Apparently, though, some states and county jails never got the memo. Welcome to the debtors’ prisons of the 21st century.

“Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son,” the New York Times wrote in an editorial.

“When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.”

The details of Nowlin’s case are even more alarming than the Times editorial suggests. Not only was Nowlin under orders to pay a fine stemming from someone else’s actions, but she had been laid off from work and lost her home at the time she was ordered to “reimburse” the county for her son’s detention.

Despite her inability to pay, she was held in contempt of court and ordered to serve a 30-day sentence. On March 6, three days after she was incarcerated, she was released for one day to work. She also picked up her paycheck, in the amount of $178.53. This, she thought, could be used to pay the $104, and she would be released from jail.

But when she got back to the jail, the sheriff told her to sign her check over to the county — to pay $120 for her own room and board, and $22 for a drug test and booking fee.

Even more absurd, Nowlin requested but was denied a court-appointed lawyer. So because she was too poor to afford a lawyer and denied her constitutional right to have the court provide one for her, she couldn’t fight the contempt charge that stemmed from her poverty. And her contempt conviction only added to her poverty, as the fines and fees she was obligated to pay now multiplied.

“Like many people in these desperate economic times, Ms. Nowlin was laid off from work, lost her home and is destitute,” said Michael Steinberg, legal director of the Michigan ACLU. “Jailing her because of her poverty is not only unconstitutional, it’s unconscionable and a shameful waste of resources. It is not a crime to be poor in this country, and the government must stop resurrecting debtor’s prisons from the dustbin of history.”

Michigan isn’t the only place where you can be imprisoned for the crime of involuntary poverty. The same Catch-22 ensnares poor defendants daily in courtrooms across the country.

In 2006, the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) filed a suit on behalf of Ora Lee Hurley, who couldn’t get out of prison until she had enough money to pay a $705 fine. But she couldn’t pay the fine because she had to pay the Georgia Department of Corrections $600 a month for room and board, and spend $76 a month on public transportation, laundry and food.

She was released five days a week to work at the K&K Soul Food restaurant, where she earned $6.50 an hour, which netted her about $700 a month after taxes. Hurley was trapped in prison for eight months beyond her initial 120-day sentence until the Southern Center intervened. Over the course of her incarceration, she earned about $7,000, but she never had enough at one time to pay off her $705 fine.

“This is a situation where if this woman was able to write a check for the amount of the fine, she would be out of there,” Sarah Geraghty, a SCHR lawyer, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution while Hurley was still imprisoned. “And because she can’t, she’s still in custody. It’s as simple as that.”

Georgia also lets for-profit probation companies prey on people too poor to pay their traffic violations and court fees. According to a 2008 SCHR report entitled “Profiting from the poor”:

In courts around Georgia, people who are charged with misdemeanors and cannot pay their fines that day in court are placed on probation under the supervision of private, for-profit companies until they pay off their fines. On probation, they must pay these companies substantial monthly “supervision fees” that may double or triple the amount that a person of means would pay for the same offense.

For example, a person of means may pay $200 for a traffic ticket on the day of court and be done with it, while a person too poor to pay that day is placed on probation and ends up paying $500 or more for the same offense.

The privatization of misdemeanor probation has placed unprecedented law enforcement authority in the hands of for-profit companies that act essentially as collection agencies. These companies, focused on profit rather than public safety or rehabilitation, are not designed to supervise people or connect them to services and jobs. Rather, they charge exorbitant monthly fees and use the threat of imprisonment and a variety of bullying tactics to squeeze money out of the men and women under their supervision.

For too many poor people convicted of misdemeanors, our state is not living up to the constitutional promise of equal justice under law.

In Gulfport, Miss., the municipal court started a “fine collection task force” to crack down on people who owed fees for misdemeanors. According to the SCHR Web site:

The task force trolled through predominantly African American neighborhoods, rounding up people who had outstanding court fines. After arresting and jailing them, the City of Gulfport processed these people through a court proceeding at which no defense attorney was present or even offered.

Many people were jailed for months after hearings lasting just seconds. While the city collected money, it also packed the jail with hundreds of people who couldn’t pay, including people who were sick, physically disabled and/or limited by mental disabilities.

The disregard of the justice system for the rights of poor people to equal protection and due process is cause for outrage. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise in an era when the government spends billions bailing out banks while letting foreclosures and unemployment ruin the lives of working people.

We need to build a movement, like the working-class struggles of the 1930s, that can demand an end to the inhuman practice of incarcerating people for no other crime than finding themselves at the bottom of the social ladder.

But since his return and throughout his organizing activities, he says that he’s rarely been asked about his time in Afghanistan.

“Afghanistan was a high-stress environment,” explains Casler. “We worked 100-plus hours a week with a skeleton crew.

“Most of us had already deployed to Iraq, and one of the striking things is that our training for Iraq and Afghanistan wasn’t any different. We treated the situation exactly like it was Iraq. If it was really a different war with different things happening there, they would have trained us differently, but they didn’t.”

When President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January, he has pledged to withdraw a battalion a month from Iraq–and begin a surge of U.S. troops to Afghanistan. He has called for a renewed focus on a military victory in Afghanistan, as well as capturing or killing Osama bin Laden.

But to antiwar U.S. soldiers, Afghan civilians and even a growing portion of the Afghan elite, the consequences of a sharp increase in foreign troops in Afghanistan are predictable and dire–more civilian deaths, more soldiers in harm’s way, and more damage to what little remains of Afghan society.

As Casler puts it, “It’s time for us to start talking about Afghanistan.”

The occupation of Afghanistan is entering its eighth year, and yet the situation for the U.S. is getting worse, not better. American casualties are rising. The Taliban is resurgent and newly confident about challenging both U.S. troops and government forces under the command of U.S.-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

At the same time, segments of the Afghan population that once expressed gratitude toward the U.S. for removing the Taliban from power and took a wait-and-see attitude toward the ongoing U.S. presence are growing increasingly angry.

The reasons are many. First and foremost, the U.S. has increasingly relied on air strikes to suppress the growing influence of the Taliban–to a jaw-dropping extent. U.S. fighters flew only 86 bombing raids in all of 2004; in 2007, the number of air strikes grew to nearly 3,000. The bombing continued to rise in 2008, with 600,000 pounds of bombs dropped on Afghanistan in June and July alone, almost equal to the amount dropped in all of 2006.

While the Taliban has carefully avoided causing harm to civilians in areas under its control and thus succeeded in winning some new bases of support, the U.S. has used its air superiority with a recklessness that undermined what little reserve of good will remained among the Afghan population.

In early November, U.S. air strikes killed 65 civilians in a wedding party–a horrific toll but not unprecedented, as such parties, with their large concentrations of people, have been targets of air strikes in the past.

“The Americans are hitting civilian houses all the time,” exclaimed Mohammad Tawakil Khan, a provincial council member in Baghdis, whose two sons and a grandson were killed along with four others in a U.S. air strike the same week as the wedding party massacre.

“They don’t care, they just say it was a mistake…Afghan officials are only offering their condolences. After some 100 times that they have killed civilians, we have to take revenge, and afterward say our condolences to them.”

Beyond the carnage caused by bombs dropped by their supposed liberators, Afghans also seethe at the U.S. partnership with the warlords, militias and gangsters who make up the Northern Alliance.

Noting that Obama recently told a reporter that he felt no reason to apologize to the Afghan people, Eman, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), expressed disbelief, bitterness and anger.

“Didn’t he feel the need to apologize for the occupation of our country under the banner of democracy, the so-called ‘war on terror,’ and women’s rights, but then compromise with terrorists like the Northern Alliance, who cannot be distinguished from the Taliban in the history of their criminal acts?” Eman said on KPFK’s Uprising Radio, hosted by U.S.-based Afghan rights activist Sonali Kolhatkar.

“In fact, these murderers were the first to destroy our nation. And even after seven years of a very long and very costly ‘war on terror,’ terrorism has not been uprooted in Afghanistan, but has become stronger, and the Taliban are becoming more powerful. From his statements during his election campaign, we don’t think that Obama’s position is different from the Bush administration; it is the continuation of Bush’s foreign policy…

“RAWA strongly believes that whatever happens, a withdrawal of foreign troops should be the first step, because today, with the presence of thousands of troops in Afghanistan, with the presence of many foreign countries in our nation, for the majority of our people, particularly poor people in the other provinces of Afghanistan outside Kabul, the situation is so bad that it cannot get any worse.”

Ted Goodnight served in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 with the North Carolina Army National Guard and was stationed primarily at the Bagram Air Base, and for a time at a forward operating base near the Pakistani border.

Like Casler, his time overseas–combined with his horror at deploying to Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina fully armed to repress the people he thought he was supposed to be helping–persuaded him to end 15 years of service with the National Guard after he returned, and to join IVAW.

What he saw and heard in Afghanistan shocked him. “Despite all the planning and flawless execution of all the elements of a combined arms task force, based on supposedly actionable intelligence, we continually came up short–no one captured of any value,” says Goodnight.

“I thought there’s something wrong with this picture, so I asked my company commander why we kept coming up short. Was it an intelligence failure? Or something else? And the response that I got was that these were simply shows of force, that in reality there were no legitimate targets.

“I also remember the various snatch-and-grabs of Afghans that the military carried out. They would come off the helicopters with their handcuffs and leg shackles and hoods over their heads, and were led into this compound, where they were never seen or heard from by us again.

“I remember being in the dining facility and overhearing conversations between military police personnel who were in charge of interrogations, and they were bragging among themselves about their brutality–who could be more intimidating and more demeaning to the detainees.

“This was about dehumanization. They weren’t people. They were acronyms, PUCs, ‘persons under control.’ So we were not only harassing the population through giant shows of military force, but also through thuggish intimidation, kidnapping and abuse of detainees. We were there simply as an occupying force.”

Goodnight says that the U.S. totally failed to deliver on any of its promises to provide humanitarian relief. “We haven’t provided any significant assistance to the farmers who make up the majority of the labor force in Afghanistan,” he said. “We haven’t put forth any real effort to provide alternative crops, so the only option has been to turn to opium production, which the Taliban had largely eliminated before the U.S. came in and kicked them out.

“The humanitarian efforts that we have undertaken have been primarily carried out by contractors who perform shoddy work with foreign workers. The majority of the population needs that income and those jobs, so how are we supposed to win hearts and minds with construction efforts using foreign contractors and foreign workers when the population, which is capable of skilled construction work, is left by the wayside?”

The bombings and callous disregard for civilian life, the routine abuse and mistreatment of detainees, the lack of humanitarian assistance–all of this explains, according to Goodnight, why the Taliban has been able to reassert itself in Afghanistan.

“The Taliban represents an alternative,” says Goodnight. “They say to the people–you know what we’ve done. We provided stability and security, and yes, we were brutal in the enforcement of religious laws, but we provided more for the people and the farmers than the U.S. has or will. So the people figure that they prefer the lesser of two evils–which in this case is in the Taliban.”

But doesn’t the U.S. have the right to pursue Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to wipe out the terrorist threat?

As Casler says, it’s a mistake “to hold an entire country responsible for the actions of a few people. It wouldn’t make sense to hold the entire American population responsible for Timothy McVeigh’s actions or the Unabomber, would it?

“Retaliation against Afghanistan for the attack by Osama bin Laden never made sense to me, but during my time in the military, I never questioned what I was told to do. So when we went to Afghanistan, it didn’t matter why. They could have told me we’re going into Wisconsin, and I would have done it. The definition of discipline is instant willing obedience to orders, and you strive to have discipline in the military.”

Matthis Chiroux was sent to Afghanistan for a week as an Army reporter in 2005, and he is now fighting the U.S. military’s attempt to reactivate and deploy him involuntarily to Iraq. He echoes Casler’s sentiments.

“Osama bin Laden is not Afghani, and he wasn’t acting on behalf of the Afghani people or the state of Afghanistan,” says Chiroux. “He was supported by their government, which we ourselves also supported, just as we supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq. How many more Afghanis must die for us to stop being terrified?”

In fact, every Afghan killed by the U.S. is used as a recruiting pitch by both the Taliban and al-Qaeda–and it’s working. “The inherent and unjust nature of foreign occupation does far more to foment terrorism than cool it,” says Chiroux. “An occupied Afghanistan will never submit, and it shouldn’t.”

Even before the September 11 attacks, the U.S. had issued threats against Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which Washington once considered benign but later deemed an obstacle to its plans for controlling the shipment and distribution of oil and natural gas resources in Central Asia.

The 9/11 attacks became more than just a pretext for the invasion of Afghanistan. The “war on terror” has become the justification for a series of interventions and potential military interventions in the service of an American empire.

This is the crucial context for understanding the meaning of an escalation of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

“Obama’s plan to shift troops into Afghanistan and then bring the aerial war into Iraq is bringing another failed policy and a failed tactic into a country already devastated by occupation,” says Casler. “I’d personally like to see the removal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and some real reparations for the people of both these countries, not just ‘reparations’ at the end of the barrel of a gun.

“I’m actively campaigning to include Afghanistan as part of IVAW’s points of unity, but if the organization as a whole doesn’t vote that through, I’m of course going to continue my organizing against the war in Iraq. But we have to understand that there are a lot of Afghanistan veterans who want to see immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and reparations for the Afghan people, just as in Iraq.

“It’s up to everybody to educate themselves about Afghanistan. We’ve been so hyper-focused on Iraq that the issue of Afghanistan hasn’t been brought up as much as it should have. But we are fighting two wars every single day.

“Whether we like it or not, Afghanistan is going to be thrust into the public eye, and I hope we’re prepared to provide context for what’s going on there when that happens.”

The Khost offensive targeted one of the largest foreign military bases in the country and was eventually repulsed, but the attack on French forces by 100 Taliban insurgents killed 10 French soldiers and wounded 21 more. Together, the attacks are the latest expression of the growing confidence and competence of the Taliban and the growing ferocity of the fighting in America’s “other war.”

