Stan Goff, a US special forces veteran, whose son is in Iraq, is now a campaigner with the Bring Them Home Now! movement against the US occupation of Iraq. Here, he speaks to Green Left Weekly's Pip Hinman about the US deserters.
Why do you think there are so many deserters?
I am hesitant to speculate, however my best educated guess is that it's a combination of the extremely high operational tempo and the sense of horror over the real nature of this war. Many young soldiers enter military service having bought the whole story about the US military as some liberatory force, and the discovery of its true nature creates a traumatic sense of dislocation and betrayal.
How does this phenomenon compare to the early period of the Vietnam War?
The list of dissimilarities is nearly infinite, and I am hesitant to look for comparisons between apples and oranges. Nonetheless, I think the existence of a globally networked and often militant anti-war movement, even before the March 2003 ground offensive, is reflected in the military by a much higher degree of resistance at a much earlier phase of the war.
The other interesting difference is the key role women have played in this resistance, the spouses and moms and beloved aunts, grand moms. There are dads, too, but more women who oppose the war and who have had much closer access to the troops with whom they already have close personal relations. Their organization has accelerated the outreach to the service members themselves well beyond what was ever accomplished with things like GI coffeehouses — good things in themselves, but also difficult because they were mostly radical college students trying to approach their more working-class counterparts in the military without any prior relationship.
What does your organisation advise soldiers to do if they disagree with the Iraq war?
It is illegal for us to advise them to break the law, so many of us are already scofflaws. We tell them to look closely at what we are showing them about this war, and act in accordance with their consciences and circumstances. This means different things for different people.
We will support nearly any individual's resistance once that decision is taken. We are networked with the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force and the GI Rights Hotline to readily refer soldiers to legal experts to assess their decisions and to defend them once they act. We also try to make sure they get plugged into various support networks to deal with the pressure of these kinds of decisions and their experiences of the war. The options are quite diverse.
Some troops are just blogging information out of Iraq. Some are keeping notes. Some are witnessing after they are separated from service. Some fail to show up for work. Some flee to Canada. Some refuse orders and accept incarceration. Some mount legal challenges to various aspects of the current system, like the stop-loss orders that indefinitely extend their service commitments. Many are now joining Iraq Veterans Against the War, a national organisation of the veterans of this particular phase of the aggression against Iraq. We try to bring all these different forms of resistance more and more under one roof to give them a more focused political character.
From Green Left Weekly, March 16, 2005.
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