Between imperialism and Islamism

Good article from Himal Southasian and ZNet:

Between Imperialism and Islamism
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
Himal Southasian
September 28, 2007

Between the xenophobes of the West and the illogical fundamentalism in Muslim societies, the choices keep getting grimmer. A mutually beneficial disentanglement can only be provided by humane, reasoned and principled leftwing politics.

***

Many of us in the left, particularly in Southasia, have chosen to understand the rise of violent Islamic fundamentalism as a response to poverty, unemployment, poor access to justice, lack of educational opportunities, corruption, loss of faith in the political system, or the sufferings of peasants and workers. As partial truths, these are indisputable. Those condemned to living a life with little hope and happiness are indeed vulnerable to calls from religious demagogues who offer a happy hereafter in exchange for unquestioning obedience.

American imperialism is also held responsible. This, too, is a partial truth. Stung by the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States lashed out against Muslims almost everywhere. America’s neoconservatives thought that cracking the whip would surely bring the world to order. Instead, the opposite happened. Islamists won massively in Iraq after a war waged on fraudulent grounds by a superpower filled with hubris, arrogance and ignorance. ‘Shock and Awe’ is now turning into ‘Cut and Run’. The US is leaving behind a snake pit, from which battle-hardened terrorists are stealthily making their way to countries around the world. Polls show that the US has become one of the most unpopular countries in the world, and that, in many places, George W Bush is more disliked than Osama bin Laden. Most Muslims see an oil-greedy America, in collusion with Israel, as a crusader force occupying a historic centre of Islamic civilisation. Al- Qaeda rejoices. Its mission was to convince Muslims that the war was between Islam and unbelief. Today it brags: We told you so!

But like poverty and deprivation, imperialism and colonialism alone did not create violent Islamism.

Consciousness is not simply a consequence of material conditions; less tangible, psychologically rooted factors can be very important, as well. It is a palpable truth that the most dangerous religious radicalism comes from a deliberate and systematic conditioning of minds that is frenetically propagated by ideologues in mosques, madrassas and over the Internet. They have created a climate wherein external causes are automatically held responsible for any and all ills afflicting Muslim society. Shaky Muslim governments, as well as community leaders in places where Muslims are in a minority, have also successfully learned to generate an anger that steers attention away from local issues towards distant enemies, both real and imagined.

Islamic radicalism is bad news for Muslims. It pits Muslims against Muslims, as well as against the world at large. At the same time, it is only peripherally directed against the excesses of corrupt ruling establishments, or inspired by issues of justice and equity. The primary targets of Islamist violence today are other Muslims living in Muslim countries. Some fanatics terrorise and kill other Muslims who belong to the wrong sect. Others accuse “modernised Muslims” as of being vectors of hellish sinfulness – what is known as jahiliya – deserving the full wrath of God. The greatest ire among the orthodox is aroused by the simplest of things, such as women being allowed to walk around bare-faced, or the very notion that they could be considered the equal of men.

Contrary to its claims, Islamic radicalism is indifferent to the suffering of Muslims. We have not seen a large- scale street demonstration in any Muslim country protesting the ongoing genocide of Muslims in Darfur. The slaughter of Bosnian and Chechnyan Muslims caused only a hiccup in the Muslim world. And, for all the rhetoric against the West, the American aggression on Iraq did not result in mass demonstrations by Islamic parties in any Muslim country.

On the other hand, fundamentalist fury explodes when the Faith is seen to be maligned. For example, mobs set afire embassies and buildings around the world for an act of blasphemy committed in Denmark; others violently protested the knighthood of Salman Rushdie. Even as Muslim populations become more orthodox, there is a curious, almost fatalistic, disconnection with the real world. This suggests that fellow Muslims do not matter any more – only the Faith does.

Islamic radicalism now knows no borders. In searching for solutions to an exploding problem, we must realise that the speed of communication makes it meaningless to regard problems in different parts of the Muslim world as solvable in isolation. Rising Islamism in one country cannot be wholly attributed to the government policies of that country (although that government may well bear considerable responsibility). Nevertheless, let us take a quick look at the Southasian region, before turning back to the global problem. Islamic radicalism has achieved an overwhelming presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is also rapidly changing the texture of society in Bangladesh, and is worsening relations between the minority Muslim population in India and the Hindu majority.

Blowback in Pakistan

Pakistan is in the grip of a full-scale Islamist insurgency. Unable to combat the toxic mix of religion with tribalism, the Islamabad government has lost administrative authority in most areas bordering Afghanistan. The Taliban have asserted full administrative control in many tribal areas, forcing local government functionaries to flee. Taliban representatives are now the law. A widely available Taliban-made video shows the bodies of common criminals and bandits dangling from electricity poles in the town of Miranshah, the administrative headquarters of North Waziristan, while thousands of appreciative spectators look on. Girls’ schools have been closed, and barbers have been handed six-foot-long death shrouds – shave and die. Polio vaccinations have been declared haram by the ulema, and the government campaign has subsequently stalled. Taliban vigilante groups enforcing the sharia patrol the streets of tribal towns, checking, among other things, the length of beards, whether the shalwars are worn at an appropriate height above the ankles, and the attendance of individuals in the mosques.

A new breed of young militants, trained in the madrassas, now calls the shots in many places in Pakistan. They have displaced the leadership of the traditional village elders, the maliks. In August 2007, a “peace jirga” of tribal leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan was held in Kabul, attended by Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf. It was a failure. Many influential maliks were afraid to come to the gathering, in spite of being offered protection by both governments (see Himal September 2007, “No jirga like a peace jirga”).

Sectarian clashes in Pakistani tribal areas are rife, fuelled by fiery mullahs operating private FM radio stations, broadcasting incendiary programmes targeting rival mullahs and the ‘immorality’ of modern culture. In April 2007, mortars and rockets were freely used by both Sunnis and Shias in Parachinar and Dera Ismail Khan in NWFP. In villages of Hangu District, in the tribal areas, both sides have exchanged light artillery and rocket fire, oftentimes leaving scores dead. In May 2007, fierce armed battles broke out between the Ansar-ul-Islam and Lashkar-e-Islam groups in Bara in the NWFP, while Tank and Mingora saw bloody clashes with the Frontier Constabulary.

The Talibanisation of Pakistan’s tribal areas has caused alarm, but the six-month-long standoff with the local Taliban of Islamabad’s central mosque, the Lal Masjid, was stunningly novel. Islamic vigilante squads roamed the city burning CD stores, kidnapping alleged prostitutes, and enforcing their own version of morality. This would have continued for even longer but for an incident in July that drew the ire of the Chinese government, after Chinese citizens were kidnapped from a Chinese-run brothel in Islamabad. The Pakistan Army finally launched a bloody assault that left at least 117 dead and hundreds more injured. This episode showed that various militant organisations, including Jaish-e-Muhammad (which had pioneered suicide bombings in Kashmir) could easily establish themselves in the city, with the super-vigilant Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and other military organisations choosing to look the other way.

Under US pressure, the Pakistan Army has mounted military offensives against al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in recent months, but the resistance has stiffened. Pakistani soldiers are now refusing to fight. On 1 September, an entire military convoy surrendered to militants in Waziristan without firing a single shot. Three hundred Pakistani soldiers were taken hostage. But what shook the establishment was the subsequent suicide attack in Rawalpindi, on a bus carrying ISI employees on their way to work. More than 25 were killed. Since the bus was unmarked, this was clearly an inside job, suggesting that tribal militants and the Taliban have infiltrated deep into the military establishment. Not surprisingly, there has been a concurrent rise in fears in the West. According to the August 2007 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, 35 percent of US foreign- policy experts believe that Pakistan is most likely to become the next al-Qaeda stronghold; 22 percent say that Pakistan is an ally that least serves America’s national-security interests.

The rest of the neighbourhood

Afghanistan is in a still more desperate state than its neighbour, with Hamid Karzai’s government controlling little more than Kabul. Poppy cultivation is up; girls’ education is down. As in the Pakistani frontier, the Taliban have risen from the ashes after being routed by the American action following 9/11. They could have – and should have – been defeated by a correct mixture of military force, political strategising and speedy economic reconstruction of devastated areas. Instead, Washington, DC’s myopic emphasis on military solutions has led to the Taliban’s revival and subsequent spill-over into Pakistan’s tribal areas. While Afghans do not want a return to the brutality of the Taliban regime, the wholesale corruption and participation of war criminals in the Karzai government has robbed it of credibility.

Bangladesh, which owes its birth to linguistic rather than religious nationalism, is nowhere close to Pakistan or Afghanistan in terms of militant influence. Nevertheless, there is a rapid transformation in progress. Many militant incidents, including bomb blasts, have occurred over the course of the past year. Reflecting broader changes within Bangladeshi society, mainstream politics has also transformed. In 1971, few would have thought that the Jamaat-i-Islami, which had openly sided with the West Pakistani army, could ever re-establish itself in Bangladeshi politics. But the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the last ruling party, had a number of senior leaders with close ideological affinity to the Jamaat. In villages, activists are imposing veils on women and forcing men to grow beards; secular intellectuals and leftwing activists have been murdered; Ahmadis are being persecuted; and what remains of the Hindu minority is being made increasingly uncomfortable.

India, whose democratic traditions have long provided a safety valve, had seen far less Muslim militancy than Pakistan, except in Jammu & Kashmir. But in 1992, a mob of Hindu zealots tore down the Babri Masjid, challenging India’s claim to being a secularist and pluralist democracy. This set into motion a cycle of reaction and counter-reaction that has yet to play itself out. A state-assisted slaughter in 2002, which left almost 2000 Muslims dead in Gujarat, has been the most tragic consequence so far. Unlike in Pakistan or Afghanistan, Muslims in India are primarily the victims, and not the perpetrators, of violence. Most are poor and uneducated, while the community itself lost most of its capable individuals as migrants to Pakistan during Partition. While Muslim conservatism in India has increased visibly over the past decade, a growing Muslim middle class, and alternatives to the mosque as a venue for socialising, have made India relatively peaceful. However, as the July 2006 Bombay train bombings and this August’s explosions in Hyderabad illustrated, extremist violence is on the rise, with the techniques used by the extremists similar to those used by al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants.

What America must do

Southasia is not alone in facing violent Islamic militancy, of course. Faced with internal failure, manifest decline from a peak of greatness many centuries ago, and afflicted by cultural dislocation in the age of globalisation, many Muslim societies have turned inwards. From the early 1950s, following the era of decolonisation, a sense of grievance and frustration had produced a multitude of Islamist movements spreading from Algeria to Indonesia. But they were inconsequential. Had the US not cultivated them as allies against communism during the Cold War, history could have been very different.

Looking back to the middle of the 20th century, one cannot see a single Muslim nationalist leader who was a fundamentalist. Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddeq – all sought to organise their societies on the basis of secular values. However, Muslim and Arab nationalism, part of a larger anti-colonial nationalist current across the Third World, included the desire to control and use national resources for domestic benefit. The conflict with Western greed was inevitable. The imperial interests of Britain, and later that of the United States, feared independent nationalism. Anyone willing to collaborate was preferred, even the ultraconservative Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia. In time, as the Cold War pressed in, nationalism became intolerable. In 1953, Mosaddeq of Iran was overthrown in a CIA coup, replaced by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Britain targeted Nasser. Sukarno was replaced by Suharto after a bloody coup that left more than half a million dead.

Things came to a head with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The American strategy for defeating the ‘Evil Empire’ required marshalling the forces of Islam from every part of the world. With General Zia ul-Haq as America’s foremost ally, and Saudi Arabia as the principal source of funds, the CIA openly recruited Islamic holy warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Algeria. Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funnelled support to the mujahideen. It worked. In 1988, Soviet troops withdrew unconditionally, and the US-Pakistan-Saudi-Egypt alliance emerged victorious. A chapter of history seemed complete. But appearances were illusory, and events over the next two decades were to reveal the true costs of this victory. Even in the mid 1990s – long before the 9/11 attack on the US – it was clear that the victorious alliance had unwittingly created a genie suddenly beyond its control.

All this is history – and unchangeable. Today, relations between Islam and the West, particularly as represented by the US, are worse than ever before. A civilisational clash may not be here yet, but it could be around the corner. How can it be avoided? Imagine for a moment that the US had a sudden change of heart, realised the error of its ways, and wanted to bury the hatchet with Muslims. How could the US atone for its past? Here are ten key elements.

