Stick Your Neck Out, America!

By Ray McGovern, AlterNet. Posted June 12, 2006.

Hope is here. The cold light of truth is piercing the cloud of lies conjured by Donald Rumsfeld and others about the war in Iraq -- even in the defense secretary's own bailiwick.

A matter of conscience …

Several months ago, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada decided that U.S. involvement in Iraq is illegal and immoral. Like so many of us, Watada concluded that intelligence was manipulated to "justify" the invasion. Unlike so many of us, he has had the courage to stick his neck out and pay the price for resistance.

We should, I suppose, give the neck its due. It is a pleasant thing -- a convenient connection between head and torso. We do not risk it out of caprice. But if there is nothing for which we will risk that neck, then it has become our idol. And necks are not worthy of this status. Finally, an active duty U.S .Army officer has refused to engage in that kind of idol worship.

No publicity seeker, Watada earlier this year quietly submitted a request to resign from the Army. The request was denied. He then refused to deploy to Iraq with his unit this summer and is prepared to face prison rather than violate his conscience. Meanwhile, he fully expects the kind of ostracism encountered by those few Army enlisted men who objected to the torture at Abu Ghraib. In what might well be the understatement of the month, Watada says he may be "the most unpopular person at Fort Lewis."

… and a gift for Dan Berrigan

Watada may not realize this, but he has presented a pearl of great price to longtime war resister, Jesuit priest and poet Dan Berrigan, who celebrates his 85th birthday this weekend in New York. Facing ridicule and ostracism for acting on their principled opposition to the war in Vietnam, Dan and his late brother Phil were no strangers to prison -- or to profound disappointment at the dearth of those willing to witness in the way of Watada.

In "No Bars to Manhood," Dan wrote:

"Of course, let us have peace," we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties …" There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war -- at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.

Dan Berrigan will be encouraged by Watada's resistance. And so, I hope, will Faiza Al Araji, one of the courageous Iraqi women who came to the United States in March to give firsthand testimony to the suffering of the Iraqi people. Executive manager of Arab Water Treatment Co., Faiza is a highly educated engineer who took a month off to appeal to U.S. citizens to do something to end the tragedy of her people.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. In a public forum last month he confronted Donald Rumsfeld directly about the lies he has told about the war in Iraq.

This story was originally posted on Truthout.org.

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