September 21, 2005
Camilo Mejia was the first U.S. soldier
who served in Iraq and went public with his refusal to re-deploy.
He spent nine months in military confinement for deciding to
follow his conscience.
Since his release, he has been
a tireless antiwar campaigner--at the side of Cindy Sheehan when
she began her antiwar vigil outside George Bush's ranch in Crawford,
Texas, and traveling to New York to support the St. Patrick's
Four, activists on trial for opposing the war. His book, Road
from Ramadi, is forthcoming from New Press.
Ruder: How did you come
to be against the war?
Mejia: I was against the war
from the very beginning--from before there even was a war.
Politically, it seemed that
the U.S. government was forcing this war on everybody. There
was no approval from the United Nations Security Council. There
was no approval from the people here at home. And there was no
approval from historical allies like Germany and France and the
other big powers.
9-11 just seemed too fake as
a justification--a lot of the actual hijackers came from Saudi
Arabia and yet we were invading Iraq. And as far as weapons of
mass destruction, North Korea was flaunting its weapons, and
yet we were invading a country that we don't even know for sure
has such weapons. The United Nations inspectors are saying that
we don't know if they have weapons. So politically, it just didn't
make a lot of sense.
A lot of people think I came
to be against war during my stay in Iraq. I had been against
war before that, just as many people in the military are against
war, or at least against this war.
But many people don't have
an understanding that signing a contract and wearing a uniform
doesn't mean that we can't make our own decisions or that we
can't, based on our political and moral beliefs, make the decision
to refuse a particular war, or to refuse war, period.
If you truly disagree with
something, there's no uniform, and there's no Uniform Code of
Military Justice, and there's no order that can force you to
do it. In the end, you always make your own decision.
I failed to understand that
at the time, and even though I disagreed with the war from the
beginning, I deployed. And then there's a transition. You go
from being politically and impersonally and distantly against
the war to being more morally and more personally against it,
because this isn't just something that you're reading about.
You're not just reading about
prisoner abuse, but conducting prisoner abuse. You're not reading
about killing civilians, but you're killing civilians. You're
not reading about occupation but you're occupying, you're raiding
homes, and you're enforcing a curfew.
All these things are abstract
when you're reading them, and then they become more than real,
because they become a part of your conscience and a part of your
memory and a part of who you are--every decision that you make
and you fail to make becomes you.
So it can no longer stay simply
political opposition to war. You become the opposition. I can't
say that this was the case for everybody, but it was the case
for me.
The first mission we had was
to deprive prisoners of sleep for periods of up to 48 hours--creating
a lot of noise, treating them worse than animals and breaking
them up morally, psychologically, spiritually. We performed mock
executions to keep them awake. This is the beginning of the occupation--April
2003.
And then we move on to other
missions. We end up in Ramadi, which is in the Sunni Triangle.
At first, it's no big deal. There's very little opposition--not
so much because there isn't real opposition, but because the
opposition isn't very organized, and in part because people were
still trying to figure out if the U.S. is staying or just came
to kick out Saddam.
But weeks go by, we stay, and
the insurgency gets more organized, and attacks get more frequent,
more intense, more sophisticated. We respond in turn, and we
start messing things up in Iraq.
In Ramadi, nothing ever gets
fixed. The deadlines we had for training the cops and letting
them take control of the city--nothing happens. Power isn't restored,
water isn't restored, the sewage system isn't fixed. Trash thrown
all over the place--I'm telling you the stench and the fumes
were horrible. Schools were not operating.
An occupation is such a horrible
thing. And in the midst of it, there's no sense that you're helping
anyone. None. We were just there watching our own backs, and
making sure we don't get killed.
Ruder: Do you think a lot
of soldiers who start out in favor of the war are being transformed
by deploying to Iraq?
Mejia: Even though I had my
eyes somewhat open, I can say from personal experience that this
happens. Sometimes, I ask myself how the hell I believed some
of the things I used to believe.
