After a recent meeting at the Different Drummer Café, a GI coffeehouse in Watertown, N.Y., near Fort Drum, three antiwar soldiers–two veterans and one active-duty–sat down for a roundtable discussion about the occupation of Iraq and the antiwar movement inside the U.S. military.

Phil Aliff is an active-duty member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) who deployed to Iraq in 2005 and is now stationed at Fort Drum in upstate New York.

Eli Israel told his commanders while stationed in Iraq that he would no longer participate in an illegal war and was released from the military last month after a court-martial.

Camilo Mejía is the first U.S. soldier to go public with his refusal to continue fighting the U.S. war for oil and empire in Iraq. He served seven months’ confinement for his act. He is the author of Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejía.

Phil, Eli and Camilo talked to Socialist Worker’s Brian Lenzo and Kyle Brown.

Camilo Mejía’s book, Road from Ar Ramadi, provides an eyewitness account of the brutality inflicted by the U.S. in Iraq–and how Mejía made the decision to take a stand against it.

The Bush administration keeps telling us that things are getting better. While you were in Iraq, did you see progress?

Phil
We ended up in Abu Ghraib City, which is a suburb of western Baghdad, under the shadow of Abu Ghraib prison. We were told we would be there for three months, and then hand over control to the Iraqi army.

We went into the city and took it over using Gestapo methods. Attacks dropped for a period, but as we were leaving, attacks rose to such a level that even the main camp outside of our area of operations was being mortared and rocketed heavily every single day.

When we moved west toward Falluja, we saw that we were essentially chasing down the people we had driven out of Abu Ghraib, and now we were just driving them out again.

Camilo
Even as I deployed to Iraq with a political opposition to the war, I guess part of me still believed that we could still do good things through military action.

One of the most striking things that I remember about my time in Iraq was the time that we protected the al-Haditha dam. We came into contact with a lot of people who were professionals–electrical, industrial and chemical engineers.

I remember telling them that you’re going to be set now that we’re here and American corporations are going to take over, and because you guys speak English and are engineers with a lot of experience, you’re going to be making a lot of money.

And I actually believed that, but now I’m ashamed of my ignorance. When the contractors finally came in, I remember that we had geologists, engineers and physicists doing construction work for $5 a day. The jobs that really required a certain level of trust weren’t given to Iraqis but to third-country nationals.

The way that we conducted our missions, with disregard for the lives of Iraqis, going out of our way to do missions near mosques and hospitals, infuriated people. Because we weren’t protecting civilians, this was creating a bigger resistance.

When I came home and surrendered to the military and went public with my criticism, the attitude in the military was not to investigate my claims about torture or killings of civilians, but to quiet me and make me look like I was the criminal–that I had done something wrong.

The military doesn’t pay attention to the people on the ground who actually know what’s going on. And the attitude in the military makes the situation unwinnable, not only because we went there under false premises, but also because of the attitude we have–it’s not about spreading democracy but ravaging the country and taking their natural resources.

The strategy isn’t working because it’s flawed from the beginning–Iraqis know damn well why we’re there, and the delusion of sending more troops only makes the situation worse.

Eli
The Iraqis don’t want us in their country or in their neighborhoods, and we’re not respecting them as people. We’re going into neighborhoods where no one wants to kill us, and six months later, everybody does. And there are reasons for that.

It has to do with our fundamental perspective on the war, the way we maintain a stranglehold on the country, and the way we impose our “assistance” on Iraqis against their will.

A lot of what we are doing is counterproductive and destructive to them as a society. It’s not just disrespectful. It’s destroying lives because our interests–not their interests–are our primary concern.

I don’t say that because I think it may be true, I say it because I know it to be true. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And I have evidence, which I’m forbidden from being able to tell you, to back this up.

If we try to define “terrorists” in the way that they want us to define terrorists, we’ll never really have any clearly defined enemy. “Insurgents,” “al Qaeda”–these are terms that they use freely to define anyone that they want to.

Most of the insurgents and militants are the equivalent of an armed neighborhood watch. They’re doing no different than you and I would probably be doing if tanks were rolling through our city, if people were kicking in our doors without probable cause, if our little sisters were getting killed “by accident.”