First, as demanded by both Muslims and non- Muslims across the globe, the US needs an attitudinal change. It must repudiate grand imperial designs as well as its claim to being an exception among nations. The notion of total planetary control had guided the Republican administration even before the attacks of 11 September 2001. The Democrats, meanwhile, many of whom have now publicly turned against the Iraq war, limit their criticisms to the strategy and conduct of the war, the lies and disinformation dispensed by the White House, suspicious deals with defence contractors, and the like. But they share with Republicans the belief that the US possesses the right – and adequate might – to mould the world according to its wishes. The people of the US must somehow convince themselves of the need to obey international laws and etiquettes, and that they do not have some divine mission to fulfil. In the post-Tony Blair period, Britain must also seek a foreign policy independent of the United States, and cultivate independent relations with Muslim countries.

Second, the creation of a Palestinian state must not be further postponed. The dispossession of Palestinians has been appropriated as a Muslim cause with huge symbolic significance. Peace between Islam and the West is impossible without some reasonable resolution of this problem. The US has given Israel carte blanche for military action against the Palestinians, as in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and 2006. American officials remain silent about the future of occupied territories. The fact that Hamas and Fatah are at each other’s throats does not mean that the Palestinian problem has gone away. On the contrary, it strengthens extremism and makes everything more difficult. Without a Palestinian state, the Palestinian problem will mutate into a new and still less controllable form.

Third, the US must take seriously the impact of collateral damage on civilian populations. The heavy use of airpower in Iraq and Afghanistan inevitably led to large numbers of non-combatant casualties. Often the ‘coalition forces’ refuse to acknowledge civilian deaths; when confronted with incontrovertible evidence, they apologise and issue miserably small compensation. Karl Inderfurth, Assistant Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, recently admitted that “military actions [in Afghanistan] … by US and NATO forces will speak louder than those sincerely expressed words. As the death toll of civilians mounts, Afghan hearts and minds are being lost and, with that, the spectre of losing the war looms.” Very sensibly, the goal of “zero innocent civilian casualties” was recommended a year ago by retired General Barry McCaffrey after a trip to Afghanistan.

Fourth, the US must stop threatening Iran with a nuclear holocaust for trying to develop nuclear weapons, while rewarding, to various degrees, other countries – Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea – that have developed such weapons surreptitiously. The Sunday Times in London reports: “The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days.” It would, of course, be highly preferable if Iran could be dissuaded by peaceful means, including sanctions, from making a bomb. But there is no strong moral argument available to the US against Iran’s nuclear ambitions, given both its own nuclear stance and the fact that Iran’s initial nuclear capability was provided by the US during the Shah’s rule. The US refuses to work through the United Nations, or to support a nuclear-weapons free zone in West Asia. So far, the US has refused even to hold direct talks with the Iranian leadership to defuse the nuclear crisis. Overtures by Iran, such as were made by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his letter to President Bush in 2006, were rejected. But North Korea’s nuclear test showed that US refusals to hold one-on-one talks have failed miserably. On the other hand, nuclear negotiations in exchange for oil have partially succeeded in halting North Korean nuclear developments.

Fifth, the US must not exploit the Sunni-Shia schism in the hope of weakening both. Clever as this might seem, using religious passions to achieve political ends is dangerous. Moreover, created monsters have a habit of turning against their masters – some notable examples include the CIA’s Afghan jihad, Israel’s experiment with Hamas, Pakistan’s with jihadist groups, and India’s with Sikh extremists. For US strategists, exploiting sectarianism is a hard temptation to resist: al-Qaeda and parts of the Sunni community in Iraq and Lebanon see Iran and Hizbollah as an even greater threat than the US occupation. They would welcome a US attack on Iran, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, and might even provoke a confrontation to encourage the US to do so.

Sixth, the US must not support dictators and quislings like General Musharraf and Hosni Mubarak while preaching the virtues of democracy. This breeds anger and resentment, and is especially dangerous given that US hypocrisy is so transparent.

Seventh, the West must seize opportunities that project it as generous, rather than aggressive. Providing disaster relief (including following the 2004 Tsunami and the 2005 Kashmir Earthquake) did much to build a positive image. Soft power is critical. Draining the swamps where extremism breeds will require increasing foreign aid to poor Muslim countries, creating economic and employment opportunities there, and desisting from policies that reward only the elites of the recipient societies.

Eighth, the US must accept the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have become worldwide symbols of arbitrary torture and imprisonment. They demonstrate that, in dealing with suspected ‘terrorists’, the US has suspended subservience to the rule of law. In doing so, it does only marginally better than the real militants it seeks to combat. Nor should the US outsource the use of torture to repressive regimes like Pakistan, Syria and Egypt. This too can only backfire. For dealing with terrorism suspects, judicial mechanisms based on defendable principles, rather than expediency, must be developed.

Ninth, soldiers and officials must be prevented from desecrating Islamic holy symbols. Numerous such incidents are known to have taken place, exemplified by the flushing of a Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo. Fortunately the US military has officially recognised that this is extremely dangerous, due to the boost it provides to extremists. Of course, violation of rules in combat situations may be difficult to prevent. The award of knighthood to Salman Rushdie is another example of unwise provocation: it may or may not be justified on grounds of literary merit, but it instantly kindled Muslim anger.

Tenth, and finally, discriminating against Muslims living within Western societies is both morally wrong, and will only invite further radicalisation. One sees that Christians, Jews and Hindus are able to freely run private educational institutions in the US, but Muslim schools are viewed with much suspicion. A secular society must have no preferences between religions. Any perceived deviation from this is sufficient to convey to a minority group that it is an object of persecution. Indeed, paranoia is easily detectable in the US Muslim community. Education in the West must therefore be secular in word and spirit, and all schools should be open to all faiths. In other words, no religious schools should be permitted. Unfortunately there is little chance of this at the moment, as US politics have become increasingly captive to the politics of born-again Christians who see the world through a biblical prism. The UK, too, needs to secularise itself, perhaps on the French model. Its multiculturalism is not working. Like Turkey, it should ban the veil in government buildings.

What Muslims must do

There is little justice to be found in history. Nevertheless, sometimes nemesis doggedly pursues the past. Muslim states that had pushed the Islamist agenda are today besieged by the forces they helped to create.

Pakistan is the prime example. Twenty-five years ago, under a military regime, prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast during Ramadan, beards were encouraged, selections for academic posts required that the candidate demonstrate knowledge of Islamic teachings, and jihad was propagated through schoolbooks. But the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal, and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers. Since 2001, it has lost over a thousand men fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Slogans once common at army recruiting centres (for instance, Jihad for Allah) are now in the trash can, and bearded officers are losing out in promotions.

The rise of Islamic militancy in Pakistan owes much to the cowardly deference of Pakistani political leaders to mullah blackmail. Their instinctive response has been to seek appeasement. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto suddenly turned Islamic in his final days, as he made a desperate, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to save his government by banning alcohol, declaring Friday a holiday, and proclaiming Ahmadis as non-Muslims. Benazir Bhutto, fearing mullah backlash, made no attempt to challenge the horrific antiwoman Hudood and blasphemy laws during her premierships. And Mian Nawaz Sharif went a step further, by attempting to turn Pakistan into a Saudi Arabia by instituting sharia laws.

In Bangladesh, the Jamaat-i-Islami and Islamic Oikya Jote have been coalition partners of the BNP, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s party. During Khaleda Zia’s third term, there was a rise in attacks on Ahmadis and Hindus, a ban on Ahmadi publications, and a rise in religious militancy in general. During her times in office, Khaleda Zia used her fundamentalist allies as weapons against Sheikh Hasina Wajed, her bitter political and personal rival. Both leaders bicker and accuse the other of encouraging terrorism, while refusing to face up to their own responsibilities. In all of this, the Jamaat has been the winner, having set up thousands of madrassas, thus giving a significant impetus for training jihadist fighters who can fight causes around the world.

But blaming individual states and political leaders does not make for a satisfactory explanation of the huge rise in global Islamic militancy. One must seek reasons at a broader level. It is a sad truth that Muslims have little presence in today’s world affairs, in science or in culture. This has led to diminished self-esteem, as well as increasing recourse to political Islam. Some dream of a new global caliphate. But the premises of this politics are false. Each blow inflicted by America after 9/11 has led Islamists to predict that the pain and humiliation will force all Muslims to close ranks, forget old grudges, purge traitors and renegades from their ranks, and generate a collective rage great enough to take on the power of today’s governing civilisation. Each time, they have been dead wrong.

So what do Muslims need to do? A paradigm shift is essential. Muslims must realise that the awesome strength of Western civilisation – which also made possible its predatory imperialism – springs from accepting the premises of science and logic, respecting democratic institutions (at least within national borders), allowing value systems to evolve, and boldly challenging dogma without being condemned for blasphemy. They must connect the West’s success with personal freedom and liberty, superior work ethics, artistic and scientific creativity, and the compulsive urge to innovate and experiment.

Muslims, if they are to be a part of mainstream civilisation, will have to adapt to a new universal cultural climate, one that accepts human rights as defined by the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the equality of men and women. On the part of Muslim minorities and immigrants to non-Muslim countries, this means acceptance of different behavioural norms, and a move away from the current tendency of ghettoisation and towards greater integration into the larger society.

Meanwhile, Muslims themselves must stop believing convoluted conspiracy theories that purport to explain their states of weakness. For example, it is widely held that today’s sectarian warfare is a consequence of some cunningly remote manipulations by enemies of Islam. But in fact, the Shia-Sunni schism, and the first related bloodbath, followed almost immediately after the death of the Prophet Mohammad.

Muslims must also stop dreaming of theocracy and sharia law as solutions to their predicaments. This means acknowledging the sovereignty of the people rather than the rule of Allah, the latter by way of a self-appointed priesthood, such as vilayat-e-faqih and khilafat-e-arz. These are essentially prescriptions for a theocracy run by mullahs. It is simply impossible to run modern states while remaining shackled to medieval religious laws. Economic development, an expansion of individual liberties, democracy, an explosive growth in scientific knowledge and technological capabilities – these and a host of other benefits will forever remain distant dreams without the modernisation of thought. The only way by which Muslim societies can become democratic, pluralistic and free from violent extremism is by going through their own internal struggles. Indigenous reform is difficult but possible. Islam is certainly as immutable as the Koran, but values held by Muslims have changed over the centuries.

The role of the left

Looking down at planet Earth from above, one would see a bloody battlefield, where imperial might and religious fundamentalism are locked in bitter struggle. Whose victory or defeat should one wish for? There cannot be an unequivocal preference; each dispute must be looked at separately. And the answers seem to lie on the left of the political spectrum, as long as we are able to recognise what the left actually stands for.

The leftwing agenda is a positive one. It rests upon hope for a happier and more humane world that is grounded in reason, education and economic justice. It provides a sound moral compass to a world that is losing direction. One must navigate a course safely away from the xenophobes of the US and Europe – who see Islam as an evil to be suppressed or conquered – and also away from the large number of Muslims across the world who justify acts of terrorism and violence as part of asymmetric warfare. No ‘higher authority’ defines the leftwing agenda, and no covenant of belief defines a ‘leftist’. There is no card to be carried or oath to be taken. But secularism, universalistic ideas of human rights, and freedom of belief are non-negotiable. Domination by reasons of class, race, national origin, gender or sexual orientation are all equally unacceptable. In practical terms, this means that the left defends workers from capitalists, peasants from landlords, the colonised from the colonisers, religious minorities from state persecution, the dispossessed from the occupiers, women from male oppression, Muslims from Western Islamophobes, populations of Western countries from terrorists, and so on.

Mobilisation on the left is urgently needed at a time when extremists on both sides of the present divide have moved to centre stage. Even after the end of George W Bush’s presidency, the Americans are bound to continue bombing Muslim lands. They think they can win. But their power, though large, is limited. Iraq has proven the point. On the other side, Islamist groups will continue to recruit successfully, so long as a large number of Muslims feel that they are being unfairly targeted, and that justice has ceased to matter in world affairs. America cannot win. Nor can the Islamists. It is for the left to bring sanity to the world, by rising above imperialism, xenophobia, cultural determinism and religious extremism, and drawing the attention of the people back onto their real problems.

Himal Southasian | October-November 2007

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945, by Milton Mayer (Introduction and Chapter 1)

I am going to be posting the entire text of Milton Mayer's fascinating, thought-provoking book on how ordinary Germans became Nazis, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1993-1945. Here is the first installment, the Introduction and Chapter 1.

