All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live from chaosradioaustin.org and antiwar.com slash radio.
In introducing our guest today, it's Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Chris Hedges.
He's the author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, American Fascists, the Christian Right, and the War on America, Losing Moses on the Freeway, the Ten Commandments in America, and the new one is called Collateral Damage, America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
He writes for truthdig.com.
And Chris, is this right that you've covered 14 wars in your life?
Geez, I've never counted, but probably something like that.
I started in Central America and 20 years later ended up in the Balkans, and there wasn't much I missed in between.
And of course, that was an entire career spent as a reporter for the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor.
Well, 15 years with the New York Times, and then before that I was with National Public Radio and the Dallas Morning News, and then I first started out with the Christian Science Monitor.
All right, now, this is an incredible book here, Collateral Damage, America's War Against Iraqi Civilians, co-written with Laila Al-Aryan, and I want to get to this, but I thought first of all, if I could just ask you briefly at the beginning of this interview, if you could share with our listeners here your understanding of what's going on in Gaza and the context of the new peace deal that's been announced.
Is the blockade going to be lifted?
What is the situation there?
Well, I'm not sure on the details of the ceasefire negotiated essentially through Egyptian security forces and how that's going to work, or even if it's going to hold.
So beyond the ceasefire, I don't have details and what that means in terms of lifting the blockade.
I mean, Israel's idea of lifting the blockade is to usually allow in a greater shipment of fuel and humanitarian supplies, but it's more like turning a spigot on Gaza.
I mean, you know, people, the Palestinians in Gaza cannot go in and out.
The blockade, it's more how severe will the blockade be.
I can't imagine that we're going to see a resumption of normal ties between Israel and a Hamas-led Gaza anytime soon.
For the average listener in Austin, Texas who doesn't really know anything about the situation there, I've read some accounts that basically describe Gaza now as simply a prison camp by the sea, that women and children are dying of easily curable diseases and lack of water.
What's going on over there?
It's true.
It's appalling.
It's appalling.
It's collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians, and the deafening silence on the part of the United States is staggering.
In Europe, there's much more consternation and protest over this.
You know, and as far as Israel is concerned, only the United States counts.
So yes, it is, for those of us who've spent a lot of time in Gaza and worked in the Middle East, it's just, it's absolutely unconscionable what's going on.
See, I tend to think that most Americans probably don't have any idea what's going on at all, never mind whether they'd care either way, but I don't even think most people around here have had a chance to even decide whether they care or not, you know?
Yeah, well, that's not necessarily the fault of, you know, the public.
I think it's the fault of the news media.
You know, there's been such a deterioration in the quality of the press in the United States since I began working, you know, now over two decades ago, you know, foreign bureaus have all been closed, news, especially on broadcast, commercial medias, all about celebrity gossip and trivia and salacious garbage, and it's very, very disturbing.
I mean, and, you know, it's news is entertainment.
If it's not entertaining, then it's not news, and that's sort of the new paradigm.
And so it's very difficult for people, unless they go searching for it on the Internet or read, you know, one of the national papers like the New York Times or the Washington Post, to really get any information about what's happening, and not only in Gaza, but in Iraq and just about anywhere else in the world.
Yeah, well, and you know, if they're not reading Truthdig or Antiwar.com or something like that, the context of the Times and the Post articles is always, you know, twisted in favor of warfare and so forth anyway.
So even then, they need additional context from alternative media, it seems like to me.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, well, let's get to the hard news, then.
This book is really something else here.
It's called Collateral Damage, America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
And you know, just a couple of weeks back, Chris, I interviewed Mathis Shiro, who's a young man who's refusing to deploy to Iraq after serving in Afghanistan and other places.
And I was playing devil's advocate and saying, well, it's not up to you to decide what's a war crime and what ain't.
You're supposed to follow orders like the civilians tell you and that kind of thing.
And he said, no, you have to understand that it is impossible to go to Iraq to serve in Iraq and not commit war crimes.
It is an atrocity producing situation, basically, is what he said.
And I think those are actually your words for the same kind of thing.
You take an average kid, you put him on patrol in Iraq, and he becomes a war criminal simply in order to stay alive.
