Camilo Mejia was the first US soldier to serve in Iraq who went public with his refusal to re-deploy. He spent nine months in military confinement for deciding to follow his conscience. Since his release, he has been a tireless anti-war campaigner — at the side of Cindy Sheehan when she began her antiwar vigil outside US President George Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. His book, Road from ar-Ramadi, is forthcoming from New Press. Below is an extract from an interview he gave to Eric Ruder from the US Socialist Worker weekly.
George Bush would say that the US will only stay until Iraq is in a better condition, and the troops will come home as soon as possible. What do you think about that?
You can't force democracy with the muzzle of an M-16 or tank or bombs or Apache helicopters. There can't be democracy when there's occupation, because when there's occupation, there's fear, and when there's fear, there's no freedom. And people are very afraid in Iraq. They're afraid of the insurgents and the occupation. They're afraid of speaking out or leaving their homes.
The biggest part of the problem is us. For the war hawks and the corporations, a little insurgency is healthy. They know that they're creating the problem, and it's in their best interest to continue it, because as long as there's violence, they can continue to justify the presence of a foreign military.
When you look at Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, all these countries were being ruled by military dictatorships that were placed there and financed and trained by the US. [Washington] needs repression, violence and fear in order to ransack countries and exploit them and take the benefits and the profits.
Do you think the US has a responsibility to stay or should troops be withdrawn immediately?
There should be immediate withdrawal. To say that the Iraqis need 160,000 people armed to the teeth in order to succeed is straight-out racist. That's like saying that you have a family, and that somebody with a stick needs to be in your house in order for you to be able to run your house. And then every mistake you make, you get smacked upside the head because somebody else knows what's good for you better than you do.
It would be like 1 million foreign invaders coming to the US and saying that we're going to stay because you have problems. You have a president who steals elections, and you have racial minorities left behind to fend for themselves in hurricanes.
People say we're there because they mistreat women, but every eight seconds, a woman gets beat up in the US. Women don't get the same salaries as men, don't get the same job opportunities, get degraded on television. Every five minutes there's a detergent commercial where you have a beautiful, young, sophisticated woman on her knees cleaning a toilet or making food for a bunch of guys watching a football game.
The hypocrisy is incredible. We demand that the Iraqis have 25% female representation in [parliament]. And what is it here? It's 14%! And yet we use all these arguments as reasons to stay — I don't really mean "we", I mean the government.
How can we even speak about freeing anybody when we're not free ourselves? We have one of the worst, if not the worst, education system of any industrialised nation. We have more than 40 million people without health insurance. We have an education system that charges people to go to college... We need freedom here before we can even think about helping anybody with their own freedom.
[From <http://www.socialistworker.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, September 28, 2005.
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