Since the beginning of July, 70 coalition troops have been killed in Afghanistan, compared to just 31 U.S. troops killed in Iraq during the same period. Already this year, 192 NATO troops have been killed in Afghanistan, compared to 232 killed in all of last year, which itself was the deadliest for NATO troops since the war began in 2001.

At the same time, other developments in and around the region–the resignation of Pakistan’s ex-president Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the Russian thrashing of Georgia’s U.S.-backed military–have illustrated starkly that a new balance of power is taking shape, dealing a setback to U.S. ambitions.

This makes the stakes for the U.S. in Afghanistan higher than ever–and simultaneously places new demands on the U.S. antiwar movement.

Since 2003, the antiwar movement has anchored itself in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq, which was generally understood as a “war of choice” undertaken by the Bush administration. But the movement has been at best muted in its criticism–and at worst actually supportive–of the U.S. war on Afghanistan as a “legitimate” targeting of al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden following the September 11, 2001, attacks.

But in fact, the U.S. didn’t invade Afghanistan to “bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice” or to “liberate Afghan women from the Taliban.”

In truth, the U.S. had long sought an accommodation with the Taliban. As one U.S. diplomat put it in 1997, “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the oil consortium], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”

From the time that it took office, the Bush administration had been negotiating with the Taliban to enlist it as a regime friendly to U.S. interests and able to provide a bulwark against Russian and Chinese influence. At one point in negotiations, U.S. representatives tired of the slow pace and threatened Taliban officials, saying “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,” according to a book by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie.

When the 9/11 attacks happened, it became the perfect rationale for imperial aggression that the U.S. had already contemplated.

The material and geopolitical interests that underpinned the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan are the subject of increasingly blunt discussions within the foreign policy establishment.

As Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001, wrote in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs:

As the war enters its eighth year, Americans should be told the truth: it will last a long time–longer than the United States’ longest war to date, the 14-year conflict (1961-75) in Vietnam. Success will require new policies with regard to four major problem areas: the tribal areas in Pakistan, the drug lords who dominate the Afghan system, the national police, and the incompetence and corruption of the Afghan government.

An August 21 New York Times editorial makes the case even more plainly:

More American ground troops will have to be sent to Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s over-reliance on air strikes– which have led to high levels of civilian casualties–has dangerously antagonized the Afghan population. This may require an accelerated timetable for shifting American forces from Iraq, where the security situation has grown somewhat less desperate.

NATO also needs to step up its military effort. With Russia threatening to redraw the post-Soviet map of Europe, this is not time for NATO to forfeit its military credibility by losing a war. Europe does not have a lot of available ground troops either. But it needs to send its best ones to Afghanistan and let them fight.

Afghanistan’s war is not a sideshow…Washington, NATO and the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan must stop fighting it like a holding action and develop a strategy to win. Otherwise, we will all lose.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama is already promising to implement precisely this plan, calling himself a “strong supporter of the war in Afghanistan” and pledging to withdraw forces from Iraq in order to send at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan.

Those forces in the antiwar movement that don’t include opposition to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan are at risk of being made irrelevant by the dedication of increasing amounts of U.S. military firepower and personnel to the “good war.”

The movement needs to create a political consciousness about the occupation of Afghanistan so that it will be possible to mobilize the social forces–communities, neighborhoods, students, workers and U.S. troops–necessary to force the U.S. to withdraw.

Failure to do so will mean that the further the occupation of Iraq fades in the media and from American political discussion, the more difficult it will get to mobilize sufficient numbers to compel the U.S. to exit both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The case is straightforward. U.S. disregard for civilian life, human rights, democracy and the lives of Afghan women has been shocking. Marina, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, can’t use her last name for fear of assassination, but she recently told journalist John Pilger:

We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a cause in the West following September 11, 2001, when the Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America. Yes, they persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the West over the atrocious nature of the Western-backed warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorize, yet they hold seats in [U.S.-backed Hamid] Karzai’s government.

What the U.S. really wants, says Tariq Ali, is “to construct an army able to suppress its own population but incapable of defending the nation from outside powers; a civil administration with no control over planning or social infrastructure, which is in the hands of Western NGOs; and a government whose foreign policy marches in step with Washington’s.”

It’s an encouraging sign that the leadership of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) sent an August 14 e-mail to its members organizations to encourage discussion about the issue of Afghanistan, given its growing importance for U.S. war aims. In it, UFPJ quoted from its own national assembly resolution passed last summer stating that “our movement has been too silent on Afghanistan, and UFPJ must take leadership to expose the horrors and costs of this engagement.”

But during the last year, UFPJ has done very little to rectify this “silence,” and the August 14 e-mail doesn’t show any sign of exercising “leadership to expose the horrors and costs” of the occupation of Afghanistan. Instead, the e-mail poses a series of questions without making any case whatsoever.

And some of the questions are framed in a way that leaves the door open to continued support for U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, such as “Should the peace movement support U.S. military forces in a policing role, rather than counter-insurgency role?” and “Was a military invasion of Afghanistan an appropriate reaction to the September 11 attacks?”

In addition, UFPJ continues to orient its efforts on influencing Congress rather than exposing Congress’ commitment to pursuing U.S. global hegemony. As disastrous as this strategy has been in ending the U.S. war on Iraq, it will be that much worse in the case of Afghanistan, considering that support for the war in Afghanistan is an article of faith within the Democratic Party.

GI organizations such as Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) face a similar set of challenges.

To date, IVAW has not taken an official position on the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. Indeed, it appears that one current within IVAW feels that adding opposition to the U.S. war on Afghanistan to its mission would hurt its ability to recruit among active-duty troops–because, the argument goes, there is more support within the military for the war on Afghanistan than the war on Iraq.

But with increasing numbers of troops being sent to face fierce fighting in Afghanistan, the opposite is true. If IVAW doesn’t address the despair, anger and disillusionment of U.S. soldiers deployed to Afghanistan, vets and active-duty troops will go elsewhere for a way to express their antiwar views.

For soldiers gripped by the senselessness of their mission and a desperate drive for self-preservation, Afghanistan presents a situation at least as harrowing as Iraq. As an article earlier this year in the New York Times Magazine reported:

As hard as Iraq was, [Capt. Dan Kearney] said, nothing was as tough as the Korengal [a valley in Afghanistan]. Unlike in Iraq, where the captains and lieutenants could let down their guard in a relatively safe, fortified operating base, swapping stories and ideas, here they had no one to talk to and were almost as vulnerable to enemy fire inside the wire as out…

Kearney’s soldiers told me they’d been spooked by the weird behavior of their predecessors last May: near the end of their tour, many would sit alone on the fire base talking to themselves. Privates disobeyed their sergeants, and squad leaders refused to step outside the wire to show the new boys the terrain. No one wanted to be shot in the last days of his tour.

Facing hostility from civilians weary of being killed by errant U.S. airpower and the constant anxiety of waiting for the next insurgent assault, the conditions breed the perfect atmosphere for both war crimes and paralyzing post-traumatic stress disorder–both of which are vividly described in the Times magazine article.

In the months after the 2008 election, the ability of the antiwar movement to respond clearly to the growing focus of U.S. military might on this region will be of critical importance.

In 1991, the political establishment declared a “new world order” in the wake of the collapse of the USSR. But today, U.S. economic weakness and military blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan mean that the U.S. faces a “newer world order,” marked by increased instability, new crises and new strategic competitors, especially in Asia.

Our movement must develop the political understanding to analyze these developments and respond with a loud and clear opposition to the foreign policy of a government that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. aptly characterized as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

Pfc. Jason Scheuerman left a note nailed to his barracks closet in Iraq. “Maybe finally I can get some peace,” wrote the 20-year-old man. Then he stepped inside the closet and shot himself. His parents only found out about the note after a yearlong fight to cut through military red tape and discover what happened to their son.

Scott and Jason are just two of the thousands of military personnel whose service in Iraq and Afghanistan plunged them into a place so dark that they took their own lives.

In fact, the number of suicides among veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan now likely exceeds the number of troops killed in combat.

Nearly one in five soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan–about 300,000–report symptoms of PTSD or major depression upon returning home, but only about half seek treatment, according to a Rand Corporation study released in April.

Based on known suicide rates for similar patients, “It’s quite possible that the suicides and psychiatric mortality of this war could trump the combat deaths,” according to National Institute of Mental Health director Thomas Insel, who is the government’s top psychiatric researcher.

But even more appalling than the human toll these wars are claiming even after troops leave the battlefield is the military’s shameless cover-up of the extent of the problem–and its effort to deny veterans the health care they deserve when they return.

The Pentagon officially reports that about 30,000 troops were seriously wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. But USA Today found at least 20,000 cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI) not reported by the Pentagon when the newspaper conducted its own study and filed numerous requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Rand Corporation study found that 320,000 personnel may have experienced a TBI in Iraq or Afghanistan, but only 43 percent said they had ever been evaluated by a physician for the injury.

As for PTSD, the Pentagon officially acknowledges that 38,000 veterans have been diagnosed with it since 2003–so if the Rand study of 300,000 soldiers with PTSD is accurate, that means some 260,000 have either not sought treatment, not been diagnosed or simply aren’t being counted by the military.

This isn’t surprising, given the culture of denial that pervades the military and veterans health care system. In April, for example, an e-mail surfaced from Ira Katz, deputy chief patient care services officer for mental health at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), acknowledging that 1,000 veterans under VA care attempt suicide every month. On average, 18 veterans commit suicide in the U.S. every day, and four of those are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“Shh!” begins the e-mail from Katz. “Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”

Another troubling e-mail from a VA official came to light in May. Norma Perez, a leading psychologist at a facility for veterans in Texas, wrote to staff members in March directing them to diagnose PTSD less frequently because PTSD patients can receive government disability payments for their condition.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” wrote Perez in the message to mental-health specialists and social workers. Instead, she continued, “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”

A diagnosis of adjustment disorder is considered less severe and isn’t typically compensated like PTSD, for which veterans are eligible for disability payments of up to $2,527 a month, depending on the severity of their condition.

“It is outrageous that the VA is calling on its employees to deliberately misdiagnose returning veterans in an effort to cut costs,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which released the memo to the media. “Those who have risked their lives serving our country deserve far better.”

Scott Eiswert had stopped going to the VA for PTSD treatment before his suicide, and the disregard for vets under its care was one reason why, according to Stacy Hafley, an advocate for military families who is helping the Eiswert family get back on its feet.

“He didn’t feel like it was helping,” said Hafley in an interview. “He thought they were leaning toward saying that his issues were ‘family problems,’ and not PTSD. So he stopped going, which is fairly common and symptomatic of PTSD.

“I’ve heard it so many times, and my husband, who also suffers from PTSD, did the same thing. So many feel that the VA is either trying to overmedicate or understate the scope of the problem, and neither of those is particularly helpful. They get frustrated, leave and don’t come back.”

Hafley underscored the chief problem facing an understaffed VA: “The VA is trying to build a million-dollar home with a penny, and it can’t be done,” she said.

The VA has an annual mental health budget of $3.8 billion, which U.S. officials contend is a substantial amount. But the U.S. spends this much every 11 days to keep U.S. forces fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In late June, Bush signed a new supplemental war spending bill, approved by Democrats and Republicans in both houses of Congress. The bill allocates an additional $162 billion of spending that will last into the middle of 2009, well into the term of Bush’s successor.

While the bill increases spending on GI education benefits, it contains nothing for expanding the budget for military health care. “The recent war funding bill was passed to go clear through the spring of 2009, which was clearly a political ploy to not have to deal with war spending right before the election, given that both candidates are sitting senators,” explained Hafley.

“I feel like they are playing political games with the lives of our loved ones. We shouldn’t be tolerating that. This has been going on for years. These aren’t new problems. These are the same problems that Vietnam vets have been facing for decades.”

Hafley is right. Fighting wars by skimping on compensation for the soldiers who must fight them is a tried-and-true strategy of every commander in chief. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations stood in the way of compensation for Vietnam veterans struggling with PTSD and Agent Orange exposure.

The Clinton administration dragged its feet when tens of thousands of veterans of the 1991 Gulf War struggled to get compensation for the dizzying array of symptoms they were experiencing, such as frequent immune system disorders, birth defects, cancer, chronic fatigue, loss of muscle control, headaches, dizziness and loss of balance, memory problems, muscle and joint pain, indigestion, skin problems and shortness of breath.

Today, the military is employing a different arsenal to keep its overstretched military in the field at bargain-basement prices. “For the first time in history,” according to a cover story in the June 16 issue of Time, “a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool, but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines. Data contained in the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope.”

Chris LeJeune, who returned home in May 2004, began struggling with depression while on a 15-month deployment to Iraq. The uncertainty about the mission itself weighed heavily on his conscience and contributed to his condition.

“When you search someone’s house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there’s little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor–things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would,” LeJeune said.

When LeJeune sought counseling, he got a prescription for antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications, but not much else. “In the civilian world, when you have a problem, you go to the doctor, and you have therapy followed up by some medication,” said LeJeune. “In Iraq, you see the doctor only once or twice, but you continue to get drugs constantly.”

And that’s if you’re lucky enough to see a mental-health professional. According to Time, about a third of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan say they can’t see a mental-health provider when they need one.

Adding to the frustration facing the loved ones of veterans seeking help is the unresponsiveness of every level of government to the crisis.

Seeking to break the logjam, two veterans’ organization filed suit to ask a federal judge to order changes to how the VA delivers care to veterans. The suit sought redress for the lack of mental health care services, the long delays for appointments, and the four-and-a-half year backlog of cases in which veterans are appealing for a higher disability rating than was issued by VA doctors.