Sign of the times

Today I saw this Target ad, which reminds me of all the instructional films about "duck and cover" during the Cold War.


Here's the Target Family Safety Planning Guide the ad links to:


Here are some old "civil defense" propaganda posters for comparison:

Turning Ahmadinejad Into Public Enemy No. 1

From the informed commenter Juan Cole comes this description of the Two Minutes Hate of yet another Middle Easterner by an increasingly moblike, nationalistic America:

Turning Ahmadinejad Into Public Enemy No. 1
Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial is all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.
by Juan Cole
Salon.com
September 24, 2007

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited.

The media has focused on debating whether he should be allowed to speak at Columbia University on Monday, or whether his request to visit Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11 attack in lower Manhattan, should have been honored. His request was rejected, even though Iran expressed sympathy with the United States in the aftermath of those attacks and Iranians held candlelight vigils for the victims. Iran felt that it and other Shiite populations had also suffered at the hands of al-Qaida, and that there might now be an opportunity for a new opening to the United States.

Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran’s 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament.

There is, in fact, remarkably little substance to the debates now raging in the United States about Ahmadinejad. His quirky personality, penchant for outrageous one-liners, and combative populism are hardly serious concerns for foreign policy. Taking potshots at a bantam cock of a populist like Ahmadinejad is actually a way of expressing another, deeper anxiety: fear of Iran’s rising position as a regional power and its challenge to the American and Israeli status quo. The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state.

The neoconservatives are even claiming that the United States has been at war with Iran since 1979. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this assertion is absurd. In the ’80s, the Reagan administration sold substantial numbers of arms to Iran. Some of those beating the war drums most loudly now, like think-tank rat Michael Ledeen, were middlemen in the Reagan administration’s unconstitutional weapons sales to Tehran. The sales would have been a form of treason if in fact the United States had been at war with Iran at that time, so Ledeen is apparently accusing himself of treason.

But the right has decided it is at war with Iran, so a routine visit by Iran’s ceremonial president to the U.N. General Assembly has generated sparks. The foremost cheerleader for such a view in Congress is Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., who recently pressed Gen. David Petraeus on the desirability of bombing Iran in order to forestall weapons smuggling into Iraq from that country (thus cleverly using one war of choice to foment another).

American hawks are beating the war drums loudly because they are increasingly frustrated with the course of events. They are unsatisfied with the lack of enthusiasm among the Europeans and at the United Nations for impeding Tehran’s nuclear energy research program. While the Bush administration insists that the program aims at producing a bomb, the Iranian state maintains that it is for peaceful energy purposes. Washington wants tighter sanctions on Iran at the United Nations but is unlikely to get them in the short term because of Russian and Chinese reluctance. The Bush administration may attempt to create a “coalition of the willing” of Iran boycotters outside the U.N. framework.

Washington is also unhappy with Mohammad ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has been unable to find credible evidence that Iran has a weapons program, and he told Italian television this week, “Iran does not constitute a certain and immediate threat for the international community.” He stressed that no evidence had been found for underground production sites or hidden radioactive substances, and he urged a three-month waiting period before the U.N. Security Council drew negative conclusions.

ElBaradei intervened to call for calm after French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said last week that if the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear research program were unsuccessful, it could lead to war. Kouchner later clarified that he was not calling for an attack on Iran, but his remarks appear to have been taken seriously in Tehran.

Kouchner made the remarks after there had already been substantial speculation in the U.S. press that impatient hawks around U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney were seeking a pretext for a U.S. attack on Iran. Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation probably correctly concluded in Salon last week that President Bush himself has for now decided against launching a war on Iran. But Clemons worries that Cheney and the neoconservatives, with their Israeli allies, are perfectly capable of setting up a provocation that would lead willy-nilly to war.

David Wurmser, until recently a key Cheney advisor on Middle East affairs and the coauthor of the infamous 1996 white paper that urged an Iraq war, revealed to his circle that Cheney had contemplated having Israel strike at Iranian nuclear research facilities and then using the Iranian reaction as a pretext for a U.S. war on that country. Prominent and well-connected Afghanistan specialist Barnett Rubin also revealed that he was told by an administration insider that there would be an “Iran war rollout” by the Cheneyites this fall.

It should also be stressed that some elements in the U.S. officer corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency are clearly spoiling for a fight with Iran because the Iranian-supported Shiite nationalists in Iraq are a major obstacle to U.S. dominance in Iraq. Although very few U.S. troops in Iraq are killed by Shiites, military spokesmen have been attempting to give the impression that Tehran is ordering hits on U.S. troops, a clear casus belli. Disinformation campaigns that accuse Iran of trying to destabilize the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government — a government Iran actually supports — could lay the groundwork for a war. Likewise, with the U.S. military now beginning patrols on the Iran-Iraq border, the possibility is enhanced of a hostile incident spinning out of control.

The Iranians have responded to all this bellicosity with some chest-thumping of their own, right up to the final hours before Ahmadinejad’s American visit. The Iranian government declared “National Defense Week” on Saturday, kicking it off with a big military parade that showed off Iran’s new Qadr-1 missiles, with a range of 1,100 miles. Before he left Iran for New York on Sunday morning, Ahmadinejad inspected three types of Iranian-manufactured jet fighters, noting that it was the anniversary of Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 (which the Iranian press attributed to American urging, though that is unlikely).

The display of this military equipment was accompanied by a raft of assurances on the part of the Iranian ayatollahs, politicians and generals that they were entirely prepared to deploy the missiles and planes if they were attacked. A top military advisor to Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei told the Mehr News Agency on Saturday, “Today, the United States must know that their 200,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are within the reach of Iran’s fire. When the Americans were beyond our shores, they were not within our reach, but today it is very easy for us to deal them blows.” Khamenei, the actual commander in chief of the armed forces, weighed in as well, reiterating that Iran would never attack first but pledging: “Those who make threats should know that attack on Iran in the form of hit and run will not be possible, and if any country invades Iran it will face its very serious consequences.”

The threat to target U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the unveiling of the Qadr-1 were not aggressive in intent, but designed to make the point that Iran could also play by Richard M. Nixon’s “madman” strategy, whereby you act so wildly as to convince your enemy you are capable of anything. Ordinarily a poor non-nuclear third-world country might be expected to be supine before an attack by a superpower. But as Mohammad Reza Bahonar, the Iranian deputy speaker of Parliament, warned: “Any military attack against Iran will send the region up in flames.”

In the end, this is hardly the kind of conflagration the United States should be enabling. If a spark catches, it will not advance any of America’s four interests in the Middle East: petroleum, markets, Israel and hegemony.

The Middle East has two-thirds of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and nearly half its natural gas, and its fields are much deeper than elsewhere in the world, so that its importance will grow for the United States and its allies. Petro-dollars and other wealth make the region an important market for U.S. industry, especially the arms industry. Israel is important both for reasons of domestic politics and because it is a proxy for U.S. power in the region. By “hegemony,” I mean the desire of Washington to dominate political and economic outcomes in the region and to forestall rivals such as China from making it their sphere of influence.

The Iranian government (in which Ahmadinejad has a weak role, analogous to that of U.S. vice presidents before Dick Cheney) poses a challenge to the U.S. program in the Middle East. Iran is, unlike most Middle Eastern countries, large. It is geographically four times the size of France, and it has a population of 70 million (more than France or the United Kingdom). As an oil state, it has done very well from the high petroleum prices of recent years. It has been negotiating long-term energy deals with China and India, much to the dismay of Washington. It provides financial support to the Palestinians and to the Lebanese Shiites who vote for the Hezbollah Party in Lebanon. By overthrowing the Afghanistan and Iraq governments and throwing both countries into chaos, the United States has inadvertently enabled Iran to emerge as a potential regional power, which could challenge Israel and Saudi Arabia and project both soft and hard power in the strategic Persian Gulf and the Levant.

And now the American war party, undeterred by the quagmire in Iraq, convinced that their model of New Empire is working, is eager to go on the offensive again. They may yet find a pretext to plunge the United States into another war. Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York this year will not include his visit to Ground Zero, because that is hallowed ground for American patriotism and he is being depicted as not just a critic of the United States but as the leader of an enemy state. His visit may, however, be ground zero for the next big military struggle of the United States in the Middle East, one that really will make Iraq look like a cakewalk.

***

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.

American snipers lure Iraqis with "bait", shoot them

This article from the Washington Post portrays the elaborate self-delusion of American military forces trying to convince themselves that the killing they are doing is right.

U.S. Aims To Lure Insurgents With ‘Bait’: Snipers Describe Classified Program
by Josh White and Joshua Partlow
The Washington Post
September 24, 2007

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

The classified program was described in investigative documents related to recently filed murder charges against three snipers who are accused of planting evidence on Iraqis they killed.

“Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”

In documents obtained by The Washington Post from family members of the accused soldiers, Didier said members of the U.S. military’s Asymmetric Warfare Group visited his unit in January and later passed along ammunition boxes filled with the “drop items” to be used “to disrupt the AIF [Anti-Iraq Forces] attempts at harming Coalition Forces and give us the upper hand in a fight.”

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said such a baiting program should be examined “quite meticulously” because it raises troubling possibilities, such as what happens when civilians pick up the items.

“In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back,” Fidell said.

Soldiers said that about a dozen platoon members were aware of the program, and that numerous others knew about the “drop items” but did not know their purpose. Two soldiers who had not been officially informed about the program came forward with allegations of wrongdoing after they learned they were going to be punished for falling asleep on a sniper mission, according to the documents.

Army officials declined to discuss the classified program, details of which appear in unclassified investigative documents and in transcripts of court testimony. Criminal investigators wrote that they found materials related to the program in a white cardboard box and an ammunition can at the sniper unit’s base.

“We don’t discuss specific methods targeting enemy combatants,” said Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman. “The accused are charged with murder and wrongfully placing weapons on the remains of Iraqi nationals. There are no classified programs that authorize the murder of local nationals and the use of ‘drop weapons’ to make killings appear legally justified.”

It is unclear whether the program reached elsewhere in Iraq and how many people were killed through the baiting tactics.

Members of the sniper platoon have said they felt pressure from commanders to kill more insurgents because U.S. units in the area had taken heavy losses. The sniper unit — dubbed “the painted demons” because of the use of tiger-stripe face paint — often went on missions into hostile areas to intercept insurgents going to and from hidden weapons caches.

“It’s our job out here to lay people down who are doing bad things,” Spec. Joshua L. Michaud testified in Iraq in July, discussing the unit’s numerous casualties. “I don’t want to call it revenge, but we needed to find a way so that we could get the bad guys the right way and still maintain the right military things to do.”

Within months of the program’s introduction, three snipers in Didier’s platoon were charged with murder for allegedly using those items and others to make shootings seem legitimate. Though it does not appear that the three alleged shootings were specifically part of the classified program, defense attorneys argue that the program may have opened the door to the soldiers’ actions because it blurred the legal lines of killing in a complex war zone.

James D. Culp, a civilian attorney for one of the snipers, Sgt. Evan Vela, said the soldiers became “battle-fatigued pawns in a newfangled concept of ‘baiting’ warfare that, like an onion, perhaps looked good on the surface, but started stinking to high hell the minute the layers were pulled back and scrutinized.”

Spec. Jorge Sandoval and Staff Sgt. Michael Hensley are accused by the military of placing a spool of wire into the pocket of an Iraqi man Sandoval had shot on April 27 on Hensley’s order. The man had been cutting grass with a rusty sickle when he was shot, according to court documents.

The military alleges that the killing of the man carrying the sickle was inappropriate. Hensley and Sandoval have been charged with murder and with planting evidence.

As Sandoval and Hensley approached the corpse, according to testimony and court documents, they allegedly placed a spool of wire, often used by insurgents to detonate roadside bombs, into the man’s pocket in an attempt to make the case for the kill ironclad.

One soldier who came forward with the allegations, Pfc. David C. Petta, told the same court that he believed the classified items were for dropping on people the unit had killed, “to enforce if we killed somebody that we knew was a bad guy but we didn’t have the evidence to show for it.” Petta had not been officially briefed about the program.

Two weeks after that killing, Sandoval and his sniper team stopped for the night in a concealed “hide” in the village of Jurf as Sakhr along the Euphrates River. While other snipers slept, Hensley watched as an Iraqi man, Genei Nesir Khudair, slowly approached the hide. He radioed to Didier, then a first lieutenant, for permission to go for a “close kill.”

