Adam Kokesh Proudly Welcomes Fellow Marine Marcus "Tex" Whitfill to IVAW

I first met Marcus while trying out for the Marine Corps Rugby Team in 2005. We hit it off, but I haven't seen him since then, and most of our communication has been through his annoying facebook applications. About six months after we met, he left the Marines and started thinking. Five months later he wrote the blog post below for his myspace profile. For some reason, he waited until just today to show it to me, and I asked him if he was a member of IVAW yet. In our facebook chat, he said, "Should I be?" To which I replied, "you bet your ass you should be, you have not only a right, but a responsibility to speak out once you realize that not only did those Marines that have passed die for a lie, but that more die for a lie every day." Thanks to our secure server, he will soon be a member of IVAW. "Welcome to the struggle, brother."
 
Marcus' Theory On Our War
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

I have been out of the Marines for 5 months now, and people always ask me what I think about this conflict that our country has got itself into. So I think I will share my thoughts on the subject.

First of all, I was in boot camp when 9/11 occurred. I could have been like you, walking around aimlessly, or in school. But i was in what some would call hell. Think of Marine Corps boot camp as a forced 3 month thought process, or for some, I can relate it to an extended wrestling practice.

My thoughts on that day weren't about lives lost or national emergency. They were selfish thoughts about how i could do this to myself. I joined for the college money; I didn't want to aim at anyone; or be aimed at for that matter. It was scary and exciting all at the same time. I saw people cry that day, but it wasn't about 9/11, it was a selfish and cowardly cry.

I came home to endless amounts of patriotism and it made me sick to my stomach. I like to think it was ludicrous that a country needed something like that to come together and rally around each other. The funny thing was that before I left in late June, my family, friends, and acquaintances had advised me that my decision to defend the country in return for an education was a bad one. When I got home on September 21st the same people treated me like a war hero. I don't know if it was the impending doom that I could have faced or that I was a crusader for their vindictive agenda. It was a weird time for me and I didn't even try to understand what had happened and ignored all media surrounding it. This was because I was under a rock that day and I could have never understood the fear that people felt that day.

I look at the conflicts that have occurred since and make this analysis:

Afghanistan wasn't the only country that was harboring terrorists and al-q. Several of my colleagues and eventually myself went on deployments all over southeast Asia as a pre-emptive strike against the Muslim religion as a whole. I don't know the exact figure but a lot of Muslims live in places like Singapore, due to religious profiling by our society and military leadership, we administered blanket coverage of all that is Muslim. This was because of the buzz term jihad. "If they are Muslim, then they have jihad in their hearts" I heard Bill Reilly say. The media expedited fear throughout the world.

I spent a fast two years in Japan with the fear of North Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines. I originally planned to only stay a year there, but the Iraq war started and they placed a hold on everybody in the USMC.

The Iraq war seemed to come on fast. Bush was very pressing with congress, almost to the point of being coercive. That really bothered me. Up to that point our country had been about 50/50 between neo-liberalism and neo-realism. We still had respect for the U.N and tried not to hop when they said no. Bush changed the regime in our country to a 85/15 between "n.r" and "n.l" leaning more towards the diplomacy of a bullet than the diplomacy of global sanction. I understand that we tried to sanction Iraq several times without any compliance. But did we need to undermine the authority of our global system?

Probably not, and here is why: France hates us, Spain has disdain for us, Russia disapproves, China is very careful about taking a stance but hasnt offered any support, and Saudi Arabia has us walking on eggshells. The only friend we have is the U.K. and its various territorial interests, i.e. Australia. The mob in the U.K. has placed enough pressure on blair for supporting us that he is going to resign though, so dont count on that for too much longer.

The bottom line is this: If you look at it objectively, if we weren't as hegemonic as we are and "representative democracy without religious influence" was somehow unpopular. If we had control of a large portion of one of the world's most consumed natural resource, and we had a leader who could be viewed as a complete "state"sman, or global system cowboy who worried about his own region. If we trying to build up our defenses to match the capabilities of our threats and were constantly hounded about it. What if somebody came into your backyard and thwarted your leader by force, and started to install a foreign system foregoing the "this is how we have always done it" mentality? Would you not see some dude in Parma firing up his combine and running over the "occupying force" What about american innovation when it came to improvised weapons? We have teenagers who can walk into schools and launch a full scale suicide mission on his/her fellow classmates. The only motivation behind those cases were the inability to fit in and being ostricized for it. Could you imagine what our citizens would do?

So to that situation I ask, why are we doing it to others? We are taking over by brute force and installing "a better way" to do business. A person of middle eastern descent predicted the future for me. Afghanistan and iraq are geographic neighbors to Iran, So militarily, that is a perfect situation for invasion. I hope this doesn't come to fruition, because that will mean i have to go back and support a cause i obviously do not believe in.

I hope you gained something from this and will think about supporting my brothers and sisters in arms. The policing actions of our neo-realism ideology need to stop, we lose credibility by trying to install democracy by force.

Have a nice day/evening/morning