But the judge refused to grant the order, saying the plaintiffs were demanding nothing short of “a complete overhaul of the VA system.”

Hafley can think of only one other measure that would work better than a complete overhaul. “Quite frankly,” she said, “the best thing they could do to stop the overload at the VA is end the war, bring the troops home and stop creating more troops with PTSD who are at risk of suicide or having addiction problems. Adding more money into the VA does help the ones who are already home, but every day, new ones are being created.

“That influx is going to continue. Spending more money is just a temporary fix. They aren’t stopping the bleeding. And that’s the problem that brought us where we are now.”

The Rand Corporation’s study “Invisible Wounds of War” compiles information on veterans suffering from PTSD, TBI and major depression. The Rand site also has links to pamphlets with advice for individuals and families trying to cope with post-deployment stress.

To find out more about the Eiswert family and how you can help, go to the E-4 Scott Eiswert Memorial Fund.

In “Disposable heroes,” published in the International Socialist Review, Pham Binh covered the struggle of soldiers to get the government to devote adequate resources to compensating them for their service.

The Citizen Soldier is an excellent resource for active-duty soldiers looking for news and advice about their rights. Soldiers can also contact the GI Rights Hotline, or call 877-447-4487 from the U.S., 415-487-2635 from outside the U.S., or 06223-47506 from Germany.

It’s been 18 months since the antiwar movement last held a high-profile national demonstration–on January 27, 2007, in Washington, D.C.–and across the country, local activists and coalitions report a lower level of activity as compared to late 2005 and 2006.

One common explanation for this is that most Americans simply don’t care about the war or aren’t affected by it.

Likewise, most activists assume that organizing a new GI resistance–like the kind that ended the U.S. war on Vietnam–must take as its starting point that U.S. military personnel, even more than the general population, are flag-waving conservatives.

Flowing from this assessment of the state of political consciousness about the war is the conclusion that the antiwar movement needs to make certain it keeps to a well-defined set of limited demands in order to attract a broader audience. Thus, it should avoid “contentious” issues–such as opposition to the war in Afghanistan, or challenging racism against Arabs and Muslims or sexism in the military–and stick to calls to bring the troops home.

When it comes to reaching out to soldiers, by this reasoning, perhaps the appeal shouldn’t even be explicitly antiwar, but instead focused on first befriending and winning the trust of the troops and then gradually introducing antiwar ideas. The GI antiwar movement needs to be careful not to appear anti-military, or it might alienate pro-military troops.

The underlying argument of this approach is that the U.S., as a whole, is generally conservative–and this is precisely what needs to be reconsidered. In truth, the bulk of the U.S. population is to the left of the political establishment that claims to represent it.

The Bush administration has reached its lowest level of approval yet–25 percent, according to a CBS News report from early June. Only Richard Nixon and Harry Truman had lower approval ratings at some point in their terms–24 and 22 percent respectively.

Fully 42 percent of Americans want U.S. troops home from Iraq within a year, and 21 percent more say within two years. Only 30 percent are willing to have U.S. troops in Iraq longer than two years.

Views among U.S. military personnel and their families mirror those of the public at large. Slightly more–about a third–approve of Bush’s presidency, and slightly fewer approve of his policies to address the needs of active-duty troops and veterans, according to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll from December.

An even higher proportion of soldiers–nearly 60 percent–than the population at large want the troops home within the next year.

It’s no surprise, though, that there is still pressure on activists to moderate their demands, considering that the November elections are approaching fast.

The problem is that an electoral calculation without a genuinely antiwar candidate runs smack up against the need to build an antiwar movement capable of forcing whoever ends up in the White House to bring the troops home now.

The logic of electoral politics means taking for granted the millions of Americans who are the most thoroughly antiwar in order to win over those who are on the fence–hence the imperative to water down antiwar demands and appeal to the center to vote for Barack Obama in November.

But this strategy actually undercuts the method needed to build a vibrant antiwar movement. The antiwar movement has to be concerned with winning people to a higher level of commitment and political activity than simply voting in November.

The central problem facing the antiwar movement isn’t a lack of support at the level of ideas, but a lack of participation by the millions of Americans who agree with the demands of the movement, but don’t have any outlet for the active expression of their views.

The challenge shouldn’t be to reach all the fence-sitters, but rather to organize the unorganized on a firm political basis–so that there is a core of antiwar organizers and formations which can spearhead a building movement.

Isn’t this just “preaching to the choir”? Yes, because the problem right now is that the members of the choir aren’t getting together to sing. And it’s the singing–activism, a presence in the streets, sit-ins at congressional offices, reaching out to GIs at military bases, building GI coffeehouses, demanding better treatment for soldiers and veterans from the decrepit military health care system–that brings change.

What’s more, placing limits on the movement’s demands constrains the very process by which people learn lessons and become more politicized. The movement’s strength ultimately depends on how many people come to understand that forcing the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq will require challenging both parties’ commitment to projecting U.S. power in the Middle East.

If such discussion and activity is ruled out as an “obstacle” to the immediate needs of election-year activism, both the activity of the movement and its political development will be retarded.

At a time when people are looking for a persuasive and clear alternative to “staying the course” in Iraq, blurring what the movement stands for in order to convince the fence-sitters risks losing those who want to stand for something different, and do so at a higher level of political commitment and involvement.

Often, this argument about the threat of the movement scaring off supporters comes in a different form–that if we aren’t careful to temper what we say, the right wing will paint us as “radicals,” “extremists,” “socialists” or “relics of the ’60s.”

This isn’t the first time such ideas have been voiced, of course–and not just by activists who claim to have the movement’s interests at heart, but even more so by the political and military establishment and media commentators who have used similar slanders in attempts to tarnish every social movement that ever threatened to become an effective social force.

Such anticommunism had an impact on the struggle for civil rights, for example. In 1946, according to Michael Honey, author of Going Down Jericho Road, a book documenting Martin Luther King Jr.’s support of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike in 1968:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared that there were “two great menaces to the U.S., Russia abroad and unions at home,” and a new breed of Republicans in Congress, such as Richard Nixon, portrayed CIO unions and New Deal Democrats as part of a Communist conspiracy. Lubricated with money from right-wing oilmen in Texas and supported by segregationists across the South, the rhetoric of anticommunism throttled social change.

King rejected such attempts to divide and conquer. Speaking to the 1961 AFL-CIO convention, he said:

The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement. Together we can bring about the day when there will be no separate identification of Negroes and labor…Some will be called reds and communists merely because they believe in economic justice and the brotherhood of man. But we shall overcome.

The powers that be will always try to claim that social movements are “out of touch” with “regular” people. But the movement can’t confront this accusation by adapting to it and excluding radical and left organizations and individuals.

This will only poison the atmosphere of open debate and dialogue that sustains any healthy and growing movement–and marginalize and alienate many experienced and committed activists. And activists will never be successful in mollifying those intent on wielding such criticisms in any case–they’ll make such claims anyway.

During the U.S. war on Vietnam, the GI revolt that bloomed within the military in 1970 and 1971 effectively rendered the U.S. military ineffective as a fighting force. Only then did U.S. political and military leaders accept the obvious–that they couldn’t achieve a military victory in Vietnam, and it was time to end the bloodshed.

Building an antiwar GI movement today that can end the war will require building a similar resistance. However, if such a movement begins by settling on an antiwar, but pro-military appeal, aimed at attracting the majority of soldiers in the here and now, the end result will be a movement without an orientation capable of building an effective resistance.

There are already plenty of soldiers, albeit a minority, who are enthusiastic about organizing. A strategy aimed at building a GI movement in the long term has to appeal to such GIs in the here and now, as the first step toward attracting more supporters.

It’s worth recalling the words of the late Dave Cline, who was featured in the documentary Sir! No Sir! and was one of the GI movement’s most effective organizers in the Vietnam era.

Among soldiers, you have to make some distinctions. Some people join the military driven by some patriotic or ideological fervor to go fight, defend the country and avenge 9/11–there’s a certain section like that.

But the much larger section of people in the military joined because of what we call the poverty draft. They look at it like, “If I go into the military, I can get this college program, and I’m not going to be stuck working at McDonald’s or selling drugs.”

They see it as a way to improve themselves in society because they’re in such a low economic status. That tells you something about our society–where the main way for poor, young people to improve their lives is to go into an armed force, as opposed to a job program or other alternative. But that’s part of the reality of America today.

And when people go into war, even the most gung-ho get changed. It’s one thing to talk about fighting. It’s another thing when you have to fight, when you have to kill people, when you have to see people get killed, see your friends get killed. That changes people, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically.”

Of course, not all the gung-ho become antiwar campaigners. Some will become even more gung ho. But no one escapes unchanged, and indeed, some gung-ho troops will become antiwar activists. Even today, some already have.

For the antiwar movement, therefore, the essential point is that many people are ready to hear an uncompromising argument for immediate withdrawal. But they won’t hear it unless someone makes it. It’s up to local activists to find ways to reach this audience of millions.

Hopes are high that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will chart a new course if he wins the White House in November. But Obama has already stated that he will keep 60,000 to 80,000 troops–plus many thousands more Blackwater-type mercenaries–in Iraq for years to come.

But an Obama presidency would bring the expectation that there will be a change of direction. And if antiwar activists can organize around this sense of hope, then our movement will be better positioned to demand change–from the president and Congress, from Democrats and Republicans.

As historian Howard Zinn put it, “There’s hardly anything more important that people can learn than the fact that the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in–in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating–those are the things that determine what happens.”

The decision infuriated Afghanis. “This is too much,” said Kubra Aman, an Afghan senator from Nangarhar. “First, they say it’s a mistake, and after that, they let them go without charges.”

A United Nations spokesperson, Aleem Siddique, made the same point in more diplomatic language. “It is disappointing that no one has been held accountable for these deaths,” said Siddique. The UN “has always made clear that there must be increased transparency and accountability of all parties to this conflict if we are to retain the trust and confidence of the Afghan people.”

By contrast, the U.S. media barely noticed. For its part, the New York Times featured an article on Afghanistan a few days later celebrating a “fierce battle” by a Marine unit that drove Taliban fighters outside of the southern town of Garmser. The article referenced last March’s massacre–but not the Marines’ decision not to press charges.

Instead, the Times quoted a NATO officer talking about the “huge optimism” of the town’s residents for the operation–while downplaying the death of a 14-year-old boy and eight civilians injured during the battle, and the fact that the Marines will be moving on in a couple weeks, thus allowing the Taliban to return.

Why the media indifference? Because the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is still seen as the “good war.”

If there is one point of agreement between Republicans and Democrats, and even sections of the antiwar movement, it is that the U.S. war on Afghanistan is a legitimate response to the September 11 attacks, mainly aimed at bringing the perpetrators to justice–unlike the occupation of Iraq, which is viewed, even by sections of the Washington establishment, as “unnecessary,” “illegal” and “based on lies.”

George Bush and the Pentagon are currently weighing a “surge” of two additional brigades–about 7,000 troops–to Afghanistan. The Democrats’ likely presidential nominee Barack Obama has repeatedly spoken in favor of sending more troops to Afghanistan–he calls the occupation of Iraq a “distraction” from the war the U.S. should be fighting.

Two additional brigades would bring total American troop strength in Afghanistan to more than 40,000 and boost the proportion of U.S. soldiers from about half to two-thirds of NATO forces.

In 2007, because of an expansion of bombing campaigns on villages, deaths of Afghans topped 6,500, the largest number since the war began more than six years ago. Deaths of U.S. soldiers last year, at 110, were also up, while other nations contributing troops to NATO forces lost a combined 111.

The level of death and destruction in Afghanistan, combined with the horrible toll that the war has exacted on U.S. soldiers, including those who return alive but forever scarred by the stress of combat, should be reason enough to oppose the war in Afghanistan.

But this is only a starting point. If you look more closely at what the U.S. has done in Afghanistan and plans to do in the future, it’s clear that the rhetoric about upholding democracy and making the world safer is–as in Iraq–a smokescreen to justify pursuing imperial ambitions.

From the start, the U.S. cloaked its motivations for going to war in Afghanistan with talk about saving ordinary people in Afghanistan–in particular, women suffering abject oppression–from the rule of the Taliban.

But a few years before, the U.S. had quietly backed the ascendance of the Taliban, in the hope that the hard-line regime would impose order–and facilitate the oil corporation Unocal’s plan to build a pipeline through the country.

No doubt, some Afghans hoped the U.S. invasion would get rid of the Taliban. But those hopes turned to bitterness and resentment as the brutality of the occupation–and the savagery of the warlords that Washington has depended on to maintain its grip–became all the more evident.

As the veteran anti-imperialist and author Tariq Ali wrote:

There have been numerous incidents of rape and rough treatment of women by [NATO] soldiers, as well as indiscriminate bombing of villages and house-to-house search-and-arrest missions. The behavior of the foreign mercenaries backing up the NATO forces is just as bad. Even sympathetic observers admit that “their alcohol consumption and patronage of a growing number of brothels in Kabul…is arousing public anger and resentment.”

To this could be added the deaths by torture at the U.S.-run Bagram prison and the resuscitation of a Soviet-era security law under which detainees are being sentenced to 20-year jail terms on the basis of summary allegations by U.S. military authorities. All this creates a thirst for dignity that can only be assuaged by genuine independence.

Journalist and filmmaker John Pilger reports that members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), bitter opponents of the Taliban, make the same point.

“We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a cause in the West following September 11, 2001, when the Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America,” Marina, a member of RAWA, explained to Pilger when he visited Afghanistan. “Yes, they persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the West over the atrocious nature of the Western-backed warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorize, yet they hold seats in [U.S.-backed Hamid] Karzai’s government.

“In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you take your life into your hands.”

In time-honored fashion, the U.S. has held up a country’s terrible history of poverty, repression and inequality as the pretext for imperial aggression that only aggravates poverty, repression and inequality.

