“Our Strategy Is Hinged To Our Ability To Organize GI Resistance”
“Our Strategy Is Hinged To Our Ability To Organize GI Resistance”
10/10/2007 By Liam Madden
[Excerpts from IVAW.]
Branch of service: United States Marine Corps (USMC)
Home: Boston, Massachusetts
Served in: Iraq, Kuwait, Okinawa, Japan, Thailand, Korea, Virginia
Liam Madden served as a Communications Electronics Specialist in the Marine Corps from January 2003 to January 2007.
While enlisted he was deployed to Iraq, Kuwait, Thailand, Okinawa, Japan, and Korea.
During his last year in the Marines, Sergeant Madden co-founded the Appeal for Redress, a campaign of service members demanding that congress halt the war in Iraq.
He is currently the president of the Boston chapter of IVAW. He will be attending Northeastern University in the fall.
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“Why are we devoting time to building a GI resistance movement?”
This question can be expounded to say:
“Why build a GI movement if the next president or congress will end the war?”
As we all know, the primary reasons given by the Bush administration for invading Iraq, WMDs that threatened the U.S. and its allies and terrorist links, were fraudulent. Thus the real reasons for invasion have been avoided by the government and media alike.
This isn’t meant to be a lecture on points we’ve all heard before, but it is
necessary to illustrate that: if our members or potential members feel that the U.S. invaded Iraq simply because Bush is an idiot or that he wants to “export democracy,” we will fail to grasp why our strategy was devised.
The U.S. is perpetuating the occupation of Iraq to dominate world energy supplies and to project military power into the Middle East, ie, the war is being fought for neo-imperialism.
It is important to note that this is not a problem that rests solely on the doorstep of the Bush administration, as we have seen from the prevailing position of ALL presidential front runners, no major candidate or party is calling for an end to the occupation.
This is not because the democrats simply don’t have the votes; in fact, they are basing their presidential campaigns on the grounds of a continued, albeit modified, occupation that perpetuates the same policy of controlling oil and projecting power.
Even if they did promise to “Redeploy,” it would be foolish to disregard the lesson taught to the people of 1968 when Richard Nixon was elected on promises of “peace with honor.”
As history reveals, politician’s empty promises often provide little more than broken hearts and shattered lives.
This is why our strategy is hinged to our ability to organize GI resistance.
Such organizing will not only reduce the capacity of the government to execute its policies, it will develop our members organizing ability, strengthen our organization, and fill our ranks with new members.
If we were to engage in any other strategy, we would be expending energy on endeavors that ultimately left us with nothing to show for our effort and frustrated that our organization wasted precious resources.
Obviously, it will take more than the efforts of IVAW to end this war. The Iraqi resistance will certainly continue to play a role, as well as the civilian anti-war movement. The Vietnam War was ended by a combination of all of these components.
Many say that Vietnam was ended because “America lost the political will to fight,” the fact is that it was soldiers who lost the will to fight. Of course not every soldier did, but enough to make the government choose between the occupation of Vietnam and a functioning U.S. military.
As elections draw nearer, the conditions exist where members and potential members will be confused and attracted to the sheer magnitude of the mainstream dialogue about the war.
No “serious” candidates will say anything remotely close to committing to the removal of troops from the occupation, however many will make it seem like they are advocating for a serious change, for example continuing the occupation with 90,000 troops and changing the nature of their mission.
Where as I previously stated that the government was forced to reevaluate its policies during Vietnam in response to the staunch VC/ NLF resistance, the crippling decline in effectiveness and discipline of the military and tremendous, domestic unrest, the current scenario requires a qualitatively different level of all forms of resistance. More clearly, the U.S. has much more at stake in Iraq than it did in Vietnam; therefore the need for dedicated GI organizing is much more pressing.
It is foolish to think that the war will peter out on its own. The U.S. will not give up its superpower status, which is entirely bound to its ability to dominate the Middle East, unless it is forced to by a conscience within its own ranks.
The war in Iraq is unique in its importance and scale, but it is entirely consistent with U.S. foreign policy for the last century.