This isn’t the war we’re being told it is. Once we realize that, it changes everything.

A lot of people say that the war in Iraq is about oil. I think that’s a side issue. I personally, through my experience, have come to the conclusion that it’s about control.

You rob somebody’s home, and you can say that you’re mainly interested in jewelry, but someone robbing a home will probably take anything of value. What we’re doing in the Middle East is about control–militarily, politically, environmentally and in every other way possible forcing our will on another people.

What effect do you think the surge is having?

Eli
Militarily, you can’t fight “terrorism” by browbeating “terrorists.” You can’t terrify terrorists into not attacking you.

And let’s throw out the word “terrorists.” You can’t browbeat people into not attacking you. Believe it or not, most people want to live in peace. Believe it or not, most Palestinians and Israelis want to live in peace.

I’ve changed my perspective on the world in so many ways because of what’s going on in Iraq. To think that they would continue this situation forever without us doing the things we’re doing is ridiculous.

We’re creating people to attack us tomorrow. The doors that are getting kicked in, the people who are being harassed, the children who are crying, the women who are seeing their houses torn apart in front of them, the men who are being shot while defending their own families, the neighbors who are being interrogated with Tasers to turn in their neighbors–all of those people are going to hate us for what we’re doing.

When are we going to accept responsibility?

Phil
This idea that we can kill all evil until evil is dispelled–it’s not created with an understanding of the subjugation that the Iraqi people are going through right now.

They’ve put all these extra troops in Baghdad, but look at the violence that’s happened outside of Baghdad. Look at a car bomb in northern Iraq in August that killed 500 people–it’s the worst car bomb in the history of the war. And this happened during the surge.

Diyala province has lots of fighting. Ramadi is as bad as it’s ever been if not worse. You can put extra troops in Baghdad, but the problem is that Iraq as a whole has been torn open to violence.

And we’re not addressing the real reasons Baghdad is so violent–which are the sectarian divisions that the U.S. has whipped up to keep domination over the country, bringing radical Shia groups into the political process, empowering Sunnis to fight against al-Qaeda, empowering the Kurds to fight against Arabs.

Look at the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, where you have a very strong Kurdish movement that’s looking to take over Kurdistan. The Americans are being wedged between the Arabs and the Kurds because this is a very oil-rich part of Iraq.

The Bush administration can talk about how well the surge is working, but they really aren’t answering the real questions about why the violence is happening–why there are still sectarian killings every day, and why Americans are still dying every day at the same or worse rate as before.

Camilo
I like Eli’s analogy about going into someone’s home to impose your will on them, and they want you out. It’s not a matter of how do we get out or when do we get out, or let’s talk about a timetable.

Look at the surge within the context of that analogy. How will you solve the problem by bringing more people into a home that’s not yours, and where they want you out?

People say there will be chaos if the U.S. just leaves. How do you respond to that?

Phil
I think it’s inherently racist to think that the Iraqis can’t rule their country. The fact of the matter is that before the war, Iraq had some of the best scientists and doctors in the region. In terms of people that had technical skills and knowledge, Iraq was a leading country in the Middle East.

Now, more than 2 million people have left the country, and another 2 million have been internally displaced.

Camilo
The Pentagon says that 80 percent of the attacks are targeting coalition troops or entities that work for coalition troops, such as militias under radical clerics. By withdrawing from Iraq, a lot of this violence would end.

It’s also racist to think that Iraqis are happy to be invaded and occupied, and what’s happening is all these other countries are fighting, but Iraqis are sitting on their butts and waiting for others to fight for their sovereignty.

By and large, what’s happening is a popular uprising in response to an occupation, so the first step that we need to take is to remove all troops from Iraq.

Eli
The Johns Hopkins report says we’ve killed somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 Iraqi civilians since we’ve been there. That’s more than wee lost in our own Civil War.

Proportionally, that’s equivalent to wiping out the entire Eastern seaboard of the United States. How in the world can we look at this and say we know what’s best for you, you don’t, and we’re going to help you figure it out? It’s obnoxious and absurd.