The problem is not a lack of money or troops, as George Bush and Barack Obama suggest, but the goal of the war itself. The U.S. has never sought to “liberate” Afghanistan, but to dominate it and turn it into a stable, U.S.-friendly outpost in Central Asia.

What the U.S. really wants, says Tariq Ali, is “to construct an army able to suppress its own population but incapable of defending the nation from outside powers; a civil administration with no control over planning or social infrastructure, which is in the hands of Western NGOs; and a government whose foreign policy marches in step with Washington’s.”

This explains why the U.S. government pressured Hamid Karzai into signing an agreement in May 2005 granting the U.S. the right to install a huge military presence in the country forever–over and against protests that erupted against the agreement before the ink was even dry.

U.S. policymakers understand that Afghanistan, like Iraq, is a strategic beachhead that can be used to spread Washington’s geopolitical influence throughout Central Asia.

Sometimes, they even spell this out explicitly. An essay in the NATO Review, for example, sounds more like a threat than a call for security and peace: “In the 21st century, NATO must become an alliance founded on the Euro-Atlantic area, designed to project systemic stability beyond its borders… There can be no systemic security without Asian security, and there will be no Asian security without a strong role for the West therein.”

The “humanitarian-security” case made by the U.S. establishment needs to be rejected–just as the case for the occupation of Iraq has been rejected as a pack of lies to justify Washington’s drive to control oil resources and project its power throughout the Middle East.

Fighting that broke out first in Basra in southern Iraq in April, between the Mahdi Army of Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr and the Iraqi government backed up by U.S. forces, has spread elsewhere around the country–in particular, to the massive Sadr City neighborhood on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Michael Schwartz is the author of a forthcoming book War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context, to be published later this year by Haymarket Books. He talked to Eric Ruder about how to make sense of the current situation in Iraq.

Eric Ruder: According to the Pentagon, last year’s surge produced a period of relative calm in Iraq that has now come to an end. What’s the reason for the recent escalation of U.S. operations?

Michael Schwartz: The surge ended last summer, and the U.S. then began a new strategy of making alliances and tacit or explicit ceasefires with the Sunni insurgents on one side and the Mahdi Army on the other.

Even American policymakers are admitting that much of this decline in the fighting is the result of those two developments–the ceasefires with the insurgents, which they named the Concerned Citizens Groups, and the ceasefire with the Sadrists.

The latter was announced as a unilateral ceasefire by the Sadrists, but it wasn’t. The Sadrists said they weren’t going to put up strong resistance to incursions into their areas, and what the U.S. then did was stop the strong incursions. The U.S. would go in and look for certain people, but they didn’t do house-to-house searches with long lists of suspected Mahdis.

As a result, a lot of the violence declined–because most of the violence in Iraq has always been the result of American patrols, incursions and attacks on various areas of the country controlled by the resistance.

So the decline in violence was actually a result of the abandoning of the strategy of the surge, which initially had involved huge formations of American troops–supported by as many Iraqis as they could find to fight with them, which was always a limited number.

By last summer, they backed off and sought formal and informal ceasefires. All along, people who watched the situation closely said the calm that followed these ceasefires was unstable. Most of the commentators I read, such as Pepe Escobar, spotted it right away. A lot of mainstream reporters even–beyond Patrick Cockburn–were saying that this was a very tense situation.

No one even wanted to call it a peace. They said it was a ceasefire, a truce, an armed truce–in which each area was controlled by militias. And the one thing that unites all of these militias is they have a deep hatred for the government, and–at the least–a deep suspicion of the Americans, if not a deep hatred.

On the other side, the American military was very well aware that these forces were not going to be their long-term allies, that this was a temporary situation. They knew that at some point, they would have to do something that would allow the U.S. occupation–or the Iraqi government that is the client of the U.S. occupation–to go in and actually control these areas, rather than allow them to be controlled by either the Shia insurgents, mostly the Mahdis, or the Sunni insurgents, now being called the Concerned Citizens Groups, the Awakening Councils, or the Sahwa.

There was always this instability, and it seemed only a matter of time before one side might break the truce, or the U.S. would make its move to try to “pacify” the country as a whole.

The offensive against the Sadrists in Basra was something that may well have been planned. There’s some convincing evidence that the U.S. and the Iraqi government had agreed to carry out a military attack on Basra.

When the offensive began, there were complaints by the U.S. that the Iraqi government went in without U.S. permission. If you look closely at it, though, U.S. military officials were saying they really were involved, because they did the logistics, they did the artillery, they had the tanks, and they had advisors with every group that went in there. But they had thought this attack was going to take place sometime later, and it hadn’t been fully planned at the time it took place, which may, in fact, be true.

What was the attack about? Juan Cole had an excellent article at the time of the attack, and he wasn’t saying anything that other people weren’t saying, but he expressed it beautifully. He said that what we were seeing was a military attempt to prevent the loss of an election in October.

In Basra province, Maysan province and probably several other provinces in the south, the Sadrists were poised to win, and win overwhelmingly, in the upcoming provincial elections. They were going to oust both the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Dawa from any kind of leadership positions in these local provinces–and especially in Basra, which controls the oil port and is the location of the largest functioning oilfields.

This created the prospect of a transition from a local government that was ambivalent toward the American occupation, though quite hostile to the central government, to a local government that was hostile to both the Americans and the central government.

This new leadership would call for the U.S. to leave as soon as possible and for a complete change in the national government, both in terms of personnel and the policies the national government was pursuing–and not just the policy of being allied with the U.S., but also of supporting the further weakening of the federal government, the privatization of oil and other key issues.

The military invasion of Basra was designed to prevent this election from handing over power in the Basra province to essentially insurgent forces.

What happened in the course of the battle, however, was that the Iraqi troops either abandoned the fight, went over to the Sadrists or were routed, depending on which units you look at. Pretty soon, it was turning from a situation that was supposed to clean out the Sadrists to a situation in which the Sadrists were expanding their control in Basra and in new areas, and proving once again that they’re really the key Iraqi fighting force in the country as a whole.

The U.S. and Britain both joined the cause, brought their troops in, carried out heavy bombing and annihilated key areas of the city, “rubble-izing” them in the tradition of Falluja. It turned into another U.S. attack on an Iraqi city, the results of which were mass devastation and huge numbers of casualties.

At this point, lower-level administrators in the Maliki government intervened by going to the Iranians to ask them to mediate a ceasefire. The Iranians agreed, and the negotiations took place in Iran behind the Americans’ back.

The resulting agreement was that the Sadrists would say that they weren’t going to fight anymore, in exchange for the Iraqi government and the U.S. ending their attempt to capture the city militarily and suspending door-to-door searches for Mahdi Army people in Basra.

It’s hard to tell what’s going on in Basra right now. There are some reports that there are still some attempts to rout the Mahdis out of their strongholds. But my hunch is that not much of that is going on, and the final result of all this is that Basra is both still sympathetic to (and fundamentally under the leadership of) the Mahdis in many areas of the city–enough so that the Mahdi Army can lay claim to citywide leadership as soon as there is the possibility for it.

Part of what happened in Basra is that the Mahdis organized uprisings in various parts of the country, because that’s the traditional guerrilla way of fighting back against a full-scale assault–try to take advantage of all the other areas where you can fight, while trying to melt into the population where you face overwhelming military strength.

As the fighting subsided in Basra, the U.S. and its Iraqi allies decided they were going to try to finally mount an offensive against the strongest and most powerfully organized Sadrist area of the country, which is Sadr City in Baghdad.

The U.S. invaded Sadr City–they tried to come from all sides, but they eventually settled on invading from the south towards the north. Now, they’re trying to separate off a section of Sadr City using cement barriers and there’s an ongoing battle.

Within that battle, it’s pretty clear that, as usual, the Iraqi troops sent to fight with the Americans have been inadequate, and many of them have handed over their weapons to the Sadrists. Some of them have gone over and begun to fight for the Sadrists, but in general, the Iraqi units have collapsed.

Of course, the Americans always have overwhelming firepower and therefore can win any particular battle, and as a result, they have marched into Sadr City and begun to erect these huge cement barriers, which have become so commonplace in Baghdad.

These barriers are really critical because they make the area that’s surrounded into a social and economic basket case. It’s impossible for people to carry on their lives. People can’t visit their relatives, kids can’t go to school, people can’t get jobs, food has difficulty getting in and out, and you can’t run a business inside these walls unless all the supplies and all the customers for the business are also inside the walls, which is almost never the case.

You get a drastic economic situation. So, as bad as things are in Sadr City, this will make them magnitudes worse.

U.S. forces are trying to put up the wall and protect it, and the Sadrists are trying to knock it down.

The Sadrists’ goal in doing this is twofold. One, they’re protecting people inside the community from the economic destitution that these walls create. Two, they’re protecting themselves militarily, because if the wall is successfully erected, then a house-to-house search means the U.S. can find all the fighting-age men, presume them to be Mahdis and effectively wipe out the community–because they will detain or kill these people.

Then the community will be made up of what the U.S. press calls “civilians.” “Civilians” are kids too young to fight, women, and men too old to fight. The rest are presumed “insurgents.” That’s what the fight in Sadr City is about from the Sadrists’ side.

ER: What does the fighting mean in terms of the Iraqi capacity to resist the U.S. occupation? Has the U.S. offensive enhanced the influence of Sadr, who is probably the most consistent opponent to the occupation?

MS: Ironically, I think that those of us who oppose the war and think a lot about it tend to underestimate the power of the American military. We’ve seen the American military defeated or at least frustrated so many times in Iraq that you begin to assume the Iraqi people, and the armed resistance in particular, will never give up and can never be defeated.

I think we have to be cautious about that, because each new offensive carries a degree of devastation that is very hard to get your mind around. The kinds of things that are happening to people in Sadr City, as miserable as they have been before and after the invasion, are horrible.

Their shelters are being destroyed, and large numbers of refugees are exiting from those areas. The level of misery is tremendous, and it could be that this kind of onslaught will eventually drain the willingness of people to stand up to the American military. I don’t exclude that possibility.

Even now, there’s still a very strong resistance in Falluja, but what the U.S. did to Falluja also inflicted a terrible price. As we look at this being applied now to Sadr City, you have to ask how much the Iraqi people can stand.

But at the same time, the reverse of what I said is also true. Once you get a few weeks or months past them, each of these events appears to have strengthened the Sadrists.

The Sadrists have consistently argued that nothing good can happen until the Americans are out of the country. They’re the most consistent nationalist leadership in Iraq. These events strengthen them because as the Shia become more disillusioned with the Maliki government, the place they go is to the Sadrists, who have a long history of standing up to tyranny.

What’s taking place also strengthens the possibility of an alliance between the Sunni insurgency and the Shia insurgency against the American presence. I think it makes it somewhat more possible, but there are still divisions that keep them apart.

There was a very interesting and positive meeting between Sahwa leaders (mainly Sunni) and Shia leaders (mainly Sadrists) to talk about a united platform for the removal of the current government and its replacement by a nationalist one, in favor of a strong government in two ways–reversing federal decentralization and directing the use of resources to reconstruct the country, and in favor of expelling the United States.

This was back in January, but nothing came of it. Similar meetings have happened in the past, but the beginnings haven’t developed into ongoing collaboration.

In 2006, there was an orgy of sectarianism going on in Baghdad, and the Sunnis were really getting wiped out. This resulted in Baghdad basically becoming a Shia city under the leadership of the Sadrists.

In the midst of all that, the Sahwas or Awakening Groups–which are basically insurgent groups, although they weren’t active insurgent groups everywhere–finally decided they had to do something about the jihadists in their ranks who combine Sunni fundamentalism with the tactics of al-Qaeda.

They had always been uncomfortable with the jihadists, considered them a cancer in their communities and often fought with them.

As early as 2004 in Falluja, these insurgent groups had reached out to the U.S. to help them with this project. They went to the U.S. military leadership and said, “Don’t attack us. If your problem is Zarqawi, we’ll get his group out of Falluja–expel them, even deliver them to you if you want–in exchange for not attacking us.” And the U.S. military replied, “Absolutely not, you’re as much an enemy as Zarqawi, maybe more.”

But by the middle of 2007, with the surge accomplishing primarily an increase in violence and the level of resistance rising during the preceding months, the U.S. began to listen to what some of its generals had been saying earlier: “Why don’t we make this deal with the Sahwas? We’ll get a ceasefire and get rid of the jihadists, and then we only have the insurgents to deal with.”

They started in small areas of Anbar province, making deals with the Awakening forces. The deal was very simple–an armed truce where the insurgents would be given control of areas that they already essentially controlled. Instead of the U.S. sending armed patrols in there, looking for insurgents, busting down doors, fighting battles and bombing buildings where they met resistance, the U.S. would leave these communities alone.

The U.S. said, “If patrols do go in, they won’t be looking for anybody, just wandering around. They won’t arrest or attack your people, and they won’t invite you to attack by breaking down doors. We’ll be peaceful, if you’ll be peaceful.”

In exchange, what the insurgents had to do was: first, make sure their communities weren’t headquarters for jihadist attacks on Shia; and second, not carry out offensives against U.S. military bases, which are usually located on the outskirts of these cities.

The insurgents had been shelling the bases with rocket-propelled grenades and ambushing American convoys on the highways with improvised explosive devices. If they would stop all this and get control of their communities, the U.S. would pay them $300 a month to be the local cops, which they were anyway.

So from the Awakening’s point of view, this was a great victory. Now, the biggest problem they had in their lives, which was the U.S. coming in and blowing up their homes and arresting everyone, was going to end. They took the deal.

It started with a few American generals cutting deals in a few areas. Then it became U.S. policy and was exported to the Baghdad area. The Awakening groups never stopped saying that they absolutely hate and detest the Iraqi government, but they stopped saying that the number-one priority was to get the U.S. out of Iraq. They continued to say that the U.S. is our enemy, but they backed off their campaign to expel the U.S. as soon as possible.