“I told him that as the ground forces commander, I would authorize that if it was necessary,” Didier testified. “And about five minutes later, he told me that he had indeed killed the individual.”

The U.S. military alleges that Vela, on Hensley’s order, shot the Iraqi man twice in the head with a 9mm pistol after he had been taken into custody. It was Vela’s first kill, and he was visibly shaken. “He looked weird,” Sgt. Robert Redfern testified. “Just messed up from it. How would you feel if you had to shoot someone?”

At the time the two shots rang out, Sandoval was on guard duty about 20 meters away, out of sight of Vela, inside a broken-down pump house along the Euphrates River, soldiers testified.

Vela and Hensley told investigators that the man had an AK-47 with him and that he posed a threat, but other soldiers have alleged that the AK-47 was planted next to Khudair after he was shot.

Hensley’s attorney could not be reached to comment. Sandoval’s attorney, Capt. Craig Drummond, thinks his client is innocent in both deaths.

“Literally, they have charged this guy with two murders when on both occasions he was just doing his job,” Drummond said.

Drummond said Sandoval did not have anything to do with placing an AK-47 in the pump-house killing. Sandoval made a statement to investigators discussing his involvement in planting the command wire on the first victim.

“That was done by one of the soldiers at the scene basically out of stupidity. The guys were trying to ensure that there were no questions at all about this kill,” Drummond said. “It was done to overly justify a kill that didn’t need justification.”

Hensley is also charged with killing an Iraqi man whom he approached after the sniper team noticed the man placing wires on a road. Hensley shot him outside his home, maintaining that the man appeared to be moving for a weapon.

Two and a half months after the shooting near the pump house, authorities seized Sandoval while he was vacationing at his mother’s house in Laredo, Tex. The charges have baffled family members, who describe Sandoval as a caring and honest young man who is being punished for following orders.

“This has been a shock to all of us,” said his eldest sister, Norma Vasquez. “He’s been in shock, too, he doesn’t know what . . . is going on.”

Sandoval, a former high school ROTC member, is scheduled to face a court-martial in Baghdad on Wednesday.

Vela’s father, Curtis Carnahan, said he thinks the military is rushing the cases and is holding the proceedings in a war zone to shield facts from the U.S. public.

“It’s an injustice that is being done to them,” Carnahan said. “I feel like you can’t prosecute our soldiers for acts of war and threaten them with years and years of confinement when this program, if it comes to the light of day, was clearly coming from higher levels. . . . All those people who said ‘go use this stuff’ just disappeared, like they never sanctioned it.”

Partlow reported from Baghdad. Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

University of Florida police shock student with Taser at Kerry speech

From the Associated Press. My conclusions: 1) Tasers should be outlawed. They are not used as a less-lethal replacement for guns, but as torture devices. 2) We live in a Fascist country, in which police consider the public the enemy, and violence against innocent people is acceptable. 3) John Kerry is not a leader. Also see this article from Salon, with a video of the incident and other Tasering incidents, including the infamous UCLA library video.

Student Arrested, Tasered at Kerry Event
By TRAVIS REED

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — A university student with a history of taping his own practical jokes was Tasered by campus police and arrested after loudly and repeatedly trying to ask U.S. Sen. John Kerry questions during a campus forum.

Andrew Meyer, 21, spent a night in jail before his release from jail Tuesday morning on his own recognizance. He had no comment when he left. His attorney, Robert Griscti, did not return messages seeking comment.

Videos of the Monday night incident, posted on several Web sites and played repeatedly on television news, show University of Florida police officers pulling Meyer away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.

University spokesman Steve Orlando said Meyer was asked to leave the microphone after his allotted time was up. Meyer can be seen refusing to walk away and getting upset that the microphone was cut off.

As two officers take Meyer by the arms, Kerry, D-Mass., can be heard saying, "That's all right, let me answer his question."

Audience members applaud, and Meyer struggles for several seconds as up to four officers try to remove him from the room. Meyer screams for help and tries to break away from officers with his arms flailing at them, then is forced to the ground and officers order him to stop resisting.

As Kerry tells the audience he will answer the student's "very important question," Meyer yells at the officers to release him, crying out, "Don't Tase me, bro," just before he is shocked by the Taser. He is then led from the room, screaming, "What did I do?"

Meyer was arrested on charges of resisting an officer and disturbing the peace, according to Alachua County jail records, but the State Attorney's Office had yet to make the formal charging decision. Police recommended charges of resisting arrest with violence, a felony, and disturbing the peace and interfering with school administrative functions, a misdemeanor.

University President J. Bernard Machen issued a statement Tuesday saying he requested the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate the arrest. Officials said it would determine whether the officers used an appropriate level of force.

Machen called the situation "regretful" in an afternoon news conference and said two officers involved in the incident were placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the probe.

"We're absolutely committed to having a safe environment for our faculty and our students so that a free exchange of ideas can occur," Machen said.

Kerry said Tuesday he regretted that a healthy discussion was interrupted and that he never had a dialogue end that way in 37 years of public appearances. He also said he hoped neither the student nor police were injured.

"Whatever happened, the police had a reason, had made their decision that there was something they needed to do. Then it's a law enforcement issue, not mine," he told The Associated Press in Washington.

Meyer has his own Web site and it contains several "comedy" videos that he appears in. In one, he stands in a street with a sign that says "Harry Dies" after the latest Harry Potter book was released. In another, he acts like a drunk while trying to pick up a woman in a bar.

The site also has what is called a "disorganized diatribe" attributed to Meyer that criticizes the Iraq war, the news media for not covering the conflict enough and the American public for paying too much attention to celebrity news.

Associated Press writer Andrew Miga in Washington contributed to this report.

Catastrophist governance and the need for a tricameral legislature

Interesting essay.

Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature
William Irwin Thompson
Printed in Annals of Earth, Spring, 2007 Issue.

As American school children, we were all raised to believe the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson's "That government is best that governs least." Americans of a Republican and Libertarian persuasion feel that interference of the state in the life of the individual is evil, and the excesses of fascism and communism in the nineteen-thirties and forties confirmed their Superman comic book sense of the superiority of "The American Way." Even to this day in a new century with new problems, the Republicans and Libertarians in their think-tanks like the Cato Institute continue to rant on about the evils of Big Government.

When government is seen as an intrusive menance, then cutting taxes as a way of starving it to death is the basic neocon philosophy of governance--a philosophy that Bush has eagerly sought to implement. In an updated version of Kipling's nineteenth-century imperialism of "the white man's burden," the neocons sought to bring suburban Right Wing party politics to tribal, medieval, and socialist societies in Afghanistan and Iraq in a policy of enforced modernization through unrestrained market economics and military invasion.

The liberalism of FDR's New Deal was a response to a man-made economic catastrophe, but the historical landscape we are now entering is one of natural catastrophes: of tsunamis that can devestate the coastlines of many countries at once, of earthquakes and hurricanes that can devastate entire cities, of volcanic eruptions that can darken the planet's skies and eliminate summers and the harvests that come at their finish, and pandemics spread by the jet travel of economic globalization. When one adds human contributions to the forces of nature in the form of global climate change, then one begins to see a new world in which the individual citizen is utterly powerless to address the rise of oceans or the shift of tectonic plates.

A philosophy of government based upon nothing more than tax cuts simply won't cut it any more. In a tranquil world, nature can be taken for granted as a stage upon which the human drama unfolds, and agriculture and industry can be used as the foundation for a business model of political governance. Farmers and merchants became the first wave of representatives elected to Congress; then, as the process of governance became larger and more complex, lawyers became the representatives of the businessmen who supported their campaigns for office.

But this tranquil world in which nature is a stage only for human ambition is a thing of the past. The rumblings of a new global storm have sounded on the horizon with the tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004, and Katrina in 2005. When hurricanes again devastate our coastal cities, and earthquakes strike the populous cities of the West, this global storm will strike us head-on and full force. At that time we will need something other than businessmen grousing about Big Government and proposing tax-cuts for the wealthy to serve as our philosophy of government.

What will the politics of catastrophe look like? In a crisis, our first instinct will be to revert to the archaic politics of the primate band and look to some alpha male to deliver us from evil. We will pray to some archaic paternal god in the sky to save us and we will surrender to the will of some dominant Big Brother to protect us through martial law and even stronger versions of the Patriot Act. But alpha male dominance and military power will be utterly incapable of addressing the problems we face. In this crisis, we will need scientists and not more soldiers and lawyers.

Certainly, when East Coast multiple hurricanes overlap with West Coast earthquakes at a time of massive neocon war deficits, we will enter a time when natural catastrophes, and not just terrorist attacks, create the punctuated equilibirium that drives evolution. At that time, the smug boomerism of capitalism that takes nature for granted in industrial development and distorts the ecological sciences to reinforce its own political ideology will be as historically irrelevant as peasant magic was to the industrial revolution. At this time, whatever culture is able to miniaturize science into a civilization—American, European, or Asian—and keep it intact during a period of catastrophes, whether from gobal warming or volcanic eruptions, or both, will determine the fate of humanity.

No doubt, human fear more than Western science will shape our response and probably create a mood of religious superstition and End of the World popular scenarios in which the face of Jesus is seen in the clouds and Elvis sightings are reported over Graceland. The Executive branch of government will probably once again seek to manipulate this fear to its own ends in the same manner that it used the fear of terrorists to secure its re-election, but in other biomes within our national ecology of mind, we might just begin to glimpse an opportunity for a new era of democratic revolution.

Our eighteenth century constitution was conceived by rural aristocratic land owners and slave holders who feared popular democracy as the rule of the urban mob, but it was also midwived by urban Federalists who wished to bring forth the economy of a modern nation-state. The machinery of the state with its checks and balances was an eighteenth-century steam engine fueled by the people but held on course by a governor. A bicameral legislature was that century's vision of balance between passion and reflection--between a lower house of pushy and uncouth merchants and farmers and an upper house of men of property and culture.

But in an age of global warming and suden catastrophes from pandemics, earthquakes, coastal innundation, tsunamis and volcanoes, a scientific academy will be needed for a tricameral legislature in which government is provided with sound and objective scientific information and informed guidance. The Bush Administration sought to constrain and edit science so that it would tell it what it wanted to hear for its own neocon ideological reasons; in other words, it sought to treat science in the same way it treated Intelligence and the CIA in particular. Since the CIA has only the single client of the Presidency, both the CIA and the Supreme Court have been corrupted by the growth of the "Imperial Presidency." A third chamber will be needed to be composed of truly intelligent and independent scientists, artists, scholars, and professors of constitutional law. These outstanding citizens will need to be men and women of "intellectual property," and not simply popular celebrities chosen through elections funded by the wealthy and the few owners of the media. They will need to be elected to this third chamber by an ad hoc electoral college composed of the faculties of the state universities and the outstanding private universities of the nation, from Harvard in the East to Stanford in the West. And at the same time that this twenty-first century ad hoc Electoral College is created, our present anti-democratic eighteenth-century Electoral College should be abolished. The President should be elected by a simple popular majority so that Florida, 2000 can never happen again. And it is this third chamber that should nominate members to the Supreme Court based upon their knowledge of constitutional law and not their party politics. In the election of 2000 we saw what happens when the Supreme Court intrudes and applies party politics to negate a plurality in the popular vote.

To avoid the imperial presidency and the neocons' doctrine of "the unitary executive" that have sucked power away from Congress, something needs to be done about the flawed institution of the American Presidency. The conventional wisdom of the Founding Fathers was that to avoid a takeover of the republic by a military dictator one should insure that the military was under the governance of a civilian President as Commander-in-Chief; but in choosing a military hero as our first president, the Founding Fathers also showed how difficult it was to avoid the shadow of Julius Caesar. The neocons' perversion of the Founding Fathers' wisdom has transformed our civilian presidency into nothing but the Commander-in-Chief of the world's largest military-industrial establishment. As the Presidency has evolved over centuries, we have seen--even before the horrors of Bush and Cheney--that purely civilian presidents like Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman were capable of suspending habeas corpus and creating a National Security State without the need of a military putsch. Parliamentary democracies-- such as Ireland, Germany, and Israel--have settled for the wisdom of separating the Head of State from the Head of the Government with the two offices of President and Prime Minister, or Chancellor. Switzerland, a country refreshingly immune to charisma, chose the most radical solution of all by having an executive council in which the Presidency rotates among the members of its "Bundesrat." Having grown sick of our contemporary simulacrum of a Roman Emperor, as well as the dominance in American culture of sports celebrities, movie stars, and military heroes, I confess that I am attracted to this bland Swiss model, but our American culture has so labored over the centuries to construct a hagiographic image of the President that I doubt that Americans could ever deliver themselves from this idolatrous worship of POTUS. POTUS omnipotens est. So our popularly elected President would most probably be expected to chair an Executive Council for the four years of the term of office.

