WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING by Chris Hedges.
Copyright 2002 by Chris Hedges, published by Public Affairs New York.
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The following is an excerpt from Bill Moyer's interview with Chris Hedges
on Moyer's show NOW:
WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING.
pbs.org
Moyers "……… WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING.
Its author, Chris Hedges, knows about war, knows about people dying from close up
experience. As a foreign correspondent for the NEW YORK TIMES, Chris Hedges covered the
Balkans, the Middle East, including the first Gulf War where he was captured by the Iraqis,
and Central America.
Last year he was a member of the team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize for the NEW
YORK TIMES coverage of global terrorism. Chris Hedges now writes the column, "Public
Lives." He's also, by the way, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. Welcome to NOW.
MOYERS: Does the inevitability of civilian casualties make this war illegitimate?
HEDGES: Well, I think the war is illegitimate not because civilians will die. Civilians die in
every conflict. It's illegitimate because the administration has not, to my mind, provided any
evidence of any credible threat. And we can't go to war just because we think somebody
might do something eventually.
There has to be hard intelligence. There has to be a real threat if we're going to ask our
young men and women to die.
Because once you unleash the "dogs of war" and I know this from every war I've ever
covered, war has a force of its own. It's not surgical. We talk about taking out Saddam
Hussein. Once you use the blunt instrument of war, it has all sorts of consequences when
you use violence on that scale that you can't anticipate. I'm not opposed to the use of force.
But force is always has to be a last resort because those who wield force become tainted or
contaminated by it. And one of the things that most frightens me about the moment our
nation is in now, is that we've lost touch with the notion of what war is.
At the end of the Vietnam War, we became a better country in our defeat. We asked
questions about ourselves that we had not asked before. We were humbled, maybe even
humiliated. We were forced to step outside of ourselves and look at us as others saw us.
And it wasn't a pretty sight.
But we became a better country for it. A much better country. Gradually war's good name if
we can, between quotes, can say was resurrected. Certainly during the Reagan Era. Granada,
Panama. Culminating with the Persian Gulf War, where a war - the very essence of war was
hidden from us. And the essence of war is death. War is necrophilia. That's what it is.
MOYERS: Tell me, having covered the first Gulf War, what the men and women who are
about to go into Iraq are going to experience.
HEDGES: Well, the ones who are up on the front line are - especially as they prepare to go
into battle - are going to have to come face-to-face with the myth of war. The myth of
heroism, the myth of patriotism. The myth of glory. All those myths that have the ability to
arouse us when we're not in mortal danger.
And they're going to have to confront their own mortality. And at that moment some people
will be crying, some people will be vomiting. People will not speak much. Everyone will realize
that from here on out, at least until the fighting ends, it will be a constant minute-by-minute
battle with fear. And that sometimes fear wins. And anybody who tells you differently has
never been in a war.
MOYERS: And yet you say in your book that the first Gulf War, that we made war fun.
HEDGES: For those who weren't there. You know the - I was with the U.S. Marine Corps and
they hated CNN. They hated that flag-waving jingoism that dominated the coverage on, or
dominated so much of the coverage…all those abstract terms that create the excitement
back home become obscene to those who are in combat.
MOYERS: You say also in the book that the first Gulf War made war more fashionable again.
HEDGES: Right.
MOYERS: What do you mean by that?
HEDGES: Well, it was, you know, so much of commercial news has now become an extension
of the entertainment industry. And the war became entertainment. The Army had no more
candor than they did in Vietnam. But what they perfected was the appearance of candor. Live
press conferences. And well-packaged video clips of Sidewinder missiles hitting planes or
going down chimneys. You know, this kind of stuff.
It's- and the fact that they covered up death. Not only the death of our own. But the death
of tens of thousands of Iraqis who were killed. They were nameless, faceless phantoms.
When we the victims, if you watch the news reports carefully, were our young men who were
out in the desert having to sort of bathe out of a bucket and eat MRE's.
So it was completely mythic, or mendacious narrative that was presented to us. And I was a
little delayed getting back to New York because I was a prisoner with the Iraqi Republican
Guard. But I remember landing into New York and even then the mood was that we'd just
won the Super Bowl.
And it frightened me and it disgusted me. And it wasn't because I didn't believe that we
shouldn't have gone into Kuwait. I believe we had no choice. But I certainly understood that
we, as a nation, had completely lost touch with what war is. And when we lose touch with what
war is, when we believe that our technology makes us invulnerable. That we can wage war
and others can die and we won't - then eventually, if history is any guide, we are going to
stumble into a horrific swamp.
MOYERS: I read your book last night. One of the most chilling and haunting scenes in here
is when, I think you were in El Salvador, and a young man was near you, calling out,
"mama."
HEDGES: Yeah.
MOYERS: "Mama."
HEDGES: It's not uncommon when soldiers die that they call out for their mother. And that
always seems to me to cut through the absurd posturing of soldiering.
MOYERS: Three times when you were in El Salvador you were threatened with death. You
received death threats. The Embassy got you out.
HEDGES: That's right.
MOYERS: You went back.
HEDGES: Yes. Because I believe that it was better to live for one intense and overpowering
moment, even if it meant my own death, rather than go back to the routine of life.
MOYERS: You're right, you know. War is an addiction, as you say. Let me read you this:
"during a lull I dashed…" this is you.
HEDGES: Right.
MOYERS: Read this for me.
HEDGES: "During a lull I dashed across an empty square and found shelter behind a house.
