Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger’s Newsmagazine | 11.05.2005 14:59

On the eve of his May 11 court-martial for refusing to go with his ship to Iraq, sailor and war resister Pablo Paredes was joined by two other resisters, Camilo Mejía and Aidan Delgado, at a meeting in National City May 10. The program, which also featured Fernando Suárez del Solár — who became a peace activist after he lost his servicemember son in the early days of the war — veteran peace activist Blase Bonpane and poet Al Howard, became a discussion of the courage it takes to resist a war, especially in America's current political climate, and even the disagreements between these young men showed the thoughtfulness and passion with which they have thought out their positions and actions.

Pablo Paredes, Other War Resisters Lead Peace Event in National City

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2005 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission

On the eve of his court-martial on charges of being absent without leave (AWOL) and missing the movement of his ship, sailor and war resister Pablo Paredes led an event in National City Tuesday, May 10 with two other resisters against the Iraq war, Camilo Mejía and Aidan Delgado. Sponsored by the San Diego Military Counseling Project, part of a nationwide network called the G.I. Rights Hotline which offers help to servicemembers — “people like us who want to take a stand but don’t know how,” Paredes explained — the event featured a somewhat crowded program but offered moving perspectives not only from the three resisters but also from Fernando Suárez del Solár, who became a peace activist after his son was killed early on in the Iraq war and who said he wished people like Paredes and his colleagues had been around before his son made the fateful decision to enlist.

Scheduled to start at 7 p.m. in a large hall, part of the National City Adult Education Center at 401 Mile of Cars Drive, the event didn’t actually get underway until well past 7:45 because TV reporters, including representatives of NBC and Televisa, were interviewing Paredes on the patio outside the hall. Besides Paredes, Mejía, Delgado and Suárez del Solár, the program also featured veteran peace activist Blase Bonpane and poet Al Howard, who read his “Definition of Patriotism” at Paredes’ request just before Paredes spoke. The event was co-M.C.’d by Lynn Gonzalez of the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice and Jerry Quigley, a Los Angeles-based journalist and commentator for Pacifica radio station KPFK, who briefly discussed his own experiences going to Iraq and trying to cover the war without getting shot at or accepting an “embedded” position inside a U.S. military unit.

“To my mind, resistance is the greatest experience of democracy,” said Paredes, adding that even in what he called a “conservative” education that gave him a sanitized version of U.S. history he had learned that the Boston Tea Party and many other famous events in American history had been acts of resistance to empires from abroad. “I now understand that I have to be part of the resistance to this ‘empire from abroad,’” Paredes explained.

Paredes, who in previous public statements had said he was radicalized largely by reading books by veteran Left-wing authors Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn — notably Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States — cited a widely circulated estimate that over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. attacked their country in March 2003. “We hear rhetoric about a ‘culture of life’ while we kill hundreds of thousands of people,” Paredes said. “We hear talk about democracy while we put lawyers in jail for representing their clients” — a reference to New York attorney Lynne Stewart, who was tried and convicted in connection with her representation of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian exile himself convicted of masterminding the first, unsuccessful 1993 attempt by terrorists to destroy the World Trade Center in New York.

“I just wanted to extend an amazing thank-you on the part of this resistance,” Paredes said. “I may soon be in a place where I can’t speak out” — a reference to the one-year military prison term he faces if he’s convicted — but that won’t mean I won’t be part of the resistance to this immoral and illegal war.”

Aidan Delgado said he had enlisted in the Army on September 11, 2001 in response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He was inducted on September 18 and remained supportive of the U.S. military and its mission until he was sent to fight in Iraq in 2003. “What I saw in Iraq led me to believe that not only this war but all wars are wrong,” Delgado said. “Two months into my tour I gave back my weapon.” The Army kept him in Iraq for the remaining nine months he was scheduled to serve in combat and tried to make his life hell, taking the armor off his vehicle and repeatedly telling him he’d get a dishonorable discharge if he insisted on pushing through his application for conscientious objector status. “They told me they’d never let me get out of the Army this way,” Delgado recalled — and yet they did; in January 2005 he was given an honorable discharge.

“When I came back [from Iraq] all I wanted to do was go home,” Delgado said. “But I have to be here because if the American people knew what was going on in this war, they could not support it. I don’t like the hate mail I get on the Internet, but I take it. Pablo is staring down a year in prison and not backing down. It shows how dedicated we all are. This isn’t easy. It isn’t fun. I just want to go home and put this behind me, but I can’t because the people who perpetrated Abu Ghraib are spending less time in prison than Pablo is facing.”

Delgado said there were over 100 members of Iraqi Veterans Against the War — the group’s founder, Tim Goodrich (an Air Force veteran who served in Saudi Arabia but not in Iraq — his enlistment period ended one month before the deployments in preparation for the U.S. attack on Iraq began), was visible at the meeting but didn’t speak — and predicted that the group would grow as more American servicemembers in Iraq come to grips with the evil nature of the war and what they’re ordered to do in it. “It’s a small group right now because it takes a lot of guts to face the hatred of half the population,” he said.