It's as simple as that.
Is that basically the deal?
Yeah.
I mean, you have to look at the caliber of the weapons that these kids are allowed to unleash in densely populated areas.
And they weren't designed for close quarter for urban combat.
We're talking about belt fed saws, 7.62 machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, 50 caliber machine guns.
I mean, these are, you know, anybody who's been in the military will tell you are fearsome weapons with bullets that, you know, one, you know, one 50 caliber bullet can sever a human being in half.
And you know, they're frightened every time they go beyond the wire.
It's a natural reaction.
They know that they move within a hostile population.
They are fighting an elusive enemy who they can't see, who can strike them.
And yet, you know, they very rarely can lash out at their attackers, either because it's remote controlled IEDs or because, you know, they unleash automatic fire in an ambush and then melt back into a densely populated area or undergrowth.
So what they do in their fear is essentially lay down withering suppressing fire that daily takes civilian lives.
And there are many different types of war, you know, and I've covered several different types.
You know, I spent my first five years in El Salvador covering the conflict there, which was essentially a civil war between rebels and, you know, a military backed or U.S. backed military government.
But it was Salvadoran against Salvadoran.
Then I covered the first Gulf War, which was sort of conventional warfare between mechanized units in the desert.
I understand full well that the bombing campaign in southern Iraq took a lot of civilian lives, but the actual conflict, the actual point of contact between the Iraqi army and the American forces in the first Gulf War took place in open desert.
And then we have the worst kind of war, which is essentially foreign occupation, colonial occupation of a foreign land by a foreign occupier.
And that, of course, is Israel in Gaza and the West Bank.
It was the French in Algeria, it was us in Vietnam, and it is us in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And those kinds of wars are always the messiest.
I mean, murder is always a part of war.
And by that, I mean the taking of a life of an innocent, of somebody who doesn't have the capacity to do you harm, as opposed to killing, which is killing somebody who does pose a threat to you.
So murder is part of every conflict I've ever covered.
But in these kinds of conflicts, which, as Robert J. Lifton says, they are atrocity-producing situations where everyone is seen as hostile and the enemy and therefore a legitimate target, murder predominates.
And the war in Iraq is now primarily about murder.
It's not about killing.
You know, the estimates of Iraqi civilian dead range from about 600,000 to 1.2 million.
It's too dangerous now for a Western reporter to go out into civilian areas in Iraq and do the kind of thorough reporting that can begin to give a picture of the war.
And so we went through the back door, so to speak.
We spent seven months tracking down 50 combat veterans, soldiers and Marines, who had served in Iraq, many of them multiple times, and were willing to talk about the atrocities they had witnessed against Iraqi civilians, or in some cases, actually participated in.
And we sought to get a critical mass to expose the patterns of this war and to explain that incidents like Haditha, or the bloodletting in Fallujah, were not isolated.
But this was part of the daily reality for most Iraqis, where the occupation forces have become a source of unmitigated terror and violence.
And I think that that narrative is one that it's been extremely difficult for the American public to accept.
We may not like the war, but we still buy into this notion of heroism and glory and honor, all these abstract words that are meaningless and hollow in the midst of combat.
So it was fascinating.
We first published this study, it was 15,000 words.
And we focused on the key pillars of the occupation, checkpoints, convoys, detentions, raids, this kind of stuff.
And it had a huge, there was a huge reaction in Europe.
The Guardian newspaper in Britain actually reprinted the entire 15,000 words.
The Independent reprinted several thousand, Front Page Story led the paper, the BBC.
And in the United States, the narrative was just so uncomfortable that the mainstream media never picked it up.
It was interesting that NBC News, at the urging of two of their correspondents who had been in Baghdad, actually interviewed many of the veterans that we interviewed, and interviewed myself, produced the piece, but it never aired.
And I think that's because we're just not ready to face the reality of what we are doing in Iraq.
It's just too grim, and too disconcerting for us to digest.
And so we turn away and focus on the trauma, and I'm not against that.
I mean, as somebody who struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, I think we owe our veterans a lot more than we are giving them.