To avoid the excesses of the imperial presidency, I propose that in the catastrophic condidtions to come, we replace the Presidency with an Executive Council of four, consisting of the popularly-elected president, the popularly-elected Vice President as President of the Senate, and one representative elected by the new Academy of Arts and Sciences and another by the traditional House of Representatives. The popularly elected President should be defined as the Head of the Government, and the President of the Academy of Arts and Sciences should be defined as the Head of State. At the end of four years, the two chambers of the Academy and the House would elect new representatives to the Executive Council, so the Executive Council would change along with the popularly elected President and Vice President. The line of succession in which the Speaker of the House remains third in line after the popularly elected President and Vice President could remain as is in our present constitutional situation. Since the Speaker of the House has enough to do in overseeing the largest third house of the Congress, it might better serve the model of an executive council if the House elected another representative to the Council and that this position was separate from the position of Speaker of the House. It would be the work of this Executive Council to sign bills into law through a ¾'s majority. The President could remain as Commander-in-Chief, since it is hard to direct a war by committee, and the current Presidential Cabinet could continue its work of advising the Council and administering the various departments of government, such as Agriculture, Defense, and Foreign Affairs or "State."

Would conflict and abuse of power be avoided in such a situation of an executive Council of Four? Given human nature, naturally not. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice were a disaster, so there is no absolute protection from evil simply by sharing it, but there is hope that if all are not of the same party and ideology, there are more opportunities for balance and self-correction.

Of course, I realize that such an amending of the Constitution would open up the political process to crazies and not simply scientists--and to some crazy scientists as well. The possibility for such dramatic change would only be possible under unimaginable circumstances that I am here trying to imagine—such as the innundation of the East Coast and the earthquake devastation of the cities of the West Coast. Under such circumstances of unimaginable crisis, we would need to hold a new Constitutional Convention composed of the members of Congress and the Electoral College of the members of the faculties of our universities and colleges who would then elect their representatives for the creation of the new Third House, the Academy of Arts and Sciences. This new tricameral legislature would then address itself to the reconstruction of our devastated environment and polity. Since the Senate would probably be fearful of the lessening of its power, the third house should probably be limited to two members from each state and be required to submit legislation to the popularly-elected House and not directly to the Executive Council. I am not a constitutional lawyer, so it should be the work of any future Constitutional Convention to hammer out the details on the iron anvil of politics.

My modest proposal for a tricameral legislature and an amending of the Constitution is merely an amateur's sketch, but the sketch, like any political cartoon, does come from a pattern-recognition of the dangers inherent in our new mediocracy. The electronic media have created a new technopeasantry whose attacks on the imaginary castle of science's Dr. Frankenstein now threaten to eliminate scientific textbooks from our schools to replace them with the Bible. As popular ministers thrust themselves to the head of the empassioned multitude, waving their Bibles in the air, we will be brought back to the ugly Thirty Years War of religions that preceded the Age of Revolution from 1689 to 1789. If we slide into that abyss of a new dark age, then we will have indeed fallen off the edge of history.

Warriors and high priests have been the entwined poles of human culture since the origin of urban civilization in the fourth millennium B.C.E. Now that formation has expressed its sunset-effect in the evangelical fundamentalism of Karl Rove's redesign of the Republican party and Cheney's Halliburton hostile take-over of Iraq. This supernova of the dying star of militarism and religious fundamentalism is, of course, not confined to Christianity, but also expresses itself in the extremism of the Israeli West Bank settlers, right-wing Hindu nationalists, and Islamist terrorists. In ideological thinking, the content camouflages the structure, and that is why very often in conflict extremes are very much like one another.

But this too shall pass. Like the Dark Ages and Inquisition that preceded the Renaissance, or the period of global slavery that preceded the Enlightenment, humanity has still a chance to face the coming era of ecological devastation, pandemics, and natural catastrophes and respond in a way other than chaos and rule by war lords in collapsed states. Like the Dark Age monks who miniaturized classical civilization and made it a curricular content inside medieval civilization, whatever cultural group that can miniaturize scientific civilization and place it within a new formation of a post-religious spirituality of fellowship and not followership will carry us across the great rift into a new stage of cultural evolution. If we fail, then the dark age interval will be much longer.

AWOL in America: When desertion is the only option

A good article I read in Harper's several years ago is now available online, about how the American military systematically lies to recruits to get them to enlist and then, treating them like slaves, doesn't allow them to leave and subjects them to longer and more frequent tours of duty than they were originally promised, including overseas combat deployments for National Guard members who never expected to be sent abroad.

AWOL in America: When desertion is the only option
by Kathy Dobie
Harper's Magazine
March 2005

An AWOL Navy man was arrested . . . as he brought his pregnant wife to the hospital . . . . Roberto Carlos Navarro, 20, of Polk City [Florida] was charged as a deserter from the U.S. Navy . . . . Navarro became disenchanted with the constant painting and scraping of ships after two years in the Navy.
—The Ledger, April 2, 2004

A 17-year-old was turned over to the Department of Defense last week after Bellingham police discovered the teenager, involved in a traffic accident, was allegedly a deserter from Army basic training.
—The Boston Globe, August 12, 2004

I am seriously considering becoming a deserter. I am sorry if there are other military moms . . . that look poorly on me for thinking this way but . . . I WILL NOT LEAVE MY LITTLE BABY.
—Online post to BabyCenter.com, November 21, 2004

* * *

AWOL, French Leave, the Grand Bounce, jumping ship, going over the hill—in every country, in every age, whenever and wherever there has been a military, there have been soldiers discharging themselves from the ranks. The Pentagon has estimated that since the start of the current conflict in Iraq, more than 5,500 U.S. military personnel have deserted, and yet we know the stories of only a unique handful, all whom have publicly stated their opposition to the war in Iraq, and some of whom have fled to Canada. The Vietnam war casts a long shadow, distorting our image of the deserter; four soldiers have gone over the Canadian border, looking for the safe haven of the Vietnam years, which no longer exists: there are no open arms for such refugees and almost no possibility of obtaining legal status. We imagine 5,500 conscientious objectors to a bloody quagmire, soldiers like Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, who strongly and eloquently protested the Iraq war, having actually served there and witnessed civilians killed and prisoners abused, and who was subsequently court-martialed, found guilty of desertion, and given a year in prison. But deserters rarely leave for purely political reasons. They usually just quietly return home and hope no one notices.

Last summer, I read a news account of a twenty-one-year-old man caught by the police climbing through the window of a house. It turned out to be his house, but the cops found out he was AWOL from the Army and arrested him. That story, in all its recognizable, bungling humanity, intrigued me. It brought the truth of governments waging war home to me in a way that stories of combat had not—in particular, how the ambitions and desires of powerful men and women are borne by ordinary people: restless scrapers and tomboys from West Virginia, teenage immigrants from Mexico, and juvenile delinquents from Indiana; randy boys and girls, and callous ones; the stoic, the idealist, the aimless, the boastful and the bewildered; the highly adventurous and the deeply conformist. They carry the weight.

* * *

After reading the story of the AWOL soldier sneaking into his own house, I contacted the G.I. Rights hot line, a national referral and counseling service for military personnel, and on August 23, 2004, I interviewed Robert Dove, a burly, bearded Quaker, in the Boston offices of the American Friends Service Committee, one of the groups involved with the hot line. Dove told me of getting frantic calls from the parents of recruits, and of recruits who are so appalled by basic training that they “can’t eat, they literally vomit every time they put a spoon to their mouths, they’re having nightmares and wetting their beds.” Down in Chatham County, North Carolina, Steve and Lenore Woolford answer calls from the hot line in their home. Steve was most haunted by the soldiers who want out badly but who he can tell are not smart or self-assured enough to accomplish it; the ones who ask the same questions over and over again and want to know exactly what to say to their commanding officer. The G.I. Rights hot line introduced me to deserters willing to talk, and those soldiers put me in contact with others.

I met my first deserters in early September and over the next four months followed some of them through the process of turning themselves in and getting released from the military. They came from Indiana, Oregon, Washington, California, Georgia, Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts. I met with the mother and sister of a Marine who was UA (Unauthorized Absence, the Navy and Marine term for AWOL) in the mother’s home in Alto, Georgia, and at the Quantico base in Virginia one Sunday afternoon I met with eight deserters returned to military custody, members of the Casualty Platoon, as the Marines refer to them, since they are “lost combatants.” One of the AWOL soldiers, Jeremiah Adler, offered to show me the letters he had written home from boot camp; a Marine called with weekly reports from Quantico where he awaited his court-martial or administrative release. Through these soldiers, and the counselors at the G.I. Rights hot line, I discovered that the recruiting process and the training were keys to understanding why soldiers desert, as is an overextended Army’s increasingly strong grip on them.

Since the mid-1990s, the Army has been quietly struggling with a manpower crisis, as the number of desertions steadily climbed from 1,509 in 1995 to 4,739 in 2001. During this time, deserters rarely faced court-martial or punishment. The vast majority—94 percent of the 12,000 soldiers who deserted between 1997 and 2001—were simply released from the Army with other-than-honorable discharges. Then, in the fall of 2001, shortly after 9/11, the U.S. Army issued a new policy regarding deserters, hoping to staunch the flow. Under the new rules, which were given little media attention, deserters were to be returned to their original military units to be evaluated and, when possible, integrated back into the ranks. It was not a policy that made the hearts of Army officers sing. As one company commander told DefenseWatch, an online newsletter for the grass-roots organization Soldiers For The Truth, “I can’t afford to baby-sit problem children every day.”

According to DefenseWatch, in the first few months after the policy went into effect, 190 deserters were returned to military control, 89 of those were returned to the ranks, and 101 were discharged. Statistics at the end of the military fiscal year showed the desertion numbers dropping slightly, due, at least in part, to the new policy, which reintegrated almost half the runaways back into their units. It wasn’t that fewer people were leaving the military, just that fewer people were able to stay gone.

Then we invaded Iraq, and as the war there rages on, the military has had to evacuate an estimated 50,000 troops: the dead and the wounded, combat- and non-combat-related casualties. Those soldiers must be replaced—and we’re committed to sending in even more. The pressure to hold on to as many troops as possible has only increased, as is painfully evident in internal memos such as this one from Major General Claude A. Williams of the Army National Guard, dated May 2004: “Effective immediately, I am holding commanders at all levels accountable for controlling manageable losses.” The memo goes on to say that commanders must retain at least 85 percent of soldiers who are scheduled to end their active duty, 90 percent of soldiers scheduled to ship for Initial Entry Training, and “execute the AWOL recovery procedures for every AWOL soldier.” The military has issued stop-loss orders, dug deep into the ranks of reservists and guardsmen, extended tours of duty, and made it harder for recruits and active-duty personnel to get out through administrative means. According to the military’s own research, this will result in more people going AWOL.

In the summer of 2002, the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences released a study titled “What We Know About AWOL and Desertion.” “Although the problem of AWOL/desertion is fairly constant, it tends to increase in magnitude during wartime—when the Army tends to increase its demands for troops and to lower its enlistment standards to meet that need. It can also increase during times, such as now, when the Army is attempting to restrict the ways that soldiers can exit service through administrative channels.” In other words, close the door, and they will leave by the window.

At the G.I. Rights hot line, the desperation is obvious; the number of people calling in for help has almost doubled from 17,000 in 2001 to 33,000 in the last year. The majority of the calls are from people who want out of the military—soldiers with untreated injuries or urgent family problems, combat veterans who have developed a deep revulsion to war, National Guardsmen primed to deal with hurricanes, blizzards, and floods but not fighting overseas, and inactive reservists who have already served, started families and careers, and never expected to be called up again. And there are recruits—many, many recruits—who have decided, in a sentiment heard hundreds of times by the people manning the phones, “The Army’s just not for me.” Some of these callers were thinking about going AWOL; others had already left and wanted to know what could happen to them and what they should do next.