Why did you choose to resist?

Camilo
I got tired of being afraid. I realized that with everything that happened in Iraq–and a lot of messed-up shit happened, from the torture of prisoners to the killing of civilians to the unnecessary exposure of our own troops–and the inability to stand for what I believed was the right thing to do, and being there with the political conviction that the war was wrong, freedom really has nothing to do with not being in shackles or chains but with your own ability to do what you believe in your heart to be the right thing to do.

I had to overcome my fear. I knew all along what the right thing was but I hadn’t had the freedom to act upon that belief.

It got to the point where I could no longer conciliate my conscience with my military duty, and I decided that whenever being a good soldier and being a good human being came into conflict, the right thing to do was be a good human being.

Eli
Primarily, I learned to have a respect for the Iraqi people. I went over there completely convinced of that we were being told about who the Iraqis are, where they’ve come from, what they believe and what they believe about me.

I’m Jewish, and from a Jewish perspective, to go into a Muslim country was a hurdle I had to overcome. I thought that they all hated me because I was Jewish, and a lot of them thought I hated all of them because I was Jewish. But that’s simply not the way it is.

I learned that many Iraqis were very intelligent, kind people, who didn’t need to be ruled and told how to live their lives because they were perfectly capable of living their own lives in a way that made them happy.

How have other soldiers in the military reacted to you resisting?

Eli
Most people agree. I’m still looking for the droves of supporters for this conflict–they’re just not out there. The closest thing I’ve run into as far as actual support for the occupation has been sincere, good-hearted people who really think that we just need to trust our leadership to be telling us the truth.

That’s sincere-hearted naiveté. And I know enough and I’ve seen enough to know it’s not just naïve–it’s stupid, and it’s dangerous, and people are dying because of it. But our losses are nothing compared to the losses of the people whose country we’re occupying.

Camilo
It’s worth remembering that I resisted in 2003 and went public in 2004, and the war and the president still had a lot of approval. But even then, I still received a lot of support from members of the military. I did get called a “coward” and “traitor” a couple of times, but mostly by people who had not been to Iraq.

I talked about the politics, the illegality and the immorality of the war, but I also touched on the issues that dealt with the hypocrisy of “support the troops” while active-duty soldiers here still have equipment from the 1980s.

So I spoke against the war on many different levels, and I think people coming from different perspectives were able to see eye-to-eye with me on a lot of those issues.

Eli
The closest thing I’ve encountered to any significant level of disagreement from military personnel would be what I considered to be resentment, because most people agree–if you get them off the topic that I signed a contract and all this other stuff they’ve been brainwashed into thinking.

If you get them to the point where they actually discuss with you what they think is right, they agree. The vast majority of those who have taken part in this occupation agree that we don’t need to be there. And it’s not just that we don’t need to be there, it’s that we need to not be there.

How do they deal with us? That’s where a lot of the anger and hostility directed toward me came from among those in my chain of command. It was a recognition that both sides of this issue are not going to be able to come out of it looking good.

So what side do you fall on? Do you fall on the side of those who are taking a stand against it or those who are continuing to justify it to themselves because it’s the only way they sleep at night?

That’s what I was stuck doing for a period of months in Iraq. I got to the point of questioning what was going on and having serious doubts that what I was doing was moral, and then having to justify to myself every day that maybe it’s for the greater good or because I signed a contract. Those justifications last for a while, but they eat you up inside.

The lashing out is toward those who have the conviction and the guts to say I think it’s wrong, and I’m not going to have anything to do with it. This isn’t about a contract. This is about life and death, this is about truth, and it’s not based on a piece of paper or other symbolisms we’re supposed to honor–honor, courage, commitment, duty, loyalty. Those are human, moral qualities.

The oath to military service that we took was an oath of moral conviction. It was not an oath to freedom from it.

Phil, you have a unique situation working with the IVAW chapter in Watertown and the Different Drummer Café. How do soldiers respond when they come here?

Phil
It’s interesting. When we have events here, you can see a transformation. I hate to generalize, but it’s true that a lot of soldiers come in, and they’re hesitant. They don’t agree with the war, but they wonder if we’re on the fringe. They don’t know what to expect.