The question is whether the Sahwas are ready to make an alliance with the Sadrists, who have as their primary goal to expel the U.S. I don’t know the answer to that, and I haven’t seen any informed reporting on it.

I do know that the Awakening Groups have repeatedly had major complaints with the way the Americans treat them and even bigger complaints about the Iraqi government. There’s no sense that there’s some kind of peaceful situation developing. It’s incredibly tense.

But whether they’re willing to form an official alliance with the Sadrists who are clearly fighting the U.S. on a daily basis is a real question.

ER: In recent weeks, the Bush administration has again stepped up its rhetoric against Iran, claiming that it is a sponsor of the fighting in Iraq and Lebanon. Do you think that we’re on the threshold of an even more dangerous phase of the U.S.-driven conflict in the Middle East?

MS: I think we might be at a very dangerous moment precisely because Iran hasn’t gotten strong enough to really deter the U.S., but they will be soon. The Bush administration, especially certain leaders in it, will argue that if the U.S. doesn’t do it now, it can never be done.

I think that may be an explanation for why there is so much saber-rattling going on and over the last few months. But that said, it does seem that the people who think that an attack on Iran would be counterproductive are in the ascendancy at the moment, according to most reporters from inside the Beltway who have a clear lens.

We know some of the personalities here. Clearly, Dick Cheney is the highest-ranking leader of the “attack Iran” faction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is probably the most important character in the “don’t attack Iran” fraction, though sometimes, he seems to waver.

As recently as mid-May, Gates made a statement that “We think we can negotiate with Iran about many issues.” At the same time, Bush implied the opposite two days later, and they fired the head of Centcom because he made the statement that the United States wouldn’t attack, and it would be a military mistake to do so.

We can tell from the fact that they’re going back and forth in this way that there are very powerful people in the administration on both sides.

My best understanding is that they all would love to attack Iran, but many think it’s a bad strategic idea at this time. They basically want regime change in Iran, along with a whole set of changed policies on Iran’s side with regard to oil, economics in general and Middle Eastern politics. They want a dramatic transformation of Iran’s behavior that a mere change in the leadership wouldn’t accomplish.

They want to do something dramatic. They feel Iran is gaining in strength and developing more deterrence against a U.S. attack, so they feel an urgency to act soon. But it looks like such an attack would only result in a further weakening of the American position in the Middle East as a whole, and in Iraq specifically. There would be a tremendous Shia uprising in Iraq, among other things, in response to a U.S. attack on Iran.

So they’re in a terrible bind here. They seem to have accomplished what Juan Cole several years ago said: By attacking Iraq, they created in Iran a regional powerhouse that they thought the invasion of Iraq would prevent.

This is one of those fabulous contradictions that sometimes occurs in international affairs. Whatever the Bush administration does in an attempt to weaken Iran actually strengthens Iran instead. This is another round–the attack on Basra, which ends up bringing Iran into the picture as a mediating force between their client government and the rebels.

And just think of how this plays with the rest of the countries in the Middle East. It looks like Iran is rescuing the U.S.

It’s an amazing situation, and they still haven’t come up with any formulation that allows them to develop any real leverage over Iran.

For hundreds of injured soldiers at Fort Drum in Watertown, N.Y., the process of getting discharged from the military is a rollercoaster ride of emotions. Being reunited with loved ones lies just around the corner, but then there’s the challenge of readjusting to civilian life while bearing the scars–physical and emotional–of war.

Since March of last year, soldiers at Fort Drum have faced an additional burden–trying to navigate the maze of military red tape surrounding disability benefits, without the help of officials from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

A disability rating of 30 percent or more entitles a wounded soldier to annual payments and care after being discharged. But last year, Army officials told VA employees to stop helping injured soldiers fill out paperwork that determines their all-important disability rating, according to a story broken by Ari Shapiro of National Public Radio (NPR) in late January.

Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker initially denounced the NPR report as a falsehood and said that no Army official had told the VA to end its practice of advising soldiers on their paperwork. A few days later, he issued an apology for the Army saying precisely that–and said that the VA can continue to assist soldiers.

The uproar around the situation at Fort Drum fits into a wider pattern of bureaucratic neglect and military penny-pinching at the expense of injured soldiers.

Early last year, media exposés revealed that wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Hospital–the military’s flagship medical facility–were living in vermin-infested quarters and wrestling with impenetrable red tape while they tried to recover from life-altering battle injuries.

Many soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health conditions have to fight to get their conditions recognized by the military. They are returning home to grapple with unemployment, substance abuse and even suicide.

The military even tried to court-martial GIs who seek but fail to receive proper treatment for their mental health conditions–and decide that they have no option but to go absent without leave in order to preserve their own sanity.

Shapiro’s report featured a soldier–whose voice was electronically altered to preserve his anonymity–saying that a VA official who briefed a room full of soldiers at Fort Drum about their disability benefits said, “We cannot help you review the narrative summaries of your medical problems.”

This new directive to VA officials came on the heels of a visit to Fort Drum by an Army “Tiger Team”–the term the Army uses for an ad-hoc group of investigators–sent to determine why soldiers at Fort Drum were receiving higher disability ratings than those from other bases.

The Army’s instruction to the VA–and the VA’s decision to abide by it even though the Army has no policy barring individuals or groups from helping soldiers review or revise their narrative summaries during the 10-day window allowed for reviewing the paperwork–shocked the soldier who spoke to Shapiro.

“If the VA is doing an outstanding job in this one particular area, why not make that army-wide and military-wide, so everybody benefits from that, instead of restraining one group that is excelling to lower the standard back to where the rest of the military is?” the soldier said.

“To be tossed aside like a worn-out pair of boots is pretty disheartening. I always believed that the Army would take care of me if I did the best that I could, and I’ve done that. It’s kind of a slap in the face to find out otherwise after all this time.”

But the Army’s motivation is as plain as it is callous–if injured soldiers get higher disability ratings, the military has to devote more of its budget to disability payments.

A soldier’s narrative summary of his or her medical issues is crucial, according to Tod Ensign, director of the GI advocacy group Citizen Soldier, which founded the Different Drummer Café, a GI coffeehouse near Fort Drum.

“Certain keywords qualify or disqualify soldiers to receive certain benefit levels,” Ensign said in an interview. “You only get what’s called severance pay from the Army based on amount of time served. So if you are injured and rated at 29 percent, that means about $3,000 in severance pay and no long-term disability pay.”

Ensign is helping several soldiers at Fort Drum file a request for a service-wide Court of Inquiry under Article 135 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice–the same regulation used by GIs during the Vietnam War to request a hearing into the My Lai massacre.

“Here, where you have thousands of injured soldiers, and you’ve got this policy interfering with their right to get help from the VA, there needs to be an Army-wide investigation because the command should not be allowed to investigate itself,” Ensign said. “You don’t have to be an active-duty soldier to sign such an article. So former members of the military can also sign on to a request for an Article 135 hearing.”

Ensign believes such a hearing is critical to determining “how widespread this problem is. How many people have been denied disability ratings that they would have otherwise been rewarded?”

The experience of Adrienne Kinne, who served in the Army from 1994 to 2004 and is now northeast regional coordinator of Iraq Veterans Against the War, illustrates why a broader inquiry is urgently needed.

“When I left active duty for the first time in 1998, it was standard operating procedure that when I was out-processing, somebody from the VA sat down with me one-on-one and went through my entire medical history,” said Kinne, who is also a VA employee, but doesn’t speak on the VA’s behalf.

“He had my medical files and went through them page for page, and helped me determine what I was able to file for and what I couldn’t. This happened with every soldier discharged from Fort Gordon, where I was stationed at that time.”

A few years later, Kinne says, things were very different.

“When I was activated after 9/11, I was stationed again at Fort Gordon, but standard operating procedure had changed because there were so many people being out-processed, all at the same time,” she said.

“I think the problem comes when you mobilize entire units and then demobilize entire units, and you have hundreds or thousands of soldiers being out-processed at the same time. As a result, they just don’t have the personnel necessary to work with soldiers one-on-one.

“And because so many soldiers are being wounded and deeply affected because of these wars, the VA budget has never been up to par. They have never increased it. They never planned for caring for soldiers after the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I think as a result, they are basically trying to deny soldiers their full benefits as a means to make money stretch further.”

One reason why Schoomaker retracted his criticism of the NPR report is a four-page document written by one of the VA officials at Fort Drum who attended the March meeting with the Army Tiger Team.

NPR’s Shapiro presented Schoomaker with the internal memo, which clearly states that an Army colonel told the VA staff at the meeting that VA support for soldiers filling out their paperwork is “a conflict of interest,” though the nature of the “conflict” is not spelled out.

The memo also notes that one purpose of the Tiger Team visit was to “ensure that there are no other ‘Walter Reed’ situations at other Army installations.” The Army had good reason to be concerned.

The memo quotes Rosie Taylor–who at the time was Fort Drum’s Disability Program manager and has since retired–saying she witnessed incidents of injured soldiers at Fort Drum “having to drag themselves up and down the hallways, as the barracks were not handicapped or wheelchair accessible.”

Taylor also told the story of a “soldier found in the barracks who had been bedridden for three days without a change of clothing or meals.” And she described the general disrepair of the medical-hold barracks, including “non-functional furnaces, shared shower facilities, poor insulation, etc.”

In an interview with NPR, Taylor said that before the scandal documenting the harrowing conditions at Walter Reed, no one took any interest in her repeated requests for improving conditions for wounded soldiers at Fort Drum.

“Every time I walked into a meeting before, it was like, ‘Oh my God, there goes $70,000,’” Taylor told NPR. “And after Walter Reed hit the fan, it was like I was getting phone calls, ‘Rosie, we’re doing over a building, and we need your advice on access.’”

The signature injury of the U.S. war on Iraq is traumatic brain injury (TBI)–typically the result of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) going off.

Diagnosing TBI presents many challenges, and such injuries can also delay the onset or mask the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. What’s more, the military often seeks to disqualify soldiers suffering from PTSD from receiving service-connected disability benefits–by attributing their symptoms to supposedly pre-existing “personality disorders.”

In the opinion of many advocates for soldiers suffering these conditions, the military and the VA have a long way to go to address their injuries.

“The VA has not implemented ways to properly screen for and treat TBI,” according to Kinne. “The military is not screening for it, and they are sending people back out again and again who have been exposed to concussive forces. This makes it more likely for them to miss cues in the field that means they could be exposed to additional IED blasts.”

Given the complexities of such issues, it should be obvious that soldiers urgently need help navigating the military bureaucracy that stands between them and the benefits they deserve.

The Army has been embarrassed by the media disclosures about the hundreds of Fort Drum soldiers who have had to wade through the system on their own since last March. “If anyone out there feels that they didn’t get the best advice, they need to come forward and let us know about that,” Schoomaker told reporters–implying that there may be help for soldiers who already received a disability rating that may be too low.

But judging from the years it took to force the military to properly compensate veterans of the Vietnam era, as well as the military’s ongoing disregard for wounded soldiers, it will require sustained organizing to hold Schoomaker to his word–for the wounded at Fort Drum and at bases across the country.

Today, Sgt. Gaskins’ life is in tatters. His dreams are haunted by visions of the dead bodies he saw in Iraq, he wakes from his nightmares drenched in sweat, his heart races, his mouth goes dry, he trembles, he has flashbacks, he feels cold.

And to make matters worse, two officers from the military’s Criminal Investigative Division and two local police arrested and handcuffed Gaskins on November 14 for going AWOL–hours before he was to voluntarily surrender to authorities at Fort Drum in Watertown, N.Y., and hours after base officials assured his civilian attorney he would be “treated sympathetically.”

Gaskins has been diagnosed with exceptionally severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression, according to an independent evaluation by civilian therapist Rosemary Masters. Another civilian doctor and two military doctors have also diagnosed PTSD.

What you can do Activists in the Watertown, N.Y., area will gather at the Different Drummer Café outside of Fort Drum on December 6 at 6:30 p.m. for a town hall meeting on PTSD.

During Gaskins’ first tour in Iraq, he eagerly served as part of the Third Infantry Division, the spearhead of the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Gaskins thought himself lucky to have a chance to serve his country. Then he began encountering the badly burned bodies of Iraqi victims of the U.S. military’s “shock and awe” bombing raids.

He still can’t shake those images from his head. During his evaluation with Masters, according to medical records, he confessed, “I hate to talk about it. I can see a picture as clear as if it was yesterday. I have it playing in my head right now. Am I crazy?”

Gaskins’ unit was assigned the grizzly task of burying the bodies of the Iraqi dead. “He had found this assignment very disturbing,” writes Masters in her evaluation. “Bulldozers were used to push the bodies into mass graves. The bodies would fall apart, the smell was unforgettable.”

“He felt badly that the bodies were treated with such disrespect,” she continued. “There was no effort made to identify the dead so that their families could know what happened to them. He was expected to handle many of the dead bodies which were significantly decayed and often ‘oozing goop’ onto the ground.”

In a phone interview, Gaskins explained that he was supposed to “to pick up these same people we just killed–pick up their bodies and search them for intelligence information. That was kind of hard, being young. And still, I did my job.”

When he returned from his second tour in February 2006, he sought treatment for his mental health issues on base, but Fort Drum has only 12 licensed mental health professionals for some 17,000 soldiers and their families.

Gaskins quickly discovered that he couldn’t get the treatment at Fort Drum he knew he needed. What’s more, the sights and sounds of the base–people in uniform, Army vehicles, the sound of gunfire–triggered his muscles to tense up, his heart to race and an unbearable level of anxiety.