Soldiers who go AWOL have either panicked and see no other way out of their difficulties or are well-informed and know that deserting is sometimes the quickest, surest route out of the military. A soldier may not be eligible for a hardship or medical discharge, for instance, but he knows he wants out. He may not even be aware of the discharges available to him. Young, raw recruits, in particular, know only what their drill sergeants tell them. Counselors at the G.I. Rights hot line describe cases in which a recruit will ask about applying for a discharge and be told flatly by his drill sergeant, “Forget about it. Don’t even think of applying. You’re not getting out.” Conscientious-objector applications have more than tripled since operations began in Iraq, but they take on average a year and a half to process, and then, quite often, are denied.

In the Army study, which examined data from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the years 1997–2001, it was found that deserters are more likely to be younger when they enlist, less educated, to come from “broken homes,” and to have “engaged in delinquent behavior” prior to enlisting. In other words, they are both vulnerable and rebellious. During the Vietnam war, enlisted men were far more likely to desert than those who were drafted. Perhaps they had higher expectations of Army life, or perhaps a man who volunteers for service feels like he has some sense of control over his fate, a feeling a draftee could hardly share. Only 12 percent of the Vietnam-era deserters left specifically because of the war, according to the same study. Then, as now, most soldiers take off because of family problems, financial difficulties, and what the Army obliquely calls “failure to adapt” to military life and “issues with chain of command.”

Almost all of the deserters I spoke to described the kind of person they thought succeeded in the military as “an alpha male type who can take orders real well,” as one Marine put it. “If you can’t do both? Don’t join.” Physical aggression and mental docility might seem an unlikely pairing, but as the military historian Gwynne Dyer wrote in his book titled, simply, War, “Basic training has been essentially the same in every army in every age, because it works with the same raw material that’s always there in teenage boys: a fair amount of aggression, a strong tendency to hang around in groups, and an absolute desperate desire to fit in.”

* * *

It’s hard for me to be myself here. There’s no room for dissent among the guys. Everywhere you listen you hear an abundant amount of B.S., a few beds over an obnoxious redneck has a crowd around him as he details a 3 some that he recently had. The vocabulary is much different here. The bathroom is called the latrine, food is called chow, women are bitches, sex is ass. . . . These people want to go to war and kill. It is that simple.

—From a letter home, Jeremiah Adler

Jeremiah Adler arrives at my door in Brooklyn in late September, four days after he escaped Fort Benning, Georgia, with another Army recruit. At ten at night, while a friend on guard duty looked the other way, the boys took off out of the barracks, making a thirty-yard dash into the surrounding forest. They had no clue as to where they were. After an hour they heard sirens blasting, and then the baying of dogs. They spent five hours in the woods, following a bright patch in the sky that they rightly assumed to be the city of Columbus. When they finally reached the road, they saw cop cars zipping past them, lights flashing in the dark. It was terribly exciting, though the morning he arrives at my house he seems spent. Jeremiah and I had spoken for the first time the day before. He was hiding out at a friend’s house in Atlanta, ready to hop the next plane home to Portland, Oregon, but he agreed to meet with me in New York first.

Jeremiah is slight, and his blue-green eyes seem unusually large, though that could be the effect of his shorn head. He has full lips and a fine-boned face that could easily become gaunt. He’s eighteen, a deeply earnest eighteen, with a dry sense of humor. He has an odd habit for someone so young of sighing often, and wearily. He’s also very hungry. We order a cheese pizza because he does not eat meat.

When Jeremiah announced his intention to join the military he took everyone who knew him in Portland by surprise. “He was raised in a pacifist, macrobiotic house,” his mother exclaims. “He went to Waldorf schools. Here is a kid who’s never even had a bite of animal flesh in his life!” Jeremiah had protested the Iraq war, in fact. He spent most of his senior year in high school convincing his family and what he and his mother call his “community”—a tightly knit group of families connected by the Portland Waldorf School and Rudolf Steiner’s nontraditional philosophy of education—that joining the military was the right thing for him to do.

In the spring of his senior year, Jeremiah went on a “vision quest,” hiking into an area called Eagle Creek, which was still covered in snow. There he made a video explaining his reasons for joining the Army. He sits on the ground facing the camera but looking off into the woods as he talks. He starts by making a case for the military being a tool for change, a possible force for good. But, “if you have a bunch of bloodthirsty young men with an I.Q. of twenty-three in the military, that’s what the military’s gonna be—until other people, other intelligent people with morals and values and convictions and ideals [join up]. Most people hate the military. Is the answer to distance yourself as far as you can and just protest all the time? What am I doing? I don’t know anyone in the military. Neither do any of you. It takes a lot more balls for me to join the military than it does for one of you guys to go to a forty-grand liberal-arts school. Is that a huge step? You’re gonna be around more open-minded people like yourself. You’re not gonna experience any diversity there.”

In this taped explanation he leaves out one reason for joining the Army, a reason that perhaps was too amorphous to put into words, or too personal, not something he felt the folks at Waldorf would understand. “My mom was single until I was eight years old,” he tells me. “My entire life I was raised sensitive and compassionate. I have a craving for a sense of macho-ness, honestly. A sense of toughness.” He remembers the first time he thought the military was “cool”—watching Top Gun at ten years old. Then in his senior year of high school, the recruiting commercials became a siren call. “I mean, it’s an ingenious marketing campaign. It goes straight to an eighteen-year-old male’s testosterone. You see them and you’re almost sexually aroused,” he says. He wanted to kick past the cocoon of family and community, to know how other people thought and lived. He wanted a coming-of-age ritual—his vision quest, which had ended with the insight “solitude sucks,” didn’t quite fill the bill. He wanted to become a man. Jeremiah took a year convincing his friends, family, and community, and yet within seventy-two hours of arriving at Fort Benning he was writing a letter home that began, “Hello All, You have got to get me out of here.”

* * *

The recruits arrived at Reception Battalion at Fort Benning on September 16 close to midnight, completely disoriented. During the next seven days they were introduced to military life: First, their heads were shaved, a ritual that signifies the loss of one’s individual identity, and was historically used to control lice and identify deserters. Then the recruits were issued boots, gear, and military I.D. They were taught how to march and stand at attention, made to recite the Soldier’s Creed again and again, yelled at, incited, insulted, and then shipped to basic training; that is, put on a bus and sent to a training barracks at another location in Fort Benning.

The first day of Reception, the recruits should have been so busy and harassed that they wouldn’t have had time for second thoughts or regrets, but Hurricane Ivan was sweeping through Georgia, and they were confined to their barracks—104 young men, all keyed up, all on edge, about to embark on some mysterious journey, some awesome transformation that involved uniforms, mud, and guns. There was a constant jockeying for power, fights narrowly averted, a lot of enthusiasm for battle, for killing, or at least the pretense of enthusiasm. When Jeremiah suggested it might be better to wound someone than to kill him, he was quickly put in his place. “Fuck that. I’m putting two in the chest, one in the head just like I’m going to be trained to do.”

The men in the barracks were whiter, poorer, and less educated than Jeremiah had expected. Guys who could barely read were astonished that Jeremiah had enlisted even though he’d been accepted at the University of Oregon. Skinheads, ex-skinheads perhaps (since active participation by soldiers in extremist groups is prohibited), showed off their tattoos—one had been told by his recruiter to say that his swastika tattoo was a “force directional signal.” There were guys who had done jail time, though Jeremiah quickly adds, “Not that they’re bad people by any means, but it kind of shows you the type of person they’re recruiting.”

The next day, a sergeant addressed the recruits with a speech that Jeremiah says he’ll never forget. “You know, when I joined the Army nine years ago people would always ask me why I joined. Did I do it for college money? Did I do it for women? People never understood. I wanted to join the Army because I wanted to go shoot motherfuckers.” The room erupted in hoots and hollers. A drill sergeant said something about an Iraqi coming up to them screaming, “Ah-la-la-la-la!” in a high-pitched voice, and how he would have to be killed. After that, all Arabs were referred to by this battle cry—the ah-la-la-la-las. In the barracks, they played war. One recruit would come out of the shower wearing a towel on his head, screaming, “Ah-la-la-la-la!” and the other recruits would pretend to shoot him dead. Jeremiah thought, “Oh my God, what am I doing here?”

That evening he wrote his first letter home, beginning with the word “Wow.”

“I’m horrified by some of the things that they talk about. If you were in the civilian world and openly talked about killing people you would be an outcast, but here people openly talk about it, like it’s going to be fun.” In his second letter, written while he was doing guard duty, he tells his parents how sad the barracks are at night. “You can hear people trying to make sure no one hears them cry under their covers.”

On his third day, Jeremiah went to one of the drill sergeants and told him, “I’m sorry, the military’s not for me. For whatever reason, I’m not willing to kill. I had the idealistic view that it was more than that, and I realize, since coming here, that it’s not.” The sergeant stared at him. “Do you know what would happen if you came in here and talked to me fifty, a hundred years ago?”

“Yeah, but we’re not living back then,” Jeremiah replied. The sergeant said that was a shame, because if he had a 9-millimeter pistol, he’d shoot Jeremiah right then and there. The sergeant dared Jeremiah to refuse to ship, saying he would be sent to jail, that he, personally, would make an example of him.

So Jeremiah cook­ed up a plan with another unhappy recruit to pretend they were gay. That plan went about as badly as it could have—five drill sergeants questioned them, called them disgusting perverts, but refused to discharge either Jeremiah or his friend. Jeremiah was now stuck in one of the most macho and homophobic environments as a gay man, or, more bewilderingly, as a fake gay man. He had tried to get help from the military chaplain, who cited Bible passages proving that God was against murder, not killing, and told Jeremiah that Iraqis were running up to American troops requesting Bibles.

In his last letter home, written on his sixth day, Jeremiah’s handwriting disintegrates; “HELP ME” is scrawled across one page. He was due to ship to basic training in the morning. He had decided to refuse. “I’ve heard that they try to intimidate you, ganging up on you, threatening you. I heard that they will throw your bags on the bus, and almost force you on. See what I am up against? I have nothing on my side. . . . I am so fucked up right now. . . . I feel that if I stay here much longer I am not going to be the same person anymore. I have to GO. Please help. . . . Every minute you sit at home I am stuck in a shithole, stripped of self-respect, pride, will, hope, love, faith, worth, everything. Everything I have ever held dear has been taken away. This fucks with your head. . . . This makes you believe you ARE worthless shit. Please help. By the time you get this, things will be worse.”

After getting some information from his mother on a secretive call home, Jeremiah wrote a letter requesting Entry Level Separation from the Army, citing his aversion to killing. Entry Level Separation, which exists for the convenience of the Army, allows for the discharge of soldiers who are obviously not cut out for military service. The Army has to provide an exit route for inept, unhealthy, depressed, even suicidal soldiers, but at the same time it doesn’t want to open what might turn out to be floodgates, so soldiers cannot themselves apply for ELS, and rarely even know about its existence. The Reception Battalion commander told Jeremiah that if he refused to ship, he would do everything in his power to court-martial him. Then the drill sergeants had their turn. One in particular was apoplectic. “He started screaming at me about how killing is the ultimate thrill in life and every single man wants to kill. Regardless of what you think you believe, it’s every man’s job to kill, it’s the greatest high, it’s our animal instinct, our animal desire.”

When he refused to ship (he locked his duffel bag to his bed so it couldn’t be thrown on the bus), Jeremiah was sent to Excess Barracks. About twenty other recruits were there, each of them trying to get out. It was at Excess Barracks that Jeremiah first got the idea to go AWOL, because there were people there who had done it already. On his ninth day at Fort Benning, he and another recruit, Ryan Gibson, decided to leave. They got all suited up—“a Rambo-like moment” is how Jeremiah describes it. “I’m not gonna lie, we were really excited,” he says. “We were finally going to be able to go out into the woods and do something. Even if the only commando stuff we ever did in our entire Army career was escaping from the Army, we were still excited about it.”

When Ryan arrived home in Indiana, his mother threatened to report him to the police unless he returned to Fort Benning. So Ryan did return, but he left again two days later, this time taking two other recruits with him. When Jeremiah arrived home in Portland, he told his mother, “Well, Mom, I guess I’m going to have to find a different way to become a man besides learning to kill.”

