Painting a picture of increasing suicides, rapes and post-traumatic stress disorder, independent journalist Dahr Jamail told a Southern Oregon University audience Wednesday that the U.S. military in the Mideast is in a state of "near collapse."

The author of "The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan," Jamail told stories of soldiers who had been jailed, ostracized and stripped of educational benefits when they resisted multiple redeployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

"If they are taking these risks, what are we doing to stop these wars?" said Jamail, who got a standing ovation from a sympathetic crowd of about 100 at Meese Auditorium.

In response, Mary Madisen told the audience that Peace House will hold meetings next Wednesday to consider a campaign for making Ashland a "sanctuary city for resistance," providing legal and family assistance to soldiers who reject orders to return to war zones in the Mideast.

Madisen is a member of the Collateral Repair Project, which supplies equipment for more than 500,000 Iraqis displaced by war, so they can rebuild their lives.

Jamail said soldiers who resist repeated deployments are routinely jailed, denied legal counsel and given dishonorable discharges.

Jamail, a non-embedded journalist from 2003 to 2005 in the Iraq War, wrote for Inter Press Service, Democracy Now! and his Web site, Dahr Jamail's MidEast Dispatches. Last year, he won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

He was introduced by SOU history professor Gary Miller, who said people can support the troops but not the war by valuing Iraqi and Palestinian lives as much as American lives.

Jamail said some soldiers are being redeployed up to six times and "are completely destroyed as human beings "¦ it's starting to break down the military" and is leading to a steady increase in suicides among military personnel.

Many soldiers with medical or mental problems are being sent back to war zones — and, he said, 12 percent of soldiers in Iraq are on antidepressants.

Rape and sexual assault on women soldiers is "insidious, pervasive and hard to talk about," he said, with at least 20 percent of women soldiers reporting being victims of it. The actual number, he noted, is "far greater" and many women don't join the military because "it's completely unsafe."

The situation of resisters is "spiraling totally out of control" in Afghanistan, "the place where empires go to die," said Jamail.

In the Vietnam War, large numbers of troops were refusing to follow orders because the troops were draftees and were supported by a strong anti-war movement. In the Iraq and Afghan wars, he said, it's more up to the individual resister.

To much applause, Jamail said the present wars are not about U.S. security, al Qaeda or helping Iraqis but are about creating open markets and "global hegemony "¦ for a bunch of old white guys in suits who are filthy rich and working to get a lot more money."

He added that, "once you join the military, they own your ass and you believe you have to follow orders, but that's not true. You have the right of access to your own lawyer, to write your Congressman and to question orders if you believe they are illegal."

One woman, who declined to be identified, but said she had been a Vietnam war protestor and was now 82, complained that Jamail was trying to fix "little atrocities" by encouraging support for individual resisters without opposing the basic wrong of war.

He said, "Don't look at the big picture. It's too depressing. Just say, 'We've got your back.' Get lawyers and if you can stop one person from going (redeploying), you're literally saving a life."