“The hospital at Fort Drum doesn’t have adequate professionals to take care of people with PTSD,” said Gaskins. “I’ve seen it myself. Their waiting room is full. They can’t provide quality care, and they don’t even have an in-patient mental health facility. They have to contract with a civilian hospital outside the base to provide that kind of service.

“I would spend maybe 25 to 30 minutes in an appointment, they would give me medications and send me on my way. Even when I had an appointment, nothing was guaranteed–two times they called me and told me that my appointment had to be rescheduled. I’m a seven-year Army veteran, and I’ve been deployed four times [twice to Iraq, once to Kuwait and once to Kosovo]. If that doesn’t warrant A-1 quality health care, then I don’t know what does.”

So in early 2006, Gaskins went absent without leave (AWOL) to get treatment. He also contacted Tod Ensign, director of the GI rights group Citizen Soldier, for advice about how to fight the military’s disregard for his mental health–and its effort to criminally prosecute him for seeking care.

Ensign helped bring publicity to Gaskins’ plight, lining up interviews with media outlets and getting the story told in the New York Times and an Associated Press report.

Already, the media scrutiny has produced results. The military was forced to transfer Gaskins from Fort Drum to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., which is far better equipped to diagnose and medically evaluate soldiers suffering from combat-related mental health disorders.

For active-duty troops returning from a combat tour, the military’s mental health screening amounts to handing a soldier a questionnaire to fill out–and a strong inducement to minimize or conceal potential problems.

As Ensign explains, “They give you this mental health survey form, and if you don’t write ‘no’ on everything, they tell you that you will be flagged, possibly delayed in separating from the military and in reuniting from your family in order to ‘carry out further evaluation’ of your condition.

“So there’s a heavy disincentive to honestly report whether you’ve been having flashbacks, troubling thoughts of any kind, bouts of hyper-alertness and so on.”

Once a soldier is no longer active duty and becomes a veteran, they enter a new bureaucratic tangle.

“In the veterans’ health system, 400,000 claims are pending right now,” explains Ensign. “There are severe shortages of resources all around. About a month ago, the New York Times reported that mental health is the second-largest disease category they are dealing with now.

“They admit they are treating 100,000 people right now, and half of those are PTSD diagnoses. But the Pentagon reports that only 30,000 people have been injured in the war. This is ridiculous! I’d say if you have a PTSD diagnosis, you’ve been injured. The whole system is incapable of meeting the needs of these soldiers. It’s that simple.

“If Bechtel, General Dynamics and Kellogg Brown and Root could figure out a way to make a buck off of PTSD, you might see that change. But right now, the battle for dollars is being fought for and won by the heavy hitting, politically connected, massive Fortune 100 defense contractors, and there isn’t much left at the end of the day for expenditures on soldiers’ needs.”

Those needs will only increase as the war drags on. According to a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 20.3 percent of active-duty troops and an astonishing 42.4 percent of reservists and National Guard personnel were identified as needing mental health treatment.

In other words, there are hundreds of thousands of veterans who need treatment from a system that is already strained to the breaking point.

That’s why Brad Gaskins feels a duty to speak up even as he struggles to put his own life back together. “I’m not doing this for myself, I’m doing this for the other soldiers out there that need help, who maybe are embarrassed or who fear their command or other repercussions,” Gaskins says.

“The military teaches you to be tough and stand up for things, and I’m a sergeant in the U.S. Army, and I’m going to do just that. Even though I’m not well, I still remember that drive to be the best and to take care of soldiers, and that’s what I am doing now.”

To help publicize Gaskins’ case and the larger crisis in the military’s medical system, Ensign plans to hold a town meeting on PTSD at the Different Drummer Café outside of Fort Drum, on December 6 at 6:30 p.m.

Ensign hopes that Iraq Veterans Against the War and other local antiwar groups will help publicize the event–and lend their voices to what must become a growing campaign to make sure the military can’t get away with putting a new generation of U.S. war veterans through the hell of war, only to abandon them when they return home.

Yet the antiwar movement had its largest mobilization before the war began, and more recent demonstrations have been smaller than those held several years previously, before public opinion had turned dramatically against the occupation.

On February 15, 2003, a few weeks before the invasion, as many as 1 million people marched through the streets of New York City–part of a weekend of protests worldwide that involved 10 million people in 600 cities.

Two and a half years later, on September 24, 2005, some 300,000 people marched in Washington at an event organized jointly by the two main national antiwar coalitions–United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER).

This fall, however, the antiwar movement has fragmented between competing calls for demonstrations. ANSWER’s Washington protest on September 15 drew just 10,000 people, and UFPJ didn’t even call a national demonstration, opting instead for regional mobilizations on October 27.

Why does the antiwar movement today seem weaker and more divided now, even though antiwar sentiment is stronger? And what can be done to take the struggle forward?

One reason has to do with the general political period in which today’s antiwar movement has developed.

Mainstream U.S. politics still bears the scars of a decades-long conservative dominance that began with the Reagan presidency in the 1980s. While opinion polls reflect a shift to the left in consciousness on key political questions, the level of social struggle has remained low, and the left is substantially weakened–both organizationally and in terms of its ideas–from the high points of the 1960s.

The movement against the Vietnam War grew up in a very different environment. It benefited enormously from the political atmosphere created by the 1960s civil rights movement.

Antiwar activists had the positive example to follow of building local grassroots organizing centers, which could feed into larger national efforts. The lunch counter sit-ins and integrated Freedom Rides showed the strength of combining civil disobedience tactics with mass action.

Also, civil rights activists found that they had to rely on their own strength as a movement instead of putting their hopes in politicians–because they were confronting a Jim Crow establishment in the South run by the Democratic Party, just as antiwar activists came up against a war run by the Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.

The civil rights struggle served as a model for how to organize and a setting for learning important political lessons. And above all, its success gave rise to the conviction that struggle did work.

Today’s antiwar movement needs to relearn those lessons, but doesn’t have anything like this kind of immediate experience to guide it.

Thus, when the U.S. government defied the massive protests of February 15, 2003 and launched the invasion of Iraq anyway, many of those who demonstrated drew the wrong conclusion that protest didn’t work–for the simple reason that there were no contemporary examples of a sustained, effective and grassroots movement to look to.

The process of rebuilding the antiwar movement has also been hampered by the weaknesses of the leading forces within it.

In its call for regional mobilizations on October 27, UFPJ stated: “To force a decisive change in government policy, we have to make the antiwar majority more active, more visible, more difficult to ignore. We have to stand up vigorously against the cynicism that says: there is nothing we can do.”

In reality, the sense that “there is nothing we can do” exists among UFPJ member organizations as a symptom of the coalition’s disorientation–to which leaders of UFPJ contributed by retreating from talk of a national mobilization this fall, and setting October 27 as a date for regional mobilizations, with Washington D.C. conspicuously absent from the list.

Meanwhile, the other main national antiwar group, ANSWER, has also found itself at a dead end. It has continued to make calls for national protests, but they are smaller and smaller.

ANSWER’s problems stem from its top-down methods that exclude other antiwar forces. Few individuals or organizations outside its core want to work with it–no more so now after ANSWER’s sponsoring organization Workers World split into competing groups.

The mood was very different after the Democrats took control of Congress in the November 2006 elections.

UFPJ had kept a low profile before the 2006 vote–as in 2004, when it rejected holding an explicitly antiwar mobilization, instead joining protests against the Republican National Convention in New York City, while tailoring its message to fit in with the pro-war campaign of John Kerry.

Nevertheless, the Democrats’ victory was seen by UFPJ as a vindication of its strategy of “[building] a bipartisan peace bloc in Congress that can set the date for troop withdrawal and force Bush and the Pentagon to end the occupation,” Judith Le Blanc, a UFPJ national co-chair and leader of the Communist Party USA, wrote in the People’s Weekly World.

But this strategy makes the movement a hostage to the politicians. Thus, when the “peace bloc in Congress” caved last May and voted for the Bush administration’s demand for $120 billion in war funding, the renewed confidence of UFPJ activists turned to demoralization. At the UFPJ national assembly in July, delegates expressed a sense of isolation, despite the reinvigoration of local activism following the November election.

Many activists felt betrayed by the Democrats’ failure to stand up to the Bush administration, but UFPJ’s failed strategic orientation–of tailoring its activities and mobilizations to a Democratic Congress it expects to at least limit, if not end, the Bush administration’s ability to prosecute the war–remained unexamined and unchanged.

The problem has emerged in an even more extreme form locally in Chicago. To plan the October 27 protest, the UFPJ affiliate Chicagoans Against War and Injustice (CAWI) held invitation-only organizing meetings that excluded other antiwar organizations.

The movement was presented with an already decided plan for a demonstration that included a speaking invitation for Chicago Mayor Richard Daley–an insult to the hundreds of antiwar marchers illegally arrested by Daley’s police on the first night of the war in 2003, and anyone who faced the intimidation tactics of riot cops at protests since.

CAWI leader Carl Davidson, a former figure in Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, not only defended the invitation to Daley, but argued that the antiwar movement in general, and the left in particular, needed to “set certain things aside” in order to build alliances with Democrats and even Republicans willing to go against the Bush White House.

What is the antiwar movement expected to set aside? Essentially, anything that the politicians might object to–even if that means conceding on basic demands for an immediate and complete U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

This is the exact wrong way to go about trying to end the war. The key is building a strong grassroots movement, independent of both the Democrats and Republicans, with the power to force the politicians of both parties to abandon their support for the war.

This understanding is especially important now as leaders of the Democratic Party prepare not to end the war but “take it over” from the Bush administration after the 2008 election. At a recent debate, all three of the party’s top presidential contenders–Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards–refused to say they would have withdrawn U.S. troops from Iraq after a full four years in office.

The emphasis of the antiwar movement shouldn’t be on alliances made at the top of the political system in “building a bipartisan peace bloc in Congress,” in LeBlanc’s words–but on building a struggle from below.

That, after all, is the lesson of the 1960s and ’70s struggles–that mass action at the grassroots compelled both Democrats like Lyndon Johnson and Republicans like Richard Nixon to answer to the demands of the social struggle.

What’s needed now is a focus on building local bases of antiwar activism around basic points of unity. These local formations–at colleges and high schools, in neighborhoods and cities, on military bases and in workplaces–provide the best way to help people overcome their sense of isolation, in activities like teach-ins, speakouts and pickets, that bring opponents of the war together. And these local bases in turn can serve as the building blocks for larger national events.

The guiding principles for the movement can be simple and straightforward–like the three demands of Iraq Veterans Against the War: immediate withdrawal; a commitment to health care and other services for returning veterans; and payment of reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage inflicted by the U.S. occupation.

Strategically, the movement needs to understand that three inter-related ingredients are required to end the war–the resistance of Iraqis to the occupation, a domestic antiwar movement stepping up the pressure at home, and a revolt of U.S. soldiers that can undermine the ability of the U.S. to continue the war effort.

The interplay of these elements ended the U.S. war in Vietnam. Today, there is no shortcut to building an antiwar movement that again helps bring these different dimensions together.

In an editorial, the “liberal” New York Times set the tone, denouncing Ahmadinejad as “loathsome” for “his call to wipe Israel off the map and his country’s sponsorship of terrorism. Equally loathsome is Iran’s denial of basic civil rights to its citizens, including the right of free speech.”

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger did the Times one better by introducing Ahmadinejad to a campus audience as a “showing all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.”

But that wasn’t enough to satisfy New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and New York City Council member David Weprin. The two Democrats have threatened to withhold millions of dollars in public funds from Columbia University for inviting Ahmadinejad at all.

Only a few media outlets caught the irony of politicians threatening Columbia’s finances for inviting Ahmadinejad to speak–while denouncing the Iranian president for his disregard for free speech.

New York’s tabloid newspapers denounced Ahmadinejad as a “monster” and the “new Hitler” in giant headlines, and others in the press repeated the Bush administration’s claim that Iran’s nuclear energy program is aimed at producing nuclear weapons.

Further down the media food chain, Greg Gutfeld, host of the show Redeye on Fox News, wrote: “So the foul-smelling fruitbat Ahmadinejad spoke at that crack house known as Columbia University.”

Nowhere in the media was there any serious examination of the allegations made against Iran–nor any questioning of the larger U.S. aims at work in the demonization of Ahmadinejad.

Nuclear weapons

Politicians and media commentators almost universally treated Ahmadinejad as a nuclear maniac intent on obtaining weapons of mass destruction.

But Iran has only insisted on its right to develop a nuclear energy program–as guaranteed to it under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed, though U.S. allies Israel, India and Pakistan have not.

Mohammad ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which oversees inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites, repeated again last month that the agency has been unable to find credible evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, including any sign of underground production sites or forbidden radioactive substances. ElBaradei has called for a three-month waiting period before the UN Security Council pursues further measures.

Second, even if Iran “got a nuclear weapon, it couldn’t use it except in desperate self-defense as both Israel and the United States have many nuclear bombs and superior delivery systems, so that any offensive use of its nuclear weapon(s) would entail Iranian national suicide,” wrote media experts Edward Herman and David Peterson.

“It may be recalled that Saddam used his WMD only against Iran and his Kurds, but not even in self-defense during the 1991 Persian Gulf war attack on Iraq by the United States and its ‘coalition’–the former use was with U.S. approval, the latter case of non-use was because Saddam would have suffered disproportionate retaliation by the United States and his restraint followed.

“This point is not made in the establishment media, possibly because it would seem to qualify the Iran nuclear menace. The media also do not draw the further inference that an Iranian nuclear weapon would therefore serve only as a means of self-defense and to give Iran a little more leverage in dealing with the nuclear power states–the United States and Israel–that openly threaten it.

“Instead, the media, following the official line, talk about an Iranian nuclear weapon as ‘destabilizing,’ when what they really mean is that the Israeli-U.S. continuous war-making, ethnic cleansing, and deliberate and effective destabilization of the Middle East would be made more difficult.”