* * *

Jeremiah is hardly the only recruit to arrive at basic training or boot camp and realize, for the first time, that he is there to learn how to kill. And that he can’t or won’t do it. Many civilians wonder how that can be: They’re joining the Army, for God’s sake, they’ve enlisted in the Marines, what did they expect? It is too simple an answer just to say that the recruiters don’t mention killing, though they don’t, and that they sell the military as a career or educational opportunity to high schoolers, which they do. You have to understand that after all the soft, inspiring talk of educational opportunities, financial bonuses, job skills, cool gear, and easy sex from uniform-loving girls and German prostitutes, recruits arrive at boot camp and are assaulted by a completely different reality. Basic training is a shock, and purposefully so. In a matter of weeks the military must take teenagers from what Gwynne Dyer calls “the most extravagantly individualistic civilian society” and turn them into soldiers; that is, selfless, obedient fighters with an intense loyalty to each other, for ultimately that is why they will risk death, not for their country or some high-flown ideal but for their comrades. “We” must replace “I.” Most importantly, the military must turn them into killers, for that is how you win battles, and how you survive them.

Despite our entertainment industry telling us otherwise, it is not easy to kill. In his groundbreaking and highly influential study of World War II firing rates, S.L.A. Marshall, a World War I combatant and chief historian for the European Theater of Operations during World War II, interviewed soldiers fresh from battle and found that only 15 to 20 percent of the combat infantry were willing to fire their weapons, and that was true even when their life or the lives of their comrades were threatened. When Medical Corp psychiatrists studied combat fatigue cases in the European Theater, they found that “fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual,” Marshall reported. Marshall’s methodology is now in question, but his findings have been replicated in studies of Civil War and World War I battles, even in re-creations of Napoleonic wars. And the effect of his findings on the military has been profound. As Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman notes in his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, “A firing rate of 15 to 20 percent among soldiers is like having a literacy rate of 15 to 20 percent among proofreaders. Once those in authority realized the existence and magnitude of the problem, it was only a matter of time until they solved it.”

By the Korean War, the firing rate had gone up to 55 percent; in the Vietnam war, it was around 90 to 95 percent. How did the military achieve this? As Grossman writes, “Since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare—psychological warfare conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one’s own troops. . . . The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.”

Training techniques became more realistic and varied. Soldiers no longer stood and fired at a nonmoving target. They were fully suited up, down in foxholes, and shooting at moving targets, targets that resembled other humans. Simultaneously, the “enemy,” whether North Korean, North Vietnamese, Russian, or Arab, was purposefully dehumanized. Killing people was described graphically, and with relish. As Dyer notes, most recruits realize the bloodthirsty talk of drill sergeants is hyperbole, but it still serves to desensitize them to the suffering of an “enemy.”

So the answer to the question “How could they not know that they were there to learn how to kill?” is another question: “How could they even begin to comprehend what that meant?” Before they’ve even seen combat, these young men and women, most of them teenagers, will be pushed to break through a psychological, cultural, and moral resistance to killing, an experience that is hard to imagine. A twenty-three-year-old deserter from Washington State, whom I’ll call Clay, since he’s still AWOL, says, “‘Stressful’ is not the word. It’s an understatement. It tears at your mind.” Clay, who went AWOL in November, was excruciatingly aware of the effect of his training: “After they broke me down, I was having a lot of conflicts with what they were trying to build me back up into. I mean, good Lord, these people told me, if need be, I might have to kill children.”

Clay joined the Army to get away from what he calls “a militant AA group” and a troubled relationship with a girlfriend. He was working off the books for a small fencing company, and the Army recruiter was “throwing all this money at me.” In five weeks he wrapped up his messy life—gave notice on his apartment, quit his girlfriend and his AA group, lost sixty pounds, took and passed his GED—and swore in to the U.S. Army.

By the sixth week of training, Clay realized not only that he could kill but that he wanted to. “Spiritually and mentally, man, I was off. I wanted to kill something. Mainly the drill sergeants, but it was bad. I was very angry. I started to see the process within myself, that transition from civilian to mindless killer. It just didn’t sit right with me. And it scared me.” Clay decided to leave. A high-ranking but highly embittered NCO actually smuggled him off base.

That soldiers flee out of fear of combat is another myth; not that some don’t, but they are, strangely enough, a minority. Of the deserters I talked to, only Clay mentioned his fear of death. After his drill sergeant showed his platoon photos of an American lieutenant blown to bits, splattered all over the side of a Humvee, “no piece of him bigger than a cigarette pack,” Clay suddenly thought about being around to raise a family. “And I started thinking about the possibility that I might not come back.” He’s gone AWOL twice now. He left from basic training, returned home, and twenty-six days later turned himself in at Fort Lewis, Washington, where he met Jeremiah, who gave him my phone number. From there he was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. At Fort Sill he was told that he would be shipped back to Fort Benning, so he took off again. He had turned himself in too soon.

After thirty days of being AWOL, a soldier is dropped from the rolls and classified as a deserter—administratively, not legally, for that takes a court-martial. At that point, a federal warrant is issued for his arrest. The Army doesn’t have the manpower to chase and apprehend deserters, so unless they get picked up for some other offense—stopped by the local cops for running a red light, for instance—they can often live life unhindered (but not necessarily unhaunted) for weeks, months, even years. Recently in New York City, a forty-three-year-old Marine deserter got into an argument with a deli owner about the difference between smoked and honey-basted turkey. The deli owner called the Marine a “nigger.” The Marine told him to step outside. They were slugging it out on the sidewalk when the cops pulled up. They ran the Marine’s driver’s license, found the federal warrant for his arrest, and called the Marines, who came and got him and drove him down to Quantico, where he now awaits processing. He’d been AWOL for twenty-four years.

Once a deserter is apprehended or turns himself in, he can be returned to his unit, or court-martialed and given jail time, or given nonjudicial punishment and an other-than-honorable discharge. As a rule of thumb, the less time and money the military has invested in someone, the less interested it is in keeping that person. If you’re going to leave, then, leave sooner rather than later, and when you leave, stay gone long enough to be dropped from the rolls. If you turn yourself in before being dropped from the rolls, you’ll be returned to your command. And it’s always better to turn yourself in than to be caught—you want to show that your intention wasn’t to stay gone forever. So you have to prove that you are dead serious about leaving the military while simultaneously proving that you weren’t planning on leaving for good.

* * *

Matt Burke, a Navy veteran and Army deserter, whom I met in October, left the military because of an injury, a recruiter’s lie, and because there was better pay—and working conditions—somewhere else. Matt is pro-military, pro-Bush, though, he says, “Your readers won’t want to hear that, I’m sure.” He describes his recent court-martial as the Army’s chance to ream him and his subsequent jail time as “interesting.” He has a bland, limited vocabulary for the good times in his life, and a much grittier one for the bad—getting shafted, screwed, kicked in the nuts. He tells his story as straight as he can, without much emotion and no self-pity. He doesn’t want his real name used because only his immediate family knows about his going AWOL, and his parents thought he was “as dumb as shit” to desert the Army.

Blond, trim, seemingly buttoned-down but with a gleam in his eye, Matt is the youngest son of a large Irish-Catholic family. He says frankly that he had a “bad upbringing,” and by that he means he was raised to care about job security above all else. He joined the Navy straight out of high school, at seventeen. He wasn’t a good student; there was little chance of his getting into a decent college and no chance of a scholarship. He had family members in the military; it wasn’t an unfamiliar option for him. He did his four years of active duty and loved it. When he returned to his New England hometown, he attended college, where he studied business. After two years as an accountant in the civilian world, he began to miss the military. So he decided to sign up for the Army’s Officer’s Candidate School.

Matt had one worry. He knew that after three months of basic training and then another three at OCS, the chances of getting injured were high. He asked the recruiter what would happen if he got hurt and couldn’t make it through OCS. He was determined to serve in the Army only as an officer; he had already done his time, and he now had a college education, a good-paying job. The recruiter told him that because of his prior service, he wouldn’t have to serve the remainder of his three-year contract; he would be discharged. Later, Matt would kick himself for not getting it in writing. “So that’s the thing that got me screwed, trusting him,” Matt says. He thought the recruiter wouldn’t lie to him: he wasn’t some green high-school kid. “I thought me being in prior service, he’d recognize that, and he knows that I know he’s a salesperson basically. But he still ended up giving me the shaft.”

At the G.I. Rights hot line they’ve heard hundreds of stories involving recruiters’ lies. Jeremiah was told he could attend college after he finished basic training, and that he wouldn’t be deployed until he graduated. One of the most common lies told by recruiters is that it’s easy to get out of the military if you change your mind. But once they arrive at training, the recruits are told there’s no exit, period—and if you try to leave, you’ll be court-martialed and serve ten years in the brig, you’ll never be able to get a good job or a bank loan, and this will follow you around like a felony conviction. This misinformation may keep some scared and unhappy soldiers from leaving—some may even turn out to be suffering from no more than a severe bout of homesickness—but it pushes others to the point of desperation. They purposefully injure themselves or become clinically depressed; they try to kill themselves or set out to fail the drug test; or they lie, saying they’re gay, suicidal, asthmatic, or murderous. And, of course, they go AWOL.

None of this behavior, the lies or the pressure tactics, is particularly surprising. Recruiters are under tremendous pressure to meet year-end recruiting goals, which are essentially set by Congress. (Congress mandates the actual number of soldiers required to be on active duty at the end of the recruiting year.) Failure to meet their “mission” can affect job promotion, pay, even the ability to stay in the Army until retirement. When the fiscal year ends in September, if Recruiting command hasn’t met its quota, it shifts the ship dates of soldiers in the Delayed Entry Program (DEP)—soldiers due to ship to training in October and November often are rescheduled to ship in the last week of September. Recruiting command can then report favorably to Congress, but the recruiters have to scramble even harder to make up for those lost numbers in the coming year.

What is puzzling is the fact that so many people believe the recruiters, believe even the most outrageous lies. High schoolers and their parents. Diane Stanley, the mother of a UA Marine named Jarred whom I met with in her trailer home in Alto, Georgia, told me that the recruiter promised her and her son that he wouldn’t be sent overseas. He would, in fact, be stationed close to home in Kentucky. We were at war in Iraq, and still they believed this. The recruiter was sitting at their kitchen table, drinking her coffee, a man she describes as being “super nice.” He told the lie then and repeated it every time she asked for reassurance. She trusted him.

Most people simply have a hard time wrapping their minds around the fact that someone would look straight at them and tell a bald-faced lie, especially when that someone is in uniform, representing the United States government, and has visited their homes and been “a part of our family,” as Jeremiah’s mother puts it. The recruiter had often dined at the Adler house; he attended Jeremiah’s high-school graduation. And there’s no denying that many parents who want their children, particularly their sons, to grow up and find some sense of purpose and responsibility have magical thinking when it comes to the military.

When I spoke with Douglas Smith of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command’s Public Affairs Office, he said he found the lies told to Jeremiah, Matt, and Jarred far too outrageous to believe that any recruiter would tell them. Smith told me that recruiters rely on a good relationship with the community, and recruiting itself relies on satisfied, enthusiastic graduates of basic training promoting the service back home. Recruiters may talk of “possibilities,” Smith suggested, that a recruit may hear as promises, such as large student loans that are available only to qualified recruits. His advice was that recruits need to read their contracts carefully before signing them; if the recruiter’s “possibilities” are not written into the contract, they don’t exist.

* * *

In the last few weeks of basic training, Matt pulled a knee ligament, but he “sucked it up” and graduated. At OCS, his knee injury grew worse until he was no longer able to run. After a few visits to sick bay, he was booted out of OCS for missing too many training days. He was put in a holding company, and there he waited with other injured or rejected OCS candidates to receive orders to go to enlisted training. He was Army property. He had three years of a contract to fulfill. He would be trained in a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) that fit the needs of the Army—these days the military seems to be short MPs and truck driv­ers. He was angry.

When Matt went home on leave, he didn’t go back. After discussing his case with people on the G.I. Rights hot line, he waited the thirty-plus days until he was dropped from the rolls and declared a deserter, then he traveled to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to turn himself in. The treatment at Fort Sill was “very routine, very professional,” Matt says. Except for him and one other young recruit, all of the other deserters were quickly processed out. Matt’s command wanted him back at Fort Benning so that they could court-martial him. “I was from an OCS battalion, and I think at that same time the war in Iraq was peaking, so I think they felt they couldn’t just let me go. They had to bring me back and give me the shaft as best they could, to set an example.”