“About one year ago I stood where Pablo is now,” said Mejía, who like Delgado served a tour of duty in Iraq — and, like Paredes, had to face a court-martial and a year in prison. “My trial was a mock trial, a kangaroo trial,” Mejía recalled. “It took place at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and they restricted access to the base to military personnel. They said anyone who wanted to attend the trial had to go through Gate 3 and then they took down the signs that said where Gate 3 was. They filled the courtroom with soldiers so my supporters couldn’t get in. They refused to let anyone in with camera or tape recorders and they sealed off an entire block around the courthouse. There was so much security that when I arrived I looked around for Osama bin Laden, since I couldn’t believe they had called out that much security just for me.”

Mejía said that even before his trial was finished, Army personnel had already entered his room and packed his things. “They knew I would be found guilty and sent away,” he said. “The same day they tried me, they tried someone else for the Abu Ghraib events. The same day of Pablo’s trial, another C.O., Kevin Benderman, is being tried in Fort Stewart, Georgia” — a strategy Mejía said was designed to discourage media attention and keep the trials from being covered at all.

“We are seeing in this country a shift from a republic to a military dictatorship, where private corporations dictate foreign policy and the U.S. military enforces it,” Mejía said. “We’re facing a monster, a war machine with more power than any in the history of the world. Pablo is standing against a power with no equal in the world’s history, but he’s putting the superpower on trial.”

Mejía said he served nine months of his one-year sentence — he got time off for good behavior and work detail (“I washed a lot of dishes,” he ruefully recalled). “When I was in prison, I received 10,000 letters of support from the U.S. and all around the world,” he said. “I know Pablo will receive ten times that many. He will come out an even stronger person. He will come out freer because there are different kinds of freedom. When I was in Iraq, I was in chains. When the U.S. attacked Falloujah, they encircled the entire city in barbed wire and started the attack by surrounding the hospital. They didn’t want anyone to speak out, but we are speaking out.”

The evening’s question-and-answer period revealed some sharp differences between the three resisters. Asked how they would respond to the idea that an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would precipitate a civil war and leave the country even worse off than it is now, Delgado made it clear that he agreed with the idea that — at least for now — the U.S. must stay. “I don’t support immediate withdrawal because, even though I hate the occupation, if we withdraw now it would plunge Iraq into civil war,” he said.

Paredes and co-M.C. Quigley couldn’t have disagreed more. Paredes called the argument against an immediate U.S. withdrawal “racist” because, he said, it suggests that Iraqis aren’t good enough to establish security and order in their own country and need help from Americans. “I can’t support the idea that they can’t handle this themselves,” Paredes said. “We have taken the economy and situation of Iraq from one of the best in the Third World to one of the worst” — a reference to both Gulf wars and the draconian regime of economic sanctions the U.S. and the United Nations imposed on Iraq between them, which according to some estimates killed up to 1.5 million Iraqis — “ and that will continue and get worse as long as we’re there.”

“Iraq is in civil war right now,” added Quigley. “You’ve got dozens to hundreds of people dying every day, and it will continue until the U.S. leaves. No Iraqi government will be supported by the Iraqi people as long as it allows the U.S. to remain there.”

The speakers’ differences only got stronger once they were asked whether there was such a thing as a “just war” and whether the U.S. military should be disbanded. Delgado, who adopted Buddhism while he was in Iraq and has become a total pacifist under its influence, said he was asked the “just war” question when military officials interviewed him in connection with his C.O. application. Asked about certain events in history — including World War II and whether it was justified for the U.S. to fight Nazi Germany — Delgado told his military interrogators that “the question of a just war is very complicated and you can’t project it back into history.”

Delgado said he was willing to concede of the “possibility” of a just war — one fought purely for defensive reasons — “but I don’t believe any such war has ever existed. I don’t think any war has been purely defensive, and I certainly don’t think any such war exists now.”

“I don’t think there’s a just war,” said Mejía. “When I was in Iraq our unit killed 30 people, only three of whom were carrying weapons. The reality of war is that innocent people die. You win wars by killing innocent people and destroying infrastructure.” Mejía said his condemnation also included the Iraqi insurgents who are fighting against the U.S. and the U.S.-recognized Iraqi government: “The insurgents kill innocent people, too. There are ways to resist occupation without violence.”

“If the world’s militaries can be disbanded,” said Paredes, “the leader would have to be the country whose military is 10 times bigger than that of any other country in the world: the United States,”

Asked what they would say to a high-school student being targeted by military recruiters, Delgado said, “The military is just like high school, except the teachers live with you, they have guns and can send you to jail if you disobey.”

“Keep in mind that the recruiter is doing his job to get you to do the job he doesn’t want to do,” Paredes said.

“Don’t tell them not to join,” Mejía said. “Give them the information. Point out that there’s small print on the back of the enlistment contract that says it can be changed by them at any time without you having any say about it.”

Mejía also discussed what’s been called the “poverty draft” — the way the so-called “volunteer military” is actually targeting poor and working-class people with few other options for financing college and advancing their careers. “They’re really talking about a professional army that’s luring people with promises of education,” he said. “Kids with no prospects are joining the Army so they can get what the government should give them for free.”

e-mail:: mgconlan@earthlink.net
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