My heart was racing. Adrenaline coursed through my bloodstream. I was safe. I made it back
to the capital. And like most war correspondents, I soon considered the experience a great
cosmic joke. I drank away the fear and excitement in a seedy bar in downtown San Salvador.
Most people, after such an experience, would learn to stay away. I was hooked. "
MOYERS: You were hooked on?
HEDGES: War. On the most powerful narcotic invented by humankind is war.
MOYERS: What is the narcotic? What is it that's the poisonous allure?
HEDGES: Well the Bible calls it, "The lust of the eye." And warns believers against it. It's that
great landscape of the grotesque. It's that power to destroy.
I mean one of the most chilling things you learn in war is that human beings like to destroy.
Not only other things but other human beings. And when unit discipline would break down or
there was no unit discipline to begin with, you would go into a town and people's eyes were
glazed over. They sputtered gibberish.
Houses were burning. They had that power to revoke the charter. That divine-like power, to
revoke the charter of another human being's place on this planet. And they used it.
MOYERS: I would have thought that being captured and held by the Iraqis as you were,
would have cured you of your addiction. But yet it didn't.
HEDGES: No.
MOYERS: So I still don't understand it. I have to be honest. I mean I just don't understand
why you keep putting yourself back into that which you hate.
HEDGES: Well, because the experience itself, that adrenaline-driven rush of war. That sense
that you know we have a vital mission that, as journalists, that we ennoble ourselves. I
mean I think one of the things I tried very hard to do in the book was show the dark side of
what we do.
I mean I admire the courage and the integrity of many of the men and women I worked
with, but I do think there is a very dark side to what we do. And it becomes very hard to live
outside of a war zone. It's why this small - my comrades, these groups of war
correspondents and photographers - would leap from war-to-war.
It's no accident that I was covering the war in Kosovo with people I had covered the war with
in El Salvador two decades earlier. You go out of Sarajevo and be in a hotel in Paris and
would be pacing the halls because you couldn't adjust. When you stepped outside war it's
literally as if you sort of see the world around you from the end of a long tunnel.
And I often would feel that I was physically here but I was really sort of four paces behind.
You're incredibly disconnected from the world around you. And if you spend long enough in
war, it's finally the only place that you can feel at home. And that's, of course, a sickness.
But I had it.
MOYERS: But doesn't it also create a sense of camaraderie among men who are fighting it.
What happens then?
HEDGES: Comradeship is something that's attainable. Everyone can attain in wartime. Once
you have that external threat. I mean I think we felt this a little bit after 9-11. We no longer
faced death alone. We faced death as a group.
And for that reason it becomes easier to bear.
MOYERS: How do you explain the phenomenon that while we venerate and mourn our own
dead from say 9-11, we're curiously indifferent about those we're about to kill.
HEDGES: Because we dehumanize the Other. We fail to recognize the divinity of all human
life. We- our own victims are the only victims that hold worth. The victims of the Other are
sort of the regrettable cost of war. There is such a moral dichotomy in war. Such a frightening
dichotomy that the world becomes a tableau of black and white, good and evil.
You see this in the rhetoric of the Bush Administration. They are the barbarians. I mean we
begin to mirror them. You know for them we're the infidels and we call them the barbarians.
MOYERS: It happened in the Johnson Administration too. The President spoke of bringing
the coonskin home.
HEDGES: Right. But that's because war is the same disease. And that's the point of the book
is that it doesn't matter if I'm an Argentine or El Salvador or the occupied territories or Iraq.
It's all the same sickness.
MOYERS: The world is sick too, this is a savage world, as we keep being reminded…
You do think that United States faces a threat? A threat from whatever we want to call it?
That produced 9/11? You think we are at danger?
HEDGES: Yes. But not from Iraq.
MOYERS: So how do we, taking into account the moral issues that you raise…
HEDGES: Right.
MOYERS: How do we protect ourselves, defend our security, do the right thing and yet not be
taken by surprise again?
HEDGES: By having the courage to be vulnerable. By not folding in on ourselves. By not
becoming like those who are arrayed against us. By not using their rhetoric and not adopting
their worldview.
What we did after 9/11 was glorify ourselves, denigrate the others. We're certainly, now at
this moment, denigrating the French and the Germans who, after all, are our allies. And we
created this global troika with Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon.
One fifth of the world's population, most of whom are not Arabs, look at us through the
prism of Chechnya and Palestine. And yes, we certainly have to hunt down Osama bin Laden.
I would like to see those who carried out 9/11, in so far as it is possible, go on trial for the
crimes against humanity that they committed. But we must also begin to address the roots
of that legitimate rage and anger that is against us.
It has to be a twofold battle. We are not going to stop terrorism through violence. You see
that in Israel. In some ways, the best friend Hamas has is Ariel Sharon, because every time
the Israelis send warplanes to bomb a refugee camp or tanks into Ramallah, it weakens and
destroys that moderate center within the Palestinian community.
And essentially creates two apocalyptic visions. One on the extreme right wing of Israeli
politics. And certainly one on the extreme wing of the Palestinian community. And when
these apocalyptic visionaries move to the center of society, then the world becomes
exceedingly dangerous. And that's what I fear. And that's what- and, but that requires us
not to resort, which is a natural kind of reaction, a kind of almost knee-jerk reaction, to the
use of force when force is used against us.
MOYERS: So is it enough in this kind of world just to be good?
HEDGES: Well, nobody's good. I mean we're all sinners and God loves us anyway. That's the
whole point. And we live in a fallen world and it's never between the choice is never between
good and evil.
The choice… or moral and immoral, as Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us. The choice is always
between immoral and more immoral." |
