“US military is out there spreading death right now”

Death, rather than nation building – that is what the US army has brought to Iraq and is bringing to Afghanistan according to former US army sergeant and anti-war activist Matthis Chiroux. He shared his views with RT.

For some, Matthis Chiroux is a hero. Others label him a US traitor. The 25-year-old is an army sergeant-turned-war-resistor, and one of roughly 8,000 US soldiers who have reportedly deserted the army since 2003.

He accuses the US military of having become a corrupt institution built upon spreading death as a response to nations’ problems by means of conducting illegal wars.

“One hundred per cent, Afghanistan war is absolutely an illegal war under the same conventions that Iraq was an illegal war,” Chiroux says.

“They are virtually the same thing,” he continues. “They are both experiments in going in, smashing the country and trying to rebuild it in our own image as a trading partner. They are both about resources. They are both defined as illegal wars of aggression by the UN Charter – that’s something people don’t understand.”

Speaking of President Obama’s decision to deploy even more troops in Afghanistan, the activist has said that “more troops in an illegal war aren’t going to somehow make it inherently right or even winnable.”

The former sergeant views the US army as a “nation-destroying force,” rather than an institution participating in nation-building. In fact, he says, it must only be an enemy-destroying force, and have nothing to do with nation building:

“The idea that you are going to take soldiers trying to kill and send them over there to build a nation – that’s not our job. That’s not what an army is meant for. The actual mission statement of the US army is to engage and destroy enemies of the United States in close combat. Period. End of story.”

To Matthis Chiroux, the American army is a place where US citizens are trained to devalue human life and think of any foreigner as a potential enemy. It is these people who are eventually sent into other countries to cause “countless deaths and immeasurable damage” to small, impoverished nations.

“These aren’t people with a lot to begin with. And we are going in and taking even more from them,” he goes on.

“The US military is out there spreading death right now… We don’t like to think of it in those terms. We like to think of it as nation-building or fighting terror, or, you know, anything but what it is. And it’s spreading death,” the former US army sergeant added.

Solutions, not spreading death, are something the United States must focus on right now, Matthis Chiroux concluded.