But when they hear what we have to say, when they hear us talk about our experiences, it’s such a universal idea that anyone in the military can wrap their head around it–if they can get past that wall that’s been built up, which Eli was talking about.

You see the transformation once they’re leaving. They’re ready to take that step forward–to speak and say the things they have to say against the war and against the injustices of the occupation, against veterans coming home and not being taken care of.

Eli
I don’t know how many people in the military know that the information that gets to them is being filtered.

If you go on a computer at the Moral Welfare Recreation center in Iraq or Kuwait, and I assume anywhere in the Middle East, and you type in a Google search or try to access directly sites such as ivaw.org or couragetoresist.org–organizations of veterans who oppose the conflict in Iraq–it’s blocked. And it says that the reason it’s blocked is that it’s an advocacy organization.

The government itself is filtering out these organizations intentionally. They don’t trust you to make your own decision–they don’t want you to know. If you do have questions, they want to think that you’re alone.

This isn’t accidental. It’s an intentional information war on the American soldier and on the American people.

What strategies do you think are important in getting people in the military who are asking questions to take the next step towards resisting?

Phil
Going into the fall, the IVAW is trying to reach out to soldiers and potential military recruits in many ways. Some of it is through direct action and demonstrations, and some of it is through chapter building and building on military bases. As we did at Fort Drum, we’re trying to create dedicated and politically educated organizers who are able to take those tools and reach out and find other soldiers.

And next spring, we’re trying to recreate the Winter Soldier testimony organized during the Vietnam War. We’re going to have soldiers come together–both active-duty and veterans–and testify about the war crimes that they’ve seen.

We want to give active-duty soldiers a voice and let them tell their stories about what’s happening in Iraq, and show the world what’s going on. And we want to work with other organizations on counter-recruiting, fall demonstrations and other efforts to build the antiwar movement and bring the IVAW more credibility in organizing GI resistance.

The majority of this country opposes this war. What can civilians do to support soldiers who choose to resist?

Eli
We need to remind them that it’s okay to use their conscience. It’s okay to still weigh in their own mind and heart what’s right and wrong. Because we’re at a time in our country where we’re being told that we don’t have the right to do that. Our military specifically is being told that it’s your duty not to do those things, and that’s a lie.

We need to remember that we founded this country based on individuals using moral conviction and moral courage to stand up for what they thought what was right, and that’s what we need to get back to.

This is going to tear our country apart if we let it, and it’s going to tear apart our military–it is tearing apart our military. I don’t even think those doing it think they can last forever. I don’t know what they’re thinking, but they’re cashing in on it as long as they can.

But this PTSD stuff is not a result of simple trauma that happens in war. It’s a result of not being able to reconcile what’s going on in their hearts with what’s going on in their minds.

Camilo
I think that education and information are key. Knowledge has to be shared.

For instance, people don’t just go to ivaw.org and learn that the IVAW is going to launch a counter-recruiting campaign or that we’re doing this Winter Soldier thing. We have to go out there and share the information with people. We have to let people know ways that they can help.

We need to send people to attend court-martials of resisters, and we need to raise defense funds for veterans like Adam Kokesh, whose right to free speech is under attack from the military.

The corporate media isn’t going to spread this information, so we have to spread it ourselves.

When Eli resisted in Iraq, I got an e-mail about it from Kelly Dougherty at IVAW. After Kelly sent that e-mail, I got that exact same e-mail from about 20 organizations. Eli Israel was everywhere. That same day, I went to a conference in Portland, Ore., where I spoke about Eli, and one of the keynote speakers that night was Sen. Mike Gravel.

We had dinner with him, and I told him about the IVAW, and he said that if there’s any way that I can help, I’d love to do that. I said there’s this guy named Eli Israel, and he said we’ve already got attorneys ready to defend him.

This happened because Eli wrote a message on MySpace to a friend, and that technology was used to spread what was happening in Iraq within hours to people everywhere.

Phil
People should support the IVAW and other organizations supporting GI resistance, either monetarily or however you can.