Opposing Israel

The media’s coverage of Ahmadinejad’s visit usually began with his supposed vow to “wipe Israel off the map.” The problem with this oft-reported fact? Ahmadinejad never said it.

“Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian,” Middle East expert Juan Cole wrote on his blog earlier this year. “He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem’ to ‘vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed…

“If Ahmadinejad is a genocidal maniac who just wants to kill Jews, then why are there 20,000 Jews in Iran, with a member of parliament in Tehran? Couldn’t he start at home if that was what he is really about?”

Ahmadinejad has questioned the fact of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews during the Second World War and echoed the views of some of the world’s more vile anti-Semites.

But, says Jonathan Steele, a columnist for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, the claims about Ahmadinejad’s military threats against Israel are wrong. “He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future,” Steele wrote. “The ‘page of time’ phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon.”

Cole reports that “some Western wire service [apparently] mistranslated the phrase as ‘wipe Israel off the map,’ which sounds rather more violent than calling for regime change…These propaganda efforts against Iran and Ahmadinejad also depend on declining to enter into evidence anything else he has ever said–like that it would be wrong to kill Jews!

“So here are some things Ahmadinejad has said that make clear his intentions, and which are translated by the United States government Open Source Center. He is hostile to Israel. He’d like to see regime change (apparently via a referendum on the shape of the government ruling over geographical Palestine, in which all ‘original’ residents of any religion would get a vote).

“Calling for a referendum on the dissolution of a government is not calling for genocide. Ahmadinejad also says he has no objection to a Jewish state in and of itself, he just thinks it should be located in, say, German territory set apart for the purpose, rather than displacing Palestinians from their homes. He may be saying unrealistic things; he is not advocating killing Jews qua Jews, or genocide.

“Note that Ahmadinejad…compares his call for an end to the Zionist regime ruling over Jerusalem to the Western call for the dissolution of the old Soviet Union. Was Ronald Reagan inciting to genocide when he called for an end of the Soviet regime?”

Meddling in Iraq

The Bush administration accuses Iran of “meddling” in Iraq by providing explosives and other supplies to Iraq’s Shiite militia forces. This “meddling” is given as a reason for both U.S. threats of war against Iran and its continuing occupation in Iraq.

Unnoticed by the media is the double standard–the U.S. claims the right to put 170,000 troops in Iraq, while Iran is considered a “foreign force,” even though it would be far more affected by events in Iraq than the U.S.

The irony is that the U.S. occupation is the cause of Iran’s expanded influence in Iraq. “When U.S. forces ousted Saddam’s regime from the south in early April 2003, the Badr Organization infiltrated from Iran to fill the void left by the Bush administration’s failure to plan for security and governance in post-invasion Iraq,” wrote Peter Galbraith, a former policy official under Bill Clinton.

“In the months that followed, the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority appointed Badr Organization leaders to key positions in Iraq’s American-created army and police.

“In short, George W. Bush had from the first facilitated the very event he warned would be a disastrous consequence of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia. And while the president contrasts the promise of democracy in Iraq with the tyranny in Iran, there is now substantially more personal freedom in Iran than in southern Iraq.”

Given the black market in weapons (including U.S. weapons) and the large amount of arms in circulation after decades of war (also backed by the U.S.), it’s not even certain that whatever smuggling has gone on represents Iranian government policy.

In any case, the U.S. has greatly exaggerated the impact of weapons that crossed the border between Iran and Iraq. “I thought Petraeus went way beyond what Iran is doing inside Iraq today,” former CIA analyst and chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq David Kay told investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. “When the White House started its anti-Iran campaign, six months ago, I thought it was all craziness.

“Now it does look like there is some selective smuggling by Iran, but much of it has been in response to American pressure and American threats–more a ‘shot across the bow’ sort of thing, to let Washington know that it was not going to get away with its threats so freely.

“Iran is not giving the Iraqis the good stuff–the anti-aircraft missiles that can shoot down American planes and its advanced anti-tank weapons.”

Whose war threats?

In late September, Newsweek reported that Dick Cheney had considered encouraging Israel to launch limited missile strikes against Iranian nuclear reactors in the hopes that Iran’s retaliation would give the U.S. the pretext to launch its own attack.

But the characterization of Ahmadinejad as a madman has cemented the idea that Iran represents the real threat.

As Iran’s president, Ahmadinejad actually has little power over foreign policy, and he remains a largely unpopular figure. In reality, he deviates little from the positions that Iran’s more reform-minded clerics have held for years–aside from his disgusting claims that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is the country that has floated war scenarios against Iran, already committed an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation (the same crime for which the Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg), and stationed tens of thousands of troops in Iran’s backyard.

The Bush administration’s leaked Nuclear Posture Review in 2002 revealed that the U.S. had made plans for the use of nuclear first-strike weapons against countries such as Iran, Iraq and Syria.

And the U.S. has a long history as the aggressor against Iran, engineering a 1953 coup against a democratically elected leader and backing its former ally Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

Since 2001, Iran’s regional influence has increased, but largely because of U.S. strategic blunders, not its own efforts. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban, Iran’s rival to the east–and then deposed Saddam Hussein, Iran’s competitor to the west.

In May 2003, after being named part of the “axis of evil” along with Iraq and North Korea, Iran offered a deal to the U.S. that it would halt its nuclear energy program, cooperate with IAEA inspectors, support the establishment of a non-religious government in Iraq, cooperate in the fight against al-Qaeda, and end material support to Palestinian groups such as Hamas.

In exchange, the U.S. was asked to remove Iran from the “axis of evil” and terrorism lists, help Iran get access to nuclear energy technology, support payment of reparations to Iran from the Iran-Iraq war, and cease support for Mojahedin-e Khalq, the anti-Iranian terrorist group based in northern Iraq.

But the administration, puffed up with a sense of its own power following Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech, rejected Iran’s offer out of hand.

Rather than admit its own strategic errors, the Washington establishment–with the mainstream media’s complicity–has returned to the same game plan used to get the war on Iraq: exaggerate the imminent threat to U.S. security of a “new Hitler,” make unfounded accusations about weapons of mass destruction, and portray its own aggression as an effort to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East.

This new set of war lies has to be exposed and opposed at every turn.

Eric Ruder: Can you describe the conditions facing the Lebanese population since the 2006 assault by Israel?

Dahr Jamail: First, it’s important for people to remember the scope of the destruction of the Israeli assault on Lebanon last summer.

When the war was going on, there were almost a million Lebanese who were displaced as refugees. There were between 300,000 and 500,000 Israelis who were displaced because of the fighting. As of last December, there were still 200,000 Lebanese who were internally displaced or refugees.

There were 1,200 Lebanese civilians killed and 4,400 injured. There were 43 Israeli civilians killed and 1,500 injured. As far as Hezbollah fighters, 250 were killed, and as far as Israeli military, there were 119 killed.

When the war broke out, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said on Israeli army radio that all those in South Lebanon were terrorists who were related in some way to Hezbollah. The Israeli air force flew over 12,000 combat missions in the 34-day war. The army fired 100,000 artillery shells. The navy fired 2,500 shells.

At the end of the day, the Lebanese infrastructure were completely destroyed: 400 miles of roads; 73 bridges; ports, water, electrical and sewage treatment plants; 25 fuel stations; 350 schools; two hospitals; and 130,000 homes, mostly in South Lebanon.

That’s the broad strokes of the destruction, and as far as reconstruction, it’s something that we could compare to Iraq, in that nothing happened at all at first from the Beirut government — until this past January, when the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Fouad Siniora successfully obtained pledges of over $7 billion in aid from meetings held in Paris.

The bulk of that came from the World Bank as loans, and also from other countries like the U.S., France and Saudi Arabia, which of course want to cash in on the loan interest action and some of the rebuilding, if possible.

But of that promised $7 billion, what I saw when I went around South Lebanon and South Beirut is that there’s been no help whatsoever from the government in Beirut. Every single person I spoke with — and I’m not exaggerating — had nothing but disdain for the government. They were disgusted that nothing had happened.

They were also disgusted with the fact that Prime Minister Siniora had never once even come down to Southern Lebanon to survey the damage. Instead, the Hezbollah organization has stepped to the front. Immediately after the war, it went around and gave the head of each household $12,000 cash and said, “Here’s some money to tide you over for a while.”

For another left-wing perspective on Lebanon, see “Lebanon and the Middle East Crisis,” an interview with Gilbert Achcar published by the International Socialist Review.

After that, they started using their own engineers — they have a group of roughly 1,500 engineers — and they started doing reconstruction in these places in South Lebanon.

The state of Qatar has adopted four villages in South Lebanon — the four that were the most heavily damaged from the war. Beirut’s doing nothing, and the great irony is Qatar and also Iran are contributing heavily to reconstruction. They have engineers that are overseeing the reconstruction of all of the roads in Lebanon that were damaged or destroyed during the war.

So you can imagine where people’s loyalties are. Their loyalties go with whoever’s helping them. That’s not Beirut — instead, that’s Hezbollah, that’s Iran and Qatar.

The aid that Hezbollah has delivered translates politically into even more support than it had before the war, which is exactly what Israel wanted to avoid. At the beginning of the war, Israel stated overtly — especially when it became evident that they were going after the civilian infrastructure even more than fighters — that it wanted to isolate Hezbollah and turn the people of Lebanon against them.

In fact, Hezbollah now has more power in political terms and is part of a large and powerful opposition group. A significant part of this opposition is Maronite Christian. One of the main Maronite currents, the Free Patriotic Movement, is led by Gen. Michel Aoun, who’s positioning himself to possibly become the next president of Lebanon.

Aoun has several members of parliament loyal to him who remain in then government, and then there is the current president, Emile Lahoud, also a Maronite Christian and also with the opposition, even though he is part of the government.

All of these forces oppose the government of Siniora, who governs along with Saad Hariri, the son of Rafik Hariri, who has both Saudi and Lebanese citizenship and is basically a U.S. pawn, and with Walid Jumblatt, the leader of the Druze, who is also quite loyal to the U.S.

It’s these three key figures in the U.S.-backed government that the opposition oppose — because they want representation in the government and assistance for the people who suffered the most during the war.

As a result, there’s a sit-in and tent city that has been going on for more than six months around some of the parliament building in downtown Beirut. The government is basically gridlocked and can’t do anything. As time goes by, it’s distancing itself more and more from what amounts to the majority of the country’s population, which the opposition has come to represent.

Eric Ruder: To what extent has Hezbollah found support beyond its historic Shia base as a result of the dynamics you described and its role in the opposition?

Dahr Jamail: It’s complex. On the one hand, there is sectarianism. For example, if you go to the tent city around the parliament building, it’s split; there’s a Shia camp that’s primarily made up of Amal and Hezbollah supporters, and if you go a little further in the other direction, there’s more of the Christian-secular camp.

But at the same time, they’re all mingling and talking with each other, and people are happy to be unified as an opposition against the government.

I spoke with people from all of the camps who said this was fascinating for them because even though Lebanon is such a small country, people from the north just don’t meet people from the south, and vice versa. But at this opposition camp against the government, they’re getting to know each other, and they hope that this experience ripples out into the wider society.

So there is some sectarianism and lines drawn as far as how people are set up in their camps, but the lines are also being crossed.

Among the Maronite leadership of the opposition, there’s also some positive sentiment toward Hezbollah. I actually interviewed Gen. Michel Aoun, and I interviewed President Lahoud. They both supported Hezbollah’s right to stay armed, and they supported Hezbollah as a resistance movement against Israel. They said that as long as Israel continues to pose a threat — which, of course, they do — Hezbollah will have this support.

When I was there, I got a chance to see what Lebanese have been living with since the so-called “ceasefire” brokered by the UN — where there are always surveillance drones overhead and Israeli warplanes flying overhead every other day. All of this is in direct breach of the UN ceasefire and international law, but this is something that Lebanese have been used to for quite some time.

Because of that, people are supportive of Hezbollah as a resistance. They’re acutely aware that the war ended when it did, and that Israel pulled its troops out of southern Lebanon — though not the Shebaa Farms, which they still occupy — because Hezbollah forced them to.

So the leadership of the opposition is of the opinion that Hezbollah is Lebanese, not an arm of Iran or a group that is subservient to and taking orders from Tehran, as U.S. officials assert.

They are the Lebanese mujahideen, which fought a legitimate resistance against an invading army and defended their homes and their country. Therefore, the Maronite Christian leadership and beyond feels a certain kinship with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. They were happy that Hezbollah has a powerful militia, because the Lebanese Army like the government is almost totally impotent.

Eric Ruder: What’s behind the Lebanese Army assault on Palestinian refugee camps?

Dahr Jamail: What we’re seeing now in Lebanon — with the Lebanese Army fully backed by the U.S., with freshly provided weapons and ammunition — is a shining example of how plans so easily go awry when the U.S. backs fundamentalist groups to do their bidding.

The U.S. has, for quite some time, been arming and funding groups like Fatah al-Islam to serve as a counter-balance to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Unlike when the U.S. armed, funded and supported the Afghanistan mujahideen, including Osama bin Laden, to go after the Soviet military in the 1980s, the unintended consequences of backing groups like Fatah al-Islam visited them much more quickly.

Siniora is happy to send in the Lebanese military against these smaller, isolated groups, to show that the military can accomplish something — unlike last summer, when they were so utterly humiliated by the U.S.-backed Israeli military. So you could view this as a playground bully taking out his recent beating on a smaller, more easily defeated foe.

Ironically, the attack is clearly backed by Israel as well. Israel, rather than risk another lashing by Hezbollah in the event of a possible summer offensive, is much happier watching, as the Lebanese military goes after Sunni fundamentalist groups — particularly since that means frontal assaults on Palestinian refugee camps, which, of course, fits into the Israeli plan of destroying any semblance of Palestinian unity or stability.