There's a huge dam at al Haditah,
and this was one of the biggest assets that the U.S. was going
for and that the Republican Guard was defending, because this
dam at some point powered 75 percent of Baghdad. They had all
these engineers who worked there, who were very smart and experienced,
and they spoke fluent English. They were showing up even though
they weren't getting paid, and they couldn't do much because
they didn't have the parts they needed.
So they're sitting around,
and we're sitting around guarding the dam, and we had a lot of
free time to talk with them. I remember telling one guy that
a lot of money was going to start coming in, and I'm pretty sure
that they would be making a lot of money, because an engineer
like them in the U.S. working at a facility like this makes a
ton--maybe even $100,000. I told them, "You guys are going
to be set, you'll have jobs and power."
I really thought that. I really
thought that some aspects of this occupation were going to help
the people of Iraq--that the U.S. was going to give money to
Iraqi contractors so they could develop their own country. And
then you start finding out the hard truth about imperial occupation.
It was a shock when we started
seeing the mistreatment of the people--even for hardcore, gung-ho,
pro-war people. After a while, you realize you're only there
to get out of there alive. It's a big shock.
The indoctrination in the military
is so strong, however, that people can see this, and say that
it sucks, but I signed a contract.
People are able to see through
the hypocrisy and the lies that we're there fighting for freedom
and democracy and justice. They realize that this war is just
for oil or money and geopolitical position for the empire. And
they'll tell you that they'll never reenlist, but they're still
performing their jobs, because they have a sense of duty to the
military, to the country and to one another, and it's hard to
break.
Ruder: George Bush would
say that the U.S. will only stay until Iraq is in a better condition,
and the troops will come home as soon as possible. What do you
think about that?
Mejia: You can't force democracy
with the muzzle of an M-16 or a tank or bombs or Apache helicopters.
There can't be democracy when there's occupation, because when
there's occupation, there's fear, and when there's fear, there's
no freedom. And people are very afraid in Iraq. They're afraid
of the insurgents and the occupation. They're afraid of speaking
out or leaving their homes.
The biggest part of the problem
is us. For the war hawks and the corporations, a little insurgency
is healthy. They know that they're creating the problem, and
it's in their best interest to continue it, because as long as
there's violence, they can continue to justify the presence of
a foreign military.
When you look at Latin America
in the 1970s and 1980s, all these countries were being ruled
by military dictatorships that were placed there and financed
and trained by the U.S. They need repression, violence and fear
in order to ransack countries and exploit them and take the benefits
and the profits.
Ruder: Do you think the
U.S. has a responsibility to stay or should troops be withdrawn
immediately?
Meija: There should be immediate
withdrawal. To say that the Iraqis need 160,000 people armed
to the teeth in order to succeed is straight-out racist.
That's like saying that you
have a family, and that somebody with a stick needs to be in
your house in order for you to be able to run your house. And
then every mistake you make, you get smacked upside the head
because somebody else knows what's good for you better than you
do.
It would be like 1 million
foreign invaders coming to the U.S. and saying that we're going
to stay because you have problems. You have a president who steals
elections, and you have racial minorities left behind to fend
for themselves in hurricanes.
People say we're there because
they mistreat women, but every eight seconds, a woman gets beat
up in the U.S. Women don't get the same salaries as men, don't
get the same job opportunities, get degraded on television. Every
five minutes there's a detergent commercial where you have a
beautiful, young, sophisticated woman on her knees cleaning a
toilet or making food for a bunch of guys watching a football
game.
The hypocrisy is incredible.
We demand that the Iraqis have 25 percent female representation
in Congress. And what is it here? It's 14 percent! And yet we
use all these arguments as reasons to stay--I don't really mean
"we," I mean the government.
How can we even speak about
freeing anybody when we're not free ourselves? We have one of
the worst, if not the worst, education system of any industrialized
nation. We have more than 40 million people without health insurance.
We have an education system that charges people to go to college.
We have this beautiful Bill
of Rights and this beautiful Constitution that unfortunately
have never applied to everyone, just very select groups. We need
freedom here before we can even think about helping anybody with
their own freedom.
Eric Ruder writes for the Socialist
Worker.