U.S. soldier in London to avoid Iraq war

[CGowen]

If he had any doubts upon arriving here, big news from back home likely erased them.

It was 5 p.m. Wednesday when Linjamin Mull, stepping off a bus in downtown London, ended a two-week journey that turned him from an American soldier to expatriate, just as the Iraq war controversy flared again in the U.S.
That same day, the U.S. government announced troop deployments to Iraq -- a war Mull refuses to join -- will be extended from 12 to 15 months.

"Most people don't have the courage to leave," said Mull, a New York City social worker and graduate of Southern Connecticut State University.

"It's a big difference if my country was attacked -- I was there for Sept. 11 . . . or Kosovo, (where you're) preventing ethnic cleansing. Then you have a purpose. (Iraq) is a form of American imperialism."

Mull, an articulate 31-year-old, recently went absent without leave from his training at Virginia's Fort Houston.
He applied for refugee status in Toronto with the help of Canadian sympathizers, one of whom has opened her London home to him.



........

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Features/2007/04/14/4013979-sun.html

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

1. Something does not compute here. He's a 31 year old college graduate, who

signed up after this war was fully in swing, but he "had no choices"?

[Warpy]

2. Our military signed up to protect our country

and its interests.

They didn't sign up for a fool's errand occupying a hostile country where they are acting as targets for a psychopath's lust for murder by proxy.

They didn't sign up to fight an imperial war based on lies.

They didn't sign up to enrich Halliburton and a vice president who has seen his stock options go from $247,000 to $8,000,000 because of the no bid contracts offered in support of this war.

They didn't sign up to protect the interests of the rich and the corporate by trying to control natural resources that belong to other countries.

Never before has a war been so transparently a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

They didn't sign up for that.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

3. This guy is a college graduate who signed up in 2005. If he had the idea that

he was not going to Iraq to fight in a war he didn't believe in, it was a big mistake to sign up in the first place, 15 month deployments nonwithstanding.

I guess my issue is, what did this guy think he was doing signing up?

I just think that this particular guy's story, as presented in the link, doesn't seem to add up.

[Monkeyman]

4. Maybe he has seen enough

[Name removed]

5. Deleted sub-thread

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