But we really turned a blind eye, we turn our backs on what this war means, if you're an Iraqi mom or dad or kid.
I think you're right about that.
But the problem is that we're supposed to be grown-ups here, and that if our will toward our government's policy in the affirmative, that they can continue on ahead with whatever it is they're doing, is costing human lives like this, well then that's tough for our feelings that we don't want to pay attention to that, that we only want to talk about the American soldiers and not the Iraqi people.
Forget our feelings, their lives are at stake here.
We're supposed to be grown-ups, and furthermore, this is supposed to be a republic, where the people are in charge, supposedly.
It's our responsibility to know even more than our government knows about what's going on there.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I mean, I think that it is a failure of responsibility is exactly the appropriate way to put it.
But we can't lay it all on the feet of the American public.
I think the press is incredibly complicitous in this.
You know, the very cable news outlets that sold us the war no longer report it.
American Journalism Review just did a study where they looked at the actual airtime that was devoted to Iraq at the inception of the war and is devoted now.
The drop-off is staggering.
I mean, it's like, I forget the exact figure, but it's like 4 or 7% of airtime is devoted to the war.
It is this salacious garbage about, you know, whatever.
I don't follow it, so I'm bad on it, but you know, Britney Spears meltdown, and Paris Hilton going to jail.
You know, I mean, it's just frightening.
Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, and he got it.
I mean, that's what we're doing.
It's all about amusement.
It's all about entertainment.
And the more that we retreat into that kind of fantasy world, that sort of empty world of gossip and trivia, the more we become disconnected from our own reality and the reality of the world around us.
Yeah.
Well, talk about the disconnect.
You know, you mentioned the credible studies estimate the civilian deaths between 655,000 and over a million, and that latter one is from opinion business research there in Great Britain.
Yeah.
And this has come up a couple of times on the show recently.
Tom Englehart brought this up in a recent interview, that there was one poll, which I guess I had missed a few months back, where most Americans, I think it was more than 50% of Americans on the multiple choice, chose that they thought that less than 9,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the war.
That's in the sixth year of this war now.
Yeah.
I mean, it's fascinating.
I did an interview in Washington with Al Jazeera yesterday, and you know, Al Jazeera, which has Arab reporters who, you know, are standing on the other side of the occupation, is unable to broadcast in the United States.
You know, the rest of the world can see it.
But of course, the images that it disseminates, and Al Jazeera reporters, you know, remained in Fallujah with civilians as U.S. Marines leveled the city, are just not shown, were prohibited by the government from seeing the caskets of American servicemen and women coming back at Dover Air Force Base.
You know, there's a conscious effort to keep reporters away from funerals.
You know, they have essentially blocked out the reality of the war.
And that, of course, has made it much easier to prosecute a war that, under international law, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression.
And I think it's one of my frustrations with the whole election cycle, is that both of the mainstream parties are sitting around talking about the terms of the occupation, including Barack Obama.
You know, he wants to leave enough troops behind to protect our imperial city, the green zone, and our large super bases, and these are his words, fight terrorism and train the Iraqi soldiers.
We don't have a right, not only do we not have a right to be there, but we are not a force for stability.
You know, most of the violence against Iraq is perpetrated by the American occupation forces.
And under international law, in the interests of, you know, attempting to calm the waters of the Middle East, and for, I think, ultimately our own health as a nation, the only thing we should be discussing is an orderly withdrawal, and, you know, coupled with the fact that we built this mercenary army, which Obama said that he would continue to employ, means that we're just trapped in a very dangerous paradigm.
Right.
Well, you know, 60% of the American people agree with you, according to the most recent poll I saw, but we need to get it to be, I don't know, 99% or something in order to actually have the effect that we want and get that withdrawal.
So I wonder if maybe we spent so much time, it's mostly my fault, we spent so much time criticizing the media for not telling the people what's going on there.
You're not telling the people what's going on there.
You do in this book.
Let's talk about this book.
It's almost all just extended quotations, and, you know, the writing just sets up the extended quotations from the soldiers and the Marines that you all interviewed, describing just day-to-day life as an occupation soldier in Iraq, what it is they're about, and I thought maybe we could just try to go through the list as you separated in the book, the convoys, the checkpoints, the raids, detentions, and so forth, you know, so that people understand.
