Collegiate Times

Former Marine Corps reservist and anti-war activist Adam Kokesh will be on campus this evening to speak in Litton-Reaves 1670 at 7 p.m. Kokesh, who spent more than six years in the Marine Corps reserves and completed a tour of Iraq before being discharged, has been a prominent figure in protests against the war in Iraq, protesting speeches and events across the country. Kokesh was arrested at Hofstra University in New York on Oct. 15 for disorderly conduct while protesting at the final presidential debate with members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Kokesh also faced disciplinary action in 2007 after he wore portions of his military uniform to anti-war events. Interview by CT news reporter Gordon Block.

Q: You are currently a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, a group that opposes the war in Iraq. What has led you to oppose the war in Iraq?

A: Part of the disillusionment for me since I went to Iraq, I was against the war before it started, but I thought we had a responsibility to clean up our mess and I thought that's what we were doing. I had to go for myself to find out that wasn't really the case. That's not the way the occupation was being conducted. There was no handover of power.

I also thought that when I left that there'd be less Marines in the region, more would be leaving and that wasn't the case. We've not only had the surges of late, but we've had really four or five surges since then. I mean if we had really started to wind these things down I never would have come out publicly against the war, but the fact it's still going on at this point when there's absolutely no point of being there, and yet there's still fellow Marines dying every day, I have to do something about it.

Q: With Election Day only a few weeks away, the presidential race is getting a lot of attention. Does either of the major presidential candidates, John McCain or Barack Obama, have the right plan for America's wars in the Middle East?

A: Well, ironically, it's anybody but Obama and McCain. All four of the third-party independent candidates are committed as Ron Paul brought them together on a joint platform on foreign policy for non-interventionism. This wasn't just drawn from Iraq and Afghanistan but from most of the other 150 countries where we have troops in the world.

That's the important philosophical difference between principled candidates who really believe in something versus the corporate sponsored candidates that base their beliefs on the people that put money toward their campaigns.

Q: What would be the best resolution for military forces fighting in the region? Can victory be achieved in the war on terror?

A: The idea of victory is such a joke, since you can't win an occupation. The idea of winning when you apply it to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, you're talking about applying some arbitrary measurement that doesn't really mean anything, and you could declare victory any time.

If you want to talk about the larger global war on terror, first of all you can't have a war on an emotion, and you certainly can't have a war against a tactic of terrorism. So what are we doing -- the whole framing is set up to make us accept occupation and long drawn out conflicts.

If you want to fight terrorism, you can apply terrorism to specific targets, cells or a handful of people.

But when you occupy a country, we're making it a fact that we can kill over there, which is absolutely the wrong approach to the global war on terror, which shouldn't be confined to Iraq and Afghanistan, but should be an international global cooperative effort to fight those who would use force or the threat of force or violence to scare other people into imposing their will.

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