He was flown to Fort Benning, waited for a month and a half for his court-martial, and after a ten-minute proceeding was given a one-month jail sentence and an other-than-honorable discharge. He served his time in a county jail, cheaper for the Army than shipping him to the nearest Army brig in Pensacola, Florida. There, Matt says, he was locked up with a bunch of “colorful characters”—drug dealers with meth labs in their basements, indicted murderers.

* * *

Jason Lane tramps out of the forest wearing a blue bandanna, a black sweatshirt, and a bulky Marine-issue backpack. He’s neither short nor tall, more thick than thin, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with an expressive face. “Hey! How yah doin’?” His voice booms, as if he’s speaking through a megaphone, and in any given word there are more inflections than there are syllables. It’s a strange moment. Meeting a Marine deserter in the Virginia woods fits my dramatic image of the situation, but the Marine himself, an affable nineteen-year-old from Connecticut with a high tolerance for chaos, seems entirely familiar.

It’s a brilliant September day in Triangle, Virginia; cool, bright air, a piercing blue sky. At the picnic area of Prince William Forest Park, one couple in business suits eats their lunch and an old man reads a newspaper. Otherwise, the park seems spectacularly empty of humans, all 17,000 acres of it. One mile away is the big statue of Iwo Jima that marks the entrance to the Quantico Marine base. Jason, whose name has been changed because he is currently in military custody, deserted the Marines on August 1, leaving Camp Geiger in North Carolina and heading home to Connecticut. When he decided to turn himself in, he chose Quantico because he heard deserters were treated more fairly there than at Camp Geiger. Jason took a bus down here, arriving yesterday afternoon, but instead of walking to the base, he walked into the forest. He needed some time, he says.

Jason’s mother married a Navy man, but she adores the Marines, and she always told Jason he would make a great one. Right before he went UA, Jason tried to explain to her that you could be good at something and still not want to do it. They were so proud at his graduation from boot camp, he tells me. And now? “It’s horrible,” he says. “It’s very horrible. I can’t even face them. It kind of makes me wish I never even left.” Still, he calls his decision to join the Marines last winter “stupid,” and his decision to go UA “stupid but right.”

At the end of the day, I bought him some snacks and Gatorade and left him at the picnic area as the sun was going down. The temperature dropped hard that night, so he spent it crouched under a hand dryer in the rest room, reaching up to turn it on every time it shut off. On the third night, Jason left the forest and simply started to walk—through the town of Triangle and on to Dumfries, and beyond, and then back again, CD earphones clamped on his head, Iron Maiden blasting, making up fantastic stories and movie scenes that he would think about jotting down in the notebook he kept in his backpack. For the next seven nights, Jason would begin walking as the sun went down, and he would walk until dawn, keeping himself warm. Before the sun rose, he would lie down on the bleachers at a local ballpark. On my three visits to Virginia, I’d buy him dinner and cigarettes, and we’d talk about his family, the Marines, the adventures he was having living on the streets. I came to admire the lengths Jason would go to avoid that moment of surrender.

Jason is always cheerful when I see him, and like many cheerful people, he has a tendency toward depression, which he fights with caffeine, cigarettes, that booming voice, a hale-and-hearty manner. In high school Jason liked to perform in front of groups, clown around, stir people up. But he’s also a dreamer, someone who can’t think in a straight line. He’d love to make movies someday, something fantastic and allegorical. Jason has a passionate belief in Christ, and no fear of death because of that, he says. He seems a completely unlikely candidate for boot camp.

Jason had dropped out of high school when the Marine recruiter called. He had what he calls “a shitty relationship with his parents”; it made him unhappy. He had no diploma, no direction, only vague dreams of acting and directing films. The recruiter offered a definite course—both a compelling reason to get his high-school diploma and a plan for the near future. As his enlistment date approached, though, Jason felt less and less like going. “I was trying to ask people, ‘You think I should cop out of this now while I got a chance?’” But Jason’s passivity, his inability to think clearly, to see the outlines of another future—how does a high-school dropout go about becoming a film director?—left him wide open to currents that were far too strong. Jason simply rode those currents straight to Parris Island. “I had the mentality—I made the commitment, I’m gonna give it a shot,” he explains. “How much can it really hurt?”

Boot camp was great, he says, though at the time it was awful. He hated every minute of it, especially being so completely caught in a bleak and grueling present that there was nothing to look forward to but chow. He loved and admired his drill instructors, never doubting that they had his best interests at heart, and he was terribly proud on graduation day. Later he would tell me that it was the happiest day of his life.

It was when he started Infantry School at Camp Geiger in North Carolina that Jason’s resolve, never strong to start with, folded. At boot camp, he got along with all the other recruits; they were harassed and beaten down and completely unified. But at Camp Geiger his fellow Marines were “just your typical man pig assholes,” Jason says, and then goes to great effort to explain a certain character type to me. “You gotta understand, people who typically join the Marines have a certain mentality. They have to prove something. Because of that mentality, this is what you get when they get confidence, you get this cocky, arrogant, look-at-me-now type of thing. And I’m sitting there saying, I’m not going to the end of the road with these guys. I will gladly fight and die for my family, my friends, and for my country. I will not fight and die with people that I don’t like.”

In his fifth week of training his leg got infected. His combat instructors thought they knew what it was—cellulitis—but told him it wasn’t all that serious yet and to wait three days for treatment until the base clinic opened. His leg swelled until he could no longer put on his boot. Still, he was given a twenty-four-hour walking post. On Sunday he was rushed to the hospital, where he stayed for a week. When he returned, he had to keep his leg elevated, and the drill instructors treated him as if he were a shirker. The final straw in this series of events that Jason would simply call “bullshit” was when they refused to give him weekend liberty because he hadn’t passed a test that he couldn’t have taken anyway, because he was in the hospital when it was given.

Two themes run through Jason’s story, very common ones in the stories of AWOL soldiers. Jason was not a young man who found himself appalled by the training, by the notion of killing. He was someone who was ambivalent about joining in the first place and then objected not to the hard work or the discipline but to what he considered unfair treatment. “Even though it sucks right now, it still feels like I did the right thing,” he says of his decision to desert. “For one, I did something I shouldn’t have done by joining. For two, I believe you should always stand up for what you believe in, and I don’t believe that I should’ve been treated like that for my leg.”

People leave civilian jobs when they’re treated unjustly, and no civilian boss holds your mortal life in his or her hands. When you enter the military, you’re not arriving at some day job, a job that requires only a piece of you and your time, a job you can easily leave. The military is your new family; indeed, during training, it’s your entire world. Your life is in their hands, you may get wounded, die, or kill—and it will be at their orders, in their company. So the sense of betrayal is felt at a profound level that’s difficult for any civilian to understand.

On my third trip to Virginia, on October 7, Jason has decided he’s ready to turn himself in. He thinks it would be easier if I went with him. So the next morning we meet for breakfast at Waffle House in Dumfries. After eggs, toast, and many cups of coffee, I try to pay the check, but Jason keeps ordering refills. He’s trying to pump himself up. “I want to try to be excited about this, as best as I can, you know? I don’t want to go in there all miserable and grim and be like this is the end of the world.” Finally, I convince him to get the last cup to go, and we drink it outside in the parking lot, where we get involved in a long discussion about the existence of God. Jason’s concerned about my atheism. He doesn’t want me missing out on heaven. The sun is high overhead when we finally get into the car and head toward the Marine base. “Man, this is gonna suck ass,” Jason says, breathing deeply.

The MP stops us at the entrance, and after I explain Jason’s situation, the Marine’s face turns hard. He looks past me at Jason. “You deserted?”

“Yes, sir,” Jason replies, looking miserable. To get to the Security Battalion, which houses the MP station, we have to drive a couple of miles down a tree-arched road, past a green, hilly golf course, and on through the woods. Jason is silent the whole time. He warned me that he would become almost comatose at this moment.

Inside the tiny lobby of the MP station, steps lead up to a windowed office, so the Marine on duty towers over us. This one is pure muscle, with shoulders and arms like tree trunks, a cinched waist, a smirk on his face, and a tattoo of Iwo Jima on his left bicep. He regards Jason with a combination of contempt and amusement, and keeps turning to the other two MPs in the office, saying something inaudible and then laughing. For some reason, the MP, who already has my driver’s license, asks me my weight, age, and Social Security number before calling Jason to the window. Jason looks small and chubby, partly in comparison to the giant at the window, and partly because he is slouched into his boots. It is all “yes, sir” and “no, sir” from there on in. A blond MP comes out into the reception area, takes Jason’s backpack, and commands him to say goodbye. We shake hands, but Jason can barely meet my eyes. And then he is gone.

Later he would tell me that the Marine sergeant who interviewed him was calm and professional, nothing like the MP at the reception desk. “If you don’t want to help your brother Marine,” he told Jason, “we don’t want you.” He didn’t say it unkindly, just matter-of-factly.

If Jason is lucky, he’ll be given nonjudicial punishment and released sometime in January with an other-than-honorable discharge; that is, in about three months from the day he surrendered. The Marines take forever to process people out—up to six months to be dropped from the rolls, and once you’ve returned, another three or four months to be processed out. At the Quaker House in Boston, they joke that the reason it takes the Marines so long to let anyone go is that “they just can’t believe there’s anyone out there who doesn’t want to be a Marine.”

The Army moves much more quickly. They have two out-processing stations, one at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the other at Fort Knox in Kentucky. At Fort Sill, people are generally out-processed in three days because they mail your discharge papers to you. When Jeremiah arrived at Fort Sill, there were eight deserters. When he was sent home a week later, there were thirty. All of the National Guardsmen and reservists were returned to their units. Regular soldiers who left from their training units were getting released. Non-commissioned officers were facing court-martial.

At the Army’s Fort Knox center, recruits aren’t released until their discharge papers are personally handed to them, so the process can take two to three weeks. Of course, any of this can change at any time, which is why the people at the G.I. Rights hot line always counsel people to call right before they turn themselves in. In November things appeared to be backed up at Fort Knox. A soldier who was shipped from there to Fort Sill told Jeremiah that when he left, seventy AWOL soldiers and deserters were being held there.

* * *

AWOL and desertion are chronic problems; all any Army can hope for is to keep them at manageable levels, not to lose soldiers needlessly. The Army admits that youth, lack of a high-school diploma, coming from “broken homes,” and having early scrapes with the law make a soldier only “relatively more likely” to go AWOL or to desert. In fact, the Army is careful to note, “the vast majority of soldiers who fit this profile are not going to desert.” Yet the Army used that very same profile to try to identify potential deserters and give them extra attention—and the desertion rate, mysteriously, rose. It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to suppose that high-school dropouts and juvenile delinquents might have joined the military for a fresh start, a chance to succeed at something, and when they were instead tagged as potential failures and troublemakers, they took off. None of the Army data comes close to capturing the hearts and minds of soldiers. What is any given person looking for when he or she joins the Army? Direction in life? A chance to belong to something? Father figures? An adventure with buddies or a test of manhood? Their parents’ approval? And when they entered the military, what did they find? That they’d been given false promises by the recruiter? That the people they turned to for help threatened them or made idiotic speeches about Bible-carrying Iraqis? No help for depression? Or a lack of armor and ammunition on the battlefield? According to the Army’s own study, before soldiers went AWOL, more than half of them sought help within the military—they spoke to their COs, to military chaplains, military shrinks. Apparently, to little avail.

The Army has examined the soldier, but not itself. It is tantamount to trying to understand the problem of teenage runaways without ever asking about their home life. Failure to adapt, issues with chain of command—there’s no sense that the military culture and environment, the commanders, themselves, also play a part in driving soldiers out and away.

The Georgia Marine who thought he would be stationed in Kentucky made it all the way to his MOS training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, before he took off. There, Jarred tried to get a foot injury treated and was told to take Tylenol. His pay was less than the recruiter had promised him, and he even seemed to be missing money from what he was paid. When he complained to his CO, he was told to shut up and mind his own business. Then he learned that his company was going to be deployed to Fallujah. “I ain’t goin’ to war,” he told his sister flatly.

His sister kept telling Jarred to go talk to somebody. “Ain’t nobody to talk to,” Jarred told her. “Ain’t nobody here interested.” When he went home to Georgia on leave last March, he didn’t return to his base. He made his mother and sister take down from the walls all their Marine paraphernalia, stripped the bumper stickers from their trucks, and refused to watch any movies or TV shows that featured the military. “The military,” he said, “is a bunch of lies.”