallujah, Iraq.” The Department of Defense report went on to explain that the sailor “was deployed with an East Coast based Navy