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October 17, 2006

The Ehren Watada Case

H
ere is an interesting article about First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, who is facing court-martial for refusing deployment to Iraq because of his political opposition to the war.

The article focuses not so much on the merits and demerits of Watada's position as on the impacts that the case is having on the Japanese American community. (Lieutenant Watada is Japanese American.)

In particular, Watada's stand is reawakening the 60-year-old memory of the several hundred Japanese Americans who resisted the draft during World War II. Their story is the subject of my book "Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II."

At a certain level of abstraction, there is a parallel between Lt. Watada and the WWII resisters; both cases involve contests between obligation to country and obligation to strongly held principle. There are, however, very important differences: the overwhelming majority of the WWII resisters were not opposed to the war in Europe or in the Pacific on principle; they were opposed to being conscripted into service after being stripped of all of the benefits of their U.S. citizenship and placed behind barbed wire.

Posted by Eric at October 17, 2006 12:11 PM