I guess maybe if you could tell us some stories about the checkpoints.
This to me is some of the most horrifying stuff.
I think that oftentimes when we think about checkpoints, we think of fixed checkpoints, a car approaches a checkpoint, you know, flagged down, and IDs are checked.
In Iraq, there are very few fixed checkpoints, except for those, you know, surrounding military installations like the Green Zone, because fixed stationary troop positions are just too vulnerable.
So they put up what they call flying checkpoints, where, you know, you may round the corner of a street in your neighborhood, and there has never been a checkpoint there, and suddenly, wham, you know, you are faced with a checkpoint that you don't anticipate.
And oftentimes for security, American troops will place Iraqi troops in front of their checkpoint, so you actually have a double checkpoint.
Now, for Iraqis, this is very disconcerting, because a lot of the sort of militias, criminal gangs, kidnapping rings, will wear Iraqi police or army uniforms, and so a lot of times Iraqis are faced with a difficult choice.
Do they stop at that checkpoint, especially if they're in a, let's say they're a Shiite in a Sunni area, or a Sunni in a Shiite area?
Do they take the risk that this could be a criminal gang?
Do they slam the car in reverse and try and get away?
That of course can get them killed, or they can go through the Iraqi lines and think they've already been through a checkpoint, and in fact, the real checkpoint is 100 yards down the road.
And any kind of speed, any kind of sudden movement in a car, a failure to brake in time, and the reaction of occupation forces is essentially to open fire on the car.
Nine times out of 10, and maybe even more than nine times out of 10, the people they kill are civilians, often whole families.
You know, this was a daily, almost a daily occurrence in Iraq, as soldiers and Marines talked about, you know, dozens of incidents that they had seen.
In some cases, they, you know, would fire up an Iraqi car, we're talking about dead children, and just leave the corpses in the car for two or three days until relatives or townspeople or somebody came to collect them.
I mean, that is a reality of life in Iraq that is very rarely transmitted to the American public.
And why?
Well, it's because American reporters in Iraq can only operate if they're embedded, i.e.if they are with occupation troops.
If they start reporting incidents like that, they are instantly unembedded, and they can't report.
And this isn't an abstraction.
I have friends who are and have been in Iraq, and what they engage in is essentially the lie of omission.
They just don't write about it.
If you write about that kind of stuff, you can't report out of Iraq.
And so they don't.
And so we never hear it.
And now the house raids, I mean, these guys make the Williamson County Sheriff's Department or even King George's Redcoats and their writs of assistance seem like gentlemen.
Yeah, they're brutal, and, you know, tens of thousands, maybe more, of Iraqis have experienced this.
What happens is when an ambush takes place or an IED goes off, then they'll cordon, usually at two or three in the morning, they'll cordon off a whole section around the area where the incident took place.
They'll burst into homes at gunpoint.
They will tear the homes to pieces.
I mean, you know, tipping over refrigerators, slashing open pillows on houses.
They will herd all of the men into one room and, you know, with plastic handcuffs, tie their hands behind their back, often haul away men of military age, tossing them into this, you know, prison, massive prison system in Iraq, where they can disappear for weeks, months, even years, families frantically trying to find out what's happening to them.
They're often abused within that prison system, both by Iraqis and by American forces.
And the terror, you know, unleashed on children and, I mean, imagine, you know, you're in your bedroom and suddenly the muzzle of an M-16 is pointed at your forehead and somebody is screaming at you in a foreign language to get up and get out.
And this has just been disastrous and fueled, you know, a tremendous amount of rage and resentment on the part of many Iraqis who might otherwise, I don't think any of them probably support the occupation, but at least might have remained more neutral.
And this happens every single night in Iraq, night after night after night.
You know, I knew an army guy and he came back from Iraq and I saw him, you know, out somewhere and we were talking about this and I was saying, and this was early in the war too, I think, maybe 2004, and I said, well, you know, it seems like you guys are out doing these raids, looking for the insurgent leaders and that kind of thing, but all you're doing is kicking in doors and making more insurgents.