I believe that if we don’t end this war and simultaneously lead the way to a systemic change in the American power structure, the same pattern will reemerge.
Given the near certainty of this, I believe it would be wise to put forth a strong argument for the drastically different method of change for which we stand and also the level of change I feel we should stand for as individuals.
What are we asking of our members and our new members?
Our new plan asks our members to develop tactics to conduct outreach to active duty service members with the express goal of developing chapters of IVAW on military installations. Our six month plan needs the organization to focus its efforts on carrying out this outreach. Chapters are being called upon to facilitate the organizing and training needed to successfully conduct this outreach.
Our new active duty members are being asked to organize a community of service members who can support and educate each other personally and politically.
The ultimate goal is to empower members to stand on their principles in an organized and thoughtful manner that defies the mold of individualism that is unfairly projected on war resisters, and to foster the sense of solidarity needed to stand by each other while we act to bring peace and justice to our nation and the world.
DO YOU HAVE A FRIEND OR RELATIVE IN THE SERVICE?
Forward GI Special along, or send us the address if you wish and we’ll send it regularly. Whether in Iraq or stuck on a base in the USA, this is extra important for your service friend, too often cut off from access to encouraging news of growing resistance to the war, inside the armed services and at home. Send email requests to address up top or write to: The Military Project, Box 126, 2576 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10025-5657
[Also send the service member copies of Sir, No Sir. -FS]
Steve B, UK:
It’ll be deemed a “terrorist organisation” inside a week.
Good idea though, and nothing he says about the reason for Iraq (or the candidates’ promises) is untrue.
17 October 2007, 6:52 amJoaquin Bustelo:
I remember at the April 24, 1971, demonstration in Washington, D.C., the speaker for the Student Mobilization Committee saying, “If you keep drafting us, you’re not going to win the war, you’re going to lose the army.” I’m sure it was said hundreds of times by hundreds of people in those years — this just happens to be the one that stuck in my memory.
I remembered that recently when I downloaded a four DVD set of Australian journalist John Pilger’s documentaries and watched the first one he ever made, in 1970 in Vietnam, called “The Quiet Mutiny.”
In 26 minutes, he cuts through all the bullshit and explains why the Vietnam War was ending: because the 80,000 “grunts” –overwhelmingly draftees who did the actual fighting out in the field– were refusing to go on with the war.
“The grunts are dying, at a level acceptable to both the American military and the American public,” Pilger says in a standup halfway through the documentary. “Another 65 this week, about the same next week, and the next, and the next, until the very last American division … combat division … is withdrawn, and so far for all the words from Washington only paper soldiers have gone home.
“The war isn’t over, but it is ending. It is ending not because of the Paris talks or the demonstrations at home. It is ending because the largest and wealthiest and most powerful organization on earth –the American Army– is being challenged from within. From the very cellars of its pyramid — from the most forgotten, the most brutalized and certainly the bravest of its members. The war is ending because the grunts are taking no more bullshit.”
Black GI: “I just don’t like, I just can’t take too much pressure from the army.
Pilger: “What happens to an unpopular officer out in the field?”
Black GI: “Mostly the unpopular officers, from what I heard, if they mess with the grunts too much they get shot up.”
White GI: “A friend of mine, a captain, got shot in the back.”
Pilger: “What was he doing, what was the captain doing to deserve being shot in the back.”
White GI: “Well, my friend said he was telling them to just go on through They were getting hit pretty bad, and he was telling them to just keep on going. They said no. He kind of got shot.”
Latino GI: “Well, yeah, there’s a lot of mistakes. But, you know, the grunts don’t always do what the captain says. The captain will stay back and tell a platoon or something to go out so many hundred meters, you know. We don’t do it. We only go as far as to get out of sight and sit down. We don’t want to hit contact, that’s the one thing we don’t want to hit.”
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This was Pilger’s first documentary and it shows. There is a jump cut (from one take of Pilger looking at the camera to another) in the “standup” I quoted, and a number of abrupt transitions not handled very artfully in either the writing or the film editing. The image quality is tolerable but won’t benefit from being put up on a really big screen, like just about all TV news film of those years.