What’s extremely disconcerting — especially now as the fighting has spread to another Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon in South Lebanon — is that the vast majority of the Lebanese population and political leaders of virtually every group in the country, including Hezbollah, are supportive of this policy.

It might surprise people that Hezbollah, and particularly Nasrallah, would be supportive of this. But keep in mind that Nasrallah is a specific target for the U.S.

The Bush administration, via the Hariri thugs in Lebanon, decided to begin supporting these fundamentalist groups to go after Nasrallah, and ideally (for the Bush administration) to take him out of the picture. So, of course, Nasrallah supports the government when they are attacking groups who would like to attack him.

Nevertheless, it’s a disgrace to humanity, and more specifically to the Lebanese people, that they cheerlead from the sidelines as the Palestinians in Lebanon are once again on the end of the whipping stick.

Eric Ruder: You witnessed firsthand the scale of the Iraq refugee crisis. Can you talk about that?

Dahr Jamail: For starters, it’s important that people know the numbers to get an idea of the scope of the crisis.

The office of the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] estimates that between 1 and 1.2 million Iraqis are in Syria. But the regional public information officer for UNHCR, a woman named Sybella Wilkes, said that the real figure is probably closer to that given by the Syrian government, because the UNHCR doesn’t have the money or the personnel to have someone on the border keeping a tally.

(See Dahr Jamail, speaking on “Beyond the Green Zone: An Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq,” at Socialism 2007, April 14-17 in Chicago. See the Socialism 2007 Web site for more information.)

According to the Syrian border information, there’s between 1.4 million and 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria. But even going with conservative figures, what we’re looking at is that Iraqis are now roughly 8 percent of the population of Syria.

Within Iraq, we have another 1.9 million internally displaced people, according to UNHCR. In Jordan, there’s over 800,000 Iraqis — that’s the most conservative figure. Then another 150,000 to Lebanon, another 150,000 to Egypt, and we don’t know how many to Iran, we don’t know how many to Kuwait, we don’t know how many to Saudi Arabia.

At the end of the day, about one out of every six Iraqis has had to flee their home because of the violence spread by the occupation. It’s the largest exodus in the Middle East since the state of Israel was created in Palestine in 1948, and it’s increasing by the day.

The UN calls it the fastest-growing refugee crisis on the planet. Just in Syria alone, we’re talking about 50,000 people a week coming over the border.

Just as important as the figures is what this looks like on the ground in Syria.

Syria is a country that had roughly 25 percent unemployment before this crisis began, and now there’s an additional 1 million to 1.5 million people added into that economy. Iraqis aren’t allowed to work. They’re welcomed into the country by Syria, and they’re not going to be kicked out, but they’re not allowed to work.

So Iraqis are flooding into these areas that are already very poor — they’re renting anything they can find, and now there’s a big housing shortage, and the prices of everything are being jacked up because of this influx of people. People are coming out desperate, and they need a place to put their families, so landlords are asking exorbitant prices to rent an apartment, and they’re paying it. It’s the typical situation where a lot of people are taking advantage of the desperation to make money.

The concern to Iraqis, to the government of Syria and to UNHCR is how much of this can Syria bear. This is a poor country. It’s small and doesn’t have the resources.

UNHCR got an increase of about $16 million in 2007 for this crisis, but that still adds up to just barely over $13 per Iraqi refugee–and that’s not including UNHCR’s overhead.

So people are lining up at the UNHCR buildings to get appointments to try to get aid, and right now, there’s a six-month wait. That’s the minimum waiting time right now, and it’s increasing every month. It used to be they could get an appointment the same day, then it was a month wait, then it was two months, then it was four months, and now it’s six months. And that, of course, is going to keep increasing.

The UNHCR is completely overwhelmed. They don’t have enough money or enough people. They’re doing the best they can, but it’s a situation where, of course, they’re under-budgeted, and the crisis is escalating.

ER: What did the Iraqis you talked to say?

DJ: Among the Iraqis that I talked to in Damascus, many are terrified to give their real names or have their photo taken. The majority of people leaving are completely traumatized. They left under desperate conditions, many of them having received direct death threats.

I spoke with many people who were still getting death threats, even though they had left the country. They were getting text messages on their cell phones or getting e-mails. I interviewed a couple of Sunni doctors who had to leave simply because their name is Omar, which is a classic Sunni name.

Specifically, the most common thing people were afraid of was the Mahdi Army — that they would be able to reach them in Syria.

Who knows if that’s really possible? I did look into whether there was sectarianism now in Syria, and so far, I hadn’t heard any reports of that, and none of the refugees I spoke with were concerned about that.

It’s a mix of people. One would think they must be primarily Sunni, but actually, they’re quite mixed. The majority are Sunni, but my rough estimate is that 60 percent are Sunni, probably 20 or 25 percent are Shia, and 15 to 20 percent are Kurdish. Actually, there’s been a large influx of Kurdish people, according to the UNHCR — who are fleeing either for economic reasons, or because of threats that Turkey is making.

ER: What are the conditions that people are living in? Are there camps? Are people just living on the streets?

DJ: The situation runs the gamut. Those who can afford it — usually, the upper middle class, who were able to get their families out and had enough money put away — are either buying houses or renting apartments, and able to house everyone relatively comfortably. Although now, they don’t have jobs, and so it’s only a matter of time until their money runs out.

Then, as you move down the economic ladder, those at the very bottom are living in some of the areas that are well known for being more poverty-stricken. Those people are literally begging on the streets for food. They have nothing. They left Iraq literally with the shirt on their backs, whatever they had in their wallets, and their lives.

They’re in an area of Damascus where the poor refugees go, and people go through there to try to pick up day laborers. There’s prostitution. It’s a very, very dismal scene.

Then there are other areas around the city, and depending on which you go to, you’re going to find people in different economic situations — maybe they’re staying with relatives, or they’re renting apartments, and there are 15 people staying in a room.

There are actual refugee camps, with the stereotypical tents, open sewage and really horrible living situations. But for the most part, the majority of people are going into the poorer neighborhoods.

A lot of people are going into the Yarmouk camp, which is the big Palestinian area in Damascus. It’s called a camp, but it’s actually a part of the city, with high-rise apartment buildings, water and electricity. You drive into it, and you think you’re in a different part of the city, but it’s still referred to as the Yarmouk camp. There’s loads of Iraqis living there, simply because it’s more affordable.

Overall, the mood is grim, because nobody knows what the future will bring. Because where do they go from here? They can’t travel. If you’re an Iraqi, you can’t travel outside of Syria or Jordan or Iraq — those are the three countries you can go to with an Iraqi passport nowadays.

They don’t know what they’re going to do for work, and what happens when their money runs out.

People are in a state of shock. They made a big push to get out to Syria with their lives, and they get there and they’re relieved. But then, the reality sets in: Where do we go from here, how am I going to feed myself, how am I going to feed my family?

Going back to Iraq is just completely out of the question. It’s absolutely not an option, because their country is completely destroyed. Nine out of ten people I spoke with just want to leave the region altogether. They’re fed up with the war and the conflict and the instability, and they want to go to Western Europe. So what does that mean regarding the future of Iraq?

ER: What did people tell you about the conditions in Iraq today?

DJ: There’s just nothing left. Everyone that I spoke with, whether they’d arrived in Damascus from Baghdad the day before, or they had been there maybe six or eight or 10 months, was saying that nothing is functioning. There’s no garbage collection, there are no jobs, there’s only violence — just bombs and gunfights going off all night and all day.

People said they would sit at home, and hopefully nothing would happen — either bombs going off nearby or people coming into their home, looking for whomever. They tried to minimize their time outside, only going out to try to find food. Otherwise, they sat at home and tried to figure out when they should try to leave the country altogether.

There’s just no security whatsoever, and the Americans aren’t able to do anything at all to control the situation. If you talked about the surge or the Baghdad security plan, people would just laugh — including the UNHCR folks.

I was standing outside one of the UNHCR processing centers, and there were thousands of Iraqis literally waiting to get in, and this was just to schedule an appointment for six months down the road. And one of the UNHCR fellows turns to me and says, yes, looks like the Baghdad security plan is working great.

People are leaving absolute hell. UNHCR is interviewing all these people, and the Damascus information person for UNHCR, Adham Mardini, said that it’s some of the grimmest information he’s ever heard — that it’s just unfathomable what people are running away from. And those who aren’t able to leave are having to stay and try to live through that.

The majority of people we spoke with had lost some family member or relative, or at the very least, a close friend. Everyone knows someone who’s been killed. The Lancet report, which found 655,000 dead since the invasion, is now almost a year out of date — the report came out in October of last year, and the survey was actually conducted in July.

There’s death and killing everywhere. We would ask people whether there was a moment or an event that occurred that made them realize it was time for them to go, no matter what it took.

I remember this one couple from Baghdad we spoke with. The woman was a retired teacher, I think around 65, and her husband was around 75, and we asked them what was the moment they decided to leave. And the man said, “I woke up one day, and looked out, and there were three more bodies in our front yard, and I just got tired of that. We knew it was probably only a matter of time before something would happen to us, so we decided to leave.”

ER: So how do people get out of Iraq?

DJ: It’s expensive. Most people are taking buses or hiring cars.

We used to go in and out of Iraq the first year of the occupation — before that became untenable — in these GMC trucks. You’d hire a seat in those trucks for like $30 or $40, and they’d drive you in and drop you off wherever in Baghdad.

Those trucks are now being hired out at exorbitant rates to take people to Syria or Jordan. When you go to these areas in Damascus where loads of refugees congregate on the streets, you can see rows of these GMCs, with luggage strapped on top, coming in and dropping people off. People are paying anywhere from $250 to $300 for a seat to get a ride up to Syria.

ER: The U.S. government claims it’s recognizing the refugee crisis and offering more options for Iraqis to come to the U.S. Is that true?

DJ: This was just propaganda. From March 2003 until today, the Bush administration has issued 466 visas to Iraqis. Under pressure from the UN a few months ago, the Bush administration said it would issue 7,000 more visas. But they never said when they would issue them, and under what criteria they would be issued.

To date, there’s no evidence that any more beyond the 466 have been issued. But even if they issued all 7,000 visas tomorrow, we’re talking about 7,000 out of 4 million displaced people.

There’s really nothing to salvage in Iraq now as far as the sentiment toward the United States. Anything left of the idea that the U.S. had any decent intentions of helping the Iraqi people was lost long before most of these people left the country. They sat there and watched their country burn, to the point where there’s really nothing left, so they finally just fled.

So you can imagine that the sentiment toward the United States was already quite anti-American, long before they had to leave. Who wants to leave their home and willingly become a refugee? There’s no guarantee of a future, there’s no infrastructure where you going, and you’re literally leaving all of your life, all of your history, all of your memories, behind.

Most of the people I spoke with had to leave everything. You can’t decide, well, I’m going to leave, so I’m going to sell my house in Baghdad. It’s not like there’s a housing market there. It’s an exodus. People are leaving their houses full of furniture, they’re leaving their pets, they’re leaving cars, they’re leaving most of their belongings at home.

To reach that point where they’re willing to make that decision to just leave, they long before lost faith in anything the United States was going to do regarding their country.

It’s disconcerting, because even a couple years into the occupation, when I was in Baghdad, people would still make the distinction between the government of the United States and the people.

But people don’t really make that distinction anymore. They see what happened in 2004. From what most of them know, there was a legitimate election in the U.S., and Bush was re-elected, so the majority of the people must support him. That compounded with what’s happened in their country, and there’s really nothing but broad anti-American sentiment now.

ER: So the idea of the U.S. waging a “war on terror” is completely discredited.

DJ: Nobody really ever bought that. Just about everyone in the Middle East is so much more politically astute and aware than the average person here. They’ve been living with U.S. and Israeli policy making their lives miserable for decades.

When you talk to people in Iraq, or coming out, the most common thing you hear is: “Who’s the terrorist now? We’re the ones being terrorized. We’re the ones who are having to flee our homes. We’re living in terror because of this U.S. policy, so you tell us who the terrorist is.”

They’ve heard the propaganda, and they know it all too well. That’s what was used to justify the invasion and occupation, so Iraqis are real quick to spin that around, and ask who the terrorist really is.

ER: IN YOUR description of the Middle East, there seems to be two competing tendencies — of people uniting in opposition to U.S. imperialism and Israeli violence, but also the divide-and-conquer tactics of the U.S. stoking a sectarian civil war, and driving people apart. How do you think the pendulum is swinging now?

DJ: When we talk about sectarianism, it’s important to remember that the primary cause is the occupation. There are differences between Shia and Sunni, and there have been tensions between them in the past, but there’s never been civil war in Iraq. There’s never been instances of Shia attacking Sunni or vice versa simply because these are different sects of Islam.

The conflict has been propagated, fostered and sponsored by the occupation forces. It’s well documented that the death squads in Iraq were being set up under U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte. And the same policies continue to this day — so soldiers of the Shia Badr Brigade militia or Kurdish peshmerga militia members are sent into Falluja to fight against a primarily Sunni resistance.

We can’t leave that out of the mix when we talk about the civil war that’s happening in Iraq. I would argue confidently that when you take the U.S. factor out of that equation, there will be ongoing bloodshed and chaos in Iraq, but Iraqis would have a legitimate chance of sorting things out and working things out politically.

As long as the U.S. is there pulling strings behind the scenes and supporting a puppet government that doesn’t represent Iraqis on the ground, then there will be no peace.

As we speak, there are groups working together that are representing Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Turkamen, Christian and secular trends — there are groups trying to make this happen. But these attempts won’t have any broad national support across Iraq, because the U.S. won’t allow it. The occupation depends on pitting these groups against one another and maintaining the divisions — deepening them and widening them.

That’s another solid argument one could make about why the occupation has to end sooner rather than later. Because until it does end, there won’t be a chance for a unified Iraq.