And so you get in this cycle where you create more insurgents and then you do more searches and then you create more insurgents.
And he looked at me like I had no idea what I was talking about and just told me, no, it doesn't work like that.
And he couldn't explain why it wouldn't work like that or anything, but this is the kind of thing that just, you know, nah, that's not the way it is at all.
Don't worry.
Well, you know, the veterans that we spoke to, and all of the veterans we spoke to, we insisted that they speak on the record and we tape recorded every interview because a lot of the things they said were very incendiary and we just, we weren't going to go with anonymous sources and we weren't going to go with stuff that wasn't on tape.
We really wanted this article and then this book to finally be, you know, bulletproof in the sense that just the reporting was just so solid and so scrupulous and accurate and careful that you couldn't go after it.
And boy, that, I mean, the veterans we talked to, all of them, I don't think there was any of them that didn't describe or feel that the raids were a huge mistake, not only in terms of turning Iraqis against us, but because they went in really blind.
There was no real intelligence.
It was just a massive sweep and, you know, it was very, very rare that units found anything of substance.
You probably went through a couple thousand homes like that before you went into a home where there actually were stockpiles of weapons and things that were used to carry out the insurgency.
Yeah.
Now, listen, I know I've got to let you go here in just a second.
I want to ask you what you think the long-term consequences of this will be.
Let's say, I don't know, John McCain and Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee's planes all crash into each other somehow and Ron Paul, by default, becomes the president and gets our troops out of there, best-case scenario.
Are we going to have terrorist attacks against American civilians for the next 50 years based on this, the next 100?
We have certainly been the best thing that ever happened to Al-Qaeda.
You know, after 9-11, and I was working in the Arab world for the New York Times covering Al-Qaeda, nearly all Muslims were absolutely appalled at the attacks of 9-11 and what had been done in their name.
And we had really garnered the empathy, not only of, you know, the world, but the Muslim world.
And the only way you fight terrorists, and terrorism has been with us, you know, going back to the Roman Empire, Solis wrote about it, the Jakartan Wars.
I mean, it's not, it's a tactic.
You can't have a war on terror.
It's a tactic that's used by rogue groups, has been, will be, you know, whether it's anarchists in the late 19th century, I mean, you know, the barter brigade, it doesn't matter.
I mean, terrorism is something that is unsadly part of the human condition.
But you battle against terrorism by isolating them within their own societies.
And essentially, the attacks on 9-11 did that.
And if we had had better leadership, and the courage and foresight to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are now.
Unfortunately, we reacted with violence by dropping iron fragmentation bombs all over the Middle East, invading a country that posed no threat to us, had no links with Al-Qaeda, no connection with the attacks of 9-11.
And this became, you know, a huge boon to Al-Qaeda, in essence, resurrected not only Al-Qaeda, but Islamic Jihad.
So the probability of catastrophic terrorist attacks on American soil is far greater because of our miscalculations and our failed policies than they were if we had been more astute.
So yes, we are.
And you know, they have intercepted, attempted terrorist plots, both here and, I mean, dozens of them, and in Europe.
But look, eventually, one is going to get through, just as they did in the subway system in London.
This is a problem that, you know, is going to come back to haunt us.
And what I fear is that, you know, the very forces that sold us the war, should we suffer another terrorist attack, will manipulate that fear and use that threat of insecurity to strip away what few civil liberties we have left.
I mean, you know, we're about to vote on this FISA bill, which is about to grant immunity to telecommunications companies, which means that if that immunity is granted, we will never know the extent of the eavesdropping, wiretapping, and surveillance that we suspect affected tens of millions of Americans, and all this data is still stored, phone records, everything else.
You know, I think probably in the end, we're one or two terrorist attacks away from a police state.
Yeah, it sure is looking that way.
All right, listen, I've got a million more questions for you, but I know you have to go.
I want to thank you very much for spending some time with us today on the show, everybody.
Chris Hedges, he's the author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, and the new one, America's War Against Iraqi Civilians, co-written with Leila al-Aryan.
Thank you very much for your time today.