But if anything, the relative lack of production values, as well as its brevity, only heightens the film’s impact. This IS the way things were, honestly filmed, honestly told and honestly presented, and without the bullshit “balance” of American TV News to obscure the truth.
Pilger says in what I quoted that the war wasn’t ending because of the protests at home, and in a direct sense that was certainly true. But he does single out the importance of the antiwar movement and the youth radicalization in general earlier in the piece.
“The grunts in 1970 are a very different kind of American foot soldier,” Pilger says a couple of minutes into the film. “They are mostly from a world unknown to their commanders. They’re the graduates of an American rebellion that stemmed from the war that they’ve been sent here to fight. And quietly but massively they’ve brought that rebellion with them, here, to Vietnam.”
“For the grunts are unraveling the very fabric of the military. They’re growing their hair, wearing love beads, smoking pot, flourishing the peace sign of peace. And some are refusing to fight. The young men you see in this film are not a selected griping minority. I’ve spoken to hundreds of young soldiers, and the rebellion they feel so deeply is everywhere.”
I was struck by Pilger’s report that the U.S. had 80,000 front line troops in Vietnam (although when asked about this at one of the daily “five o’clock follies” press briefings, the briefing officer refused to confirm the figure, saying “60%” of the then-403,000 troops in ‘Nam were combat or direct combat support). It is striking that by then, 150,000 troops had been withdrawn, but no combat units, according to Pilger.
At any rate, 80,000 is roughly the same number of front line troops as are in Iraq now, by my calculation, or more precisely, that are in the fighting units (Brigade Combat teams) in Iraq, though a number of the 4,000 troops in a BCT –I *think* a few hundred– are really in support functions. Since I don’t know how the Vietnam number was arrived at, or whether it includes the Marines, a very exact comparison is impossible, but this does confirm that Iraq is not a qualitatively smaller war than Vietnam was, which is the impression you get by looking at the total troop raw number (160,000 in Iraq now versus 550,000 in Vietnam at the peak of the war).
The resilience of the Iraqi resistance becomes all the more astonishing given this reality.
This documentary is included in the collection “Documentaries that Changed the World,” of which there appear to be a couple of different editions, with the more complete one not available at all in the U.S.
Amazon UK does carry a four-disk version, but they are Region 2 DVD’s, meaning they won’t play on DVD players sold in the US Market, at least not until you’ve hacked the region restrictions (usually done by entering a few numbers in a hidden menu — instructions for many players can be found with a Google search).
The American version of the collection is just one disk but it does include Quiet Mutiny and is available only through Bullfrog Films . It is a DVD-R (i.e., burned, just like a home-made one, not manufactured) and older players may have a problem with it.
This US release is priced at –get this!– $595, although you can rent it for $200. This obviously is meant for universities and institutions and I assume includes the necessary permissions to use for public showings. By comparison, the FOUR disk British DVD –for home viewing only– is 16 pounds, or $32.
You can save yourself a lot of hassle and a little money and just download the DVD’s through bittorrent as “ISO” files. An “iso” is an image of a DVD in a single file that you can burn to a writable DVD using a program like Nero Burning ROM. Just do a search for Pilger at http://www.onebigtorrent.org (formerly chomskytorrents.org).
BTW, this case is a good illustration of why Hollywood anti-”piracy” measures are really attacks on free speech, and the importance of a free Internet –and what the media monopolies decry as “piracy”– in combating this censorship.
It’s quite obvious why no American branch of the media mafia will distribute Pilger in this country — they make their money, ALL their money, on government-granted and enforced monopolies.
Pilger’s most recent documentary, “The War on Democracy,” about the U.S. role in Latin America, is being successfully shown in movie theaters in Britain and Australia, but the only way to see it in this hemisphere is through file-sharing.
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There are obviously quite a few differences between the draftee “grunts” of the Vietnam era and today’s “troops.” But what proved decisive in Vietnam –the attitude of those being ordered to do the fighting and dying– will also be so in this case.
20 October 2007, 10:26 pm