One of the best ways to support GI resistance is to create a mass movement outside of the military–having workers strike, having students shut down their campuses. If you look at the bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s, 4 million students shut down their campuses. That’s incredibly signficiant.

People in the military see that. When they go home for leave and when they leave their bases, they see people out on the street, and they see the mass sentiment.

That’s going to affect them. That’s going to give them the courage to resist, and the knowledge and the tools to know exactly what they are getting themselves into when they deploy to Iraq.

So we need to make sure that outside of supporting GI resistance, we’re building a grassroots movement–a broad movement of antiwar activists that’s able to tie all these things together into one cohesive message: Bring the troops home now, end the occupation.

Here, he answers Socialist Worker’s questions about a new wave of corporate “greenwashing” — public relations campaigns designed to portray the biggest polluters and those most responsible for global warming as environmentally conscientious.

Socialist Worker: The latest trend for corporations is to show off green credentials — BP has a series of commercials with a guy standing in a field talking about alternative fuels, and Rupert Murdoch is vowing to make his international operations carbon neutral. What kind of impact do corporate green solutions have on curbing global warming?

Jeffrey St. Clair: None. That’s the short answer.

I remember being up in Alaska with the Inupiat, looking at Prudhoe Bay. BP wants to expand in every direction up there, into ANWR [the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge] on one side of Prudhoe Bay, and then into the Alaska Petroleum Reserve on the other side. And one of the Inupiat tribesman said to me, “They want it all.”

If they can’t get into ANWR now, they’ll go into the Alaskan Petroleum Reserve and drain that. Then they’ll come back and get ANWR, and they’ll drain that. And meanwhile, they’re investing in solar and biofuels, too. They want it all.

To pretend that this green enlightenment on behalf of BP or ARCO or any of the others has to do with anything other than maximizing their profits is a serious delusion.

Oil and coal are almost free assets for corporations. They’re not going to stop coal mining and burning coal until they’re out of it — unless you regulate them out of that business. The free market is going to encourage them to dig up every last coal vein in Appalachia, using the most cost-efficient method, which is mountaintop removal.

This is the most noxious, environmentally destructive form of mining imaginable, but they’re even using a kind of global warming defense for engaging in this kind of activity — because the coal that they’re going after is low-sulfur coal.

SW: When a company like BP talks about developing alternative fuels, is this real, or is it a PR sham?

JSC: There’s movement toward alternative fuels that they can profit from.

This is nothing new. I remember talking to Enron executives back in the early 1990s, as they were making their first forays into Oregon and California, and they were saying that they were the good guys–that they were going to combat global warming and reduce toxic emissions, because they were promoting natural gas instead of nukes or coal-fired power plants.

What they saw were tremendous opportunities for profit. That’s what motivates them.

In BP’s case, it’s not a matter of developing biofuels at the expense of extracting oil from the north slope of Alaska. It’s developing biofuels and extracting oil. For the other integrated companies, it’s strip mines, oil, gas, biofuels and nukes–the whole gamut.

There’s another aspect of this, which is that biofuels are providing a new excuse for genetically engineered crops.

So you have Third World countries where there’s indigenous resistance to Monsanto’s saturation bombing of Frankenfoods — whether it’s cotton, corn, soybeans. There’s been resistance — in some cases, relatively successful.

But now, the new excuse for genetically engineered crops is to save the world from global warming. So we’ve seen deals struck with Lula’s government in Brazil and elsewhere.

This isn’t just a back-door way to force GM crops down the Third World’s throat. If you look in the U.S. at ethanol and other biofuels, which are promoted as the salvation of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, they’re essentially running on topsoil. These are not sustainable solutions to these problems.

SW: Among a number of politicians, including Democrats, the concerns about global warming seem to have become an excuse for talk about resurrecting nuclear power.

JSC: That comes out of the Gore shop. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with Gore’s political biography will know that he’s his father’s son, and his father was one of the prime movers behind the Tennessee Valley Authority, behind nuclear power in Appalachia, and the Oak Ridge nuclear lab. Gore Junior was their congressional protector as a congressman and as a senator.

If you go back to Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, behind the scenes of that book is a cooling tower. That’s Gore’s solution to the global warming crisis — a world that is clotted with nuclear power plants. If you look at his advisers on global warming while he was vice president, that was their message, too.

Those had been lean times for the nuclear power industry. I think that the Clinton administration could have sealed the nuclear power industry’s fate in the U.S. if it had wanted to. But of course, it didn’t. They sort of kept them on life support, with a lot of research funding and renewing all the protections.

So is there a renewed faith in nuclear power from the Democrats? Yes. And they now have a justification for it. If you scare yourself into believing that we’re going to be having a runaway greenhouse effect, and the only way to stop it is to take immediate action in reducing the burning of fossil fuels, then you’re going to be confronted with the argument that a proliferation of nuclear power plants is the fastest way to do that.

SW: With Core, it’s also a question of who gets the blame for global warming.

JSC: It’s all about personal responsibility; it’s like listening to Jerry Falwell or something. There’s no critique of capitalism, there’s no political critique, there’s no critique of large corporations.

There never has been. Earth in the Balance wasn’t a critique. Back then, in the late 1980s, Gore was already talking about this as the dividing moral issue of our time. But there was never a critique of the transgressors — except the individual responsibility of the American consumer of electrical power and gasoline.

SW: Can you talk about the attitude of the environmental movement toward this corporate greenwashing?

JSC: The environmental movement made its deal with the devil at least a decade ago, when they essentially became neoliberal lobby shops. The idea was that if we can’t defeat capitalism, if we can’t change capitalism, then let’s just give in and see if we can use some of the mechanics of the free market in order to tweak the damage done to the environment.

These kinds of seeds were sown in green groups in the early 1980s, but really reached an apogee in Clinton times.

I don’t even think the term greenwashing even applies any more. That was the industry response to the great environmental tragedies of the 1970s, and ’80s–Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez. But they don’t have to do that any more, because essentially, corporations like BP and environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund share the same basic mindset.

You can’t distinguish between, for example, Ikea, one of the world’s great predators of rain forests, and the World Wildlife Fund, which is in a joint venture with Ikea — so Ikea gets a little panda stamp on the lumber cut from primary forests in Indonesia. So greenwashing seems to me to be very passé.

Environmental politics are largely controlled by the foundations — they control what’s discussed and what the major issues are. The foundations are shackled at the hip to the Democratic Party, and the dominant ones are all children of big oil companies. Pew, the Rockefeller Family Fund, W. Alton Jones; their endowments were the fortunes of big oil.

I was talking to an environmentalist who said that if you want a grant from any of those foundations, you have to have global warming in your agenda.

Now, let’s say you’re working on fighting chemical companies in Cancer Alley. How do you work global warming into your agenda? Or if you’re fighting factory trawlers, which are creating dead zones off the Pacific coast, how do you work global warming into that? But if you can’t, then the money dries up.

What it creates is a kind of inchoate state of environmental politics, because I don’t think you can build a mass political movement around global warming.

This is one of the ways where Alex Cockburn and I differ. Alex doesn’t believe that humans can affect the environment. I know we can screw things up royally; I just don’t think we can fix it.

In some ways, to me, global warming ought to be a kind of liberating experience. Yes, this is bad, but you really can’t build a movement to fight it or correct it, so let’s go fight things that we can defeat — whether it’s strip mines, or the mismanagement of the Colorado River, or the Bush administration removing the grizzly bear in Yellowstone from listing under the Endangered Species Act.

Those are battles that you can fight and win. But if you’re cowering under the shadow of global warming, then you’re not going to be able to wage those battles successfully.

I think that’s one of the many reasons why the environmental movement is as impotent as the antiwar movement. It’s shackled to a political party that has no vision, no spine and no guts. And it’s economically dependent on a tiny network of foundations that it allows to control its political agenda.

These foundations frown on any kind of militancy, and they really want you to dance to their tune.

See Jeffrey St. Clair, speaking on “Hot Climate, Cold Cash: Making a Killing from Global Warming,” at Socialism 2007, June 14-17 in Chicago (see Socialism 2007 for more information).