Interview with Chris Hedges

This is a partial transcript of an interview on Media Matters on May 17, 2009, between Bob McChesney and Chris Hedges. Hedges has traveled widely in the Middle East, reporting for the New York Times and other news organization. He’s also the author of several books, including American Fascists and War is a Force That Gives us Meaning.

His degree, oddly, is a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School.

Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a reporter for fifteen years.

Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. In 2002, he received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.

Bob McChesney: One of the ways I became familiar with your work, Mr. Hedges, was when you gave the commencement speech at Rockford College in 2003 I believe it was, shortly after the “Mission Accomplished” speech by then-president Bush. You were hollered off the state by irate audience members who thought you were being disrespectful of the president when you criticized the war, and not unlike Michael Moore at the Academy Awards in the sense that history, as the line goes, has absolved you, and then some. But what occurs to me from that event is that we have now seen since 2003 the Iraq War has fallen from the news to a certain extent, but it’s also been repackaged as a victory of the Surge and things are now working out there and we are on the home stretch. DO you think what we are being told by the news media is an accurate perspective of what is taking place in Iraq today?

Chris Hedges: No. Iraq has been destroyed as a unified country. That experiment that arose out of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire is finished. And it is not coming back. What we’ve done is partition Iraq, and not only partition the country, but literally partition neighborhood from neighborhood in cities like Baghdad. There’s been a frightening ethnic cleansing, which we have tacitly empowered, allowing, for instance, the Sunnis to drive Shiites out of villages enclaves and neighborhoods that they control; allowing Shiites to do the same; standing by tacitly as the Kurds do that in Northern Iraq, especially in the city of Kirkuk, which is very important to the Kurds because it is oil-rich, and if they don’t’ control Kirkuk, Northern Iraq is not sustainable as a Kurdish enclave.

So the surge was a clever tactic in that it for a while mollified. You remember the huge car bombings in 2006, when really the mission was collapsing. But over the long term, we don’t own these people, we rent them. When they turn on us, and there are signs that they are already turning – as I speak remember there’s been a spate of suicide bombings in the last couple weeks in Baghdad – this war will once again, I think, unleash the kind of carnage we saw a couple of years ago. The occupation is not sustainable in Iraq, just as it is not sustainable in Afghanistan.

McChesney: Before we go to Afghanistan, just to complete the point here on Iraq, do you sense there is a difference between the Obama Administration policies in Iraq from those of the Bush Administration?

Hedges: No. It’s virtually the same. And it’s the same with McCain. They’re going to try and pull off ‘Occupation Lite’ in Iraq. I’m not sure it’s gonna work. Remember that they are leaning very heavily on a huge mercenary force in Iraq, and they are going to not bring these people home but transfer them to the Afghan theatre, because Afghanistan is really deteriorating. And I think that’s probably the precariousness of the Karzai government, the rapid expansion of Taliban control, perhaps not as widely understood (certainly understood by the Obama Administration and his national security team, but probably the American public doesn’t realize how dangerous the situation in Afghanistan has become for NATO troops.

McChesney: What would happen if the United States just withdrew as quickly as possible from both Iraq and Afghanistan?

Hedges: Well, that’s what I don’t want to see happen.

McChesney: Well, it won’t happen, don’t worry. I was just curious …

Hedges: I mean I don’t want to see the mission collapse. You’ve seen this – go back and look what happened with the partition plan with India and Pakistan, or the abrupt British withdrawal from Palestine, which triggered the 1948 war. This is the kind of thing you don’t want to see or Vietnam. But of course if they don’t begin planning for it, that is what will happen.

So people are once again walking into the embrace of the Taliban for much the same reason.

McChesney: And so to sum up, your sense is that the Obama Administration’s surge in Afghanistan is not going to solve the problem.

Hedges: Well they are hanging on by their fingertips. If you watch the news reports closely, there are attacks being carried out. There was one jus the other day in the center of Kabul. As a foreigner, you can’t walk around. If you look like me – I have blond hair – you can’t walk around the street of Kabul. It’s too dangerous. You have to get into a cab. And forget going outside the city limits unless you are embedded in the NATO forces. That’s also true in Kandahar. When the Human Rights Watch went to do its report on civilian bombings, which is of course another huge issue, their representative couldn’t leave Kandahar. They had to hire Afghans to bring people who had been affected by the bombing into the city to interview. It’s just too dangerous to go out on the roads.

So are we.

McChesney: When I was listening to you and reading your stuff I recalled, and correct me if I’m wrong, that as a consequence of your commencement address at Rockford College, there was pressure on the New York Times to reprimand you for taking such a strong opinion on the way. And the paper did actually do some sort of reprimand. Is that correct?

Hedges: Yes. My book, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, had come out in the fall of 2002, and or course I’d just spent seven years in the Middle East, and inevitably I would be asked on Charlie Rose and all these kinds of shows what I thought about the impending invasion of Iraq. Like any Arabist, including all the Arabists in the State Department, intelligence community and the Pentagon, I realized that invading Iraq was a disaster. We wouldn’t be greeted as liberators, democracy would not be planted in Baghdad and emanate outwards across the Middle East, the oil revenues wouldn’t pay for the reconstruction. The non-reality belief system, the one championed by lunatics like Wolfowitz and Pearle and Cheney, none of whom know anything about the Middle East, and frankly, the world outside the backstabbing world of Washington. I also understood that as news reporter, to make those kinds of statements was to court professional suicide.

And then I wasn’t allowed to speak out about the way anymore. At that point I started looking for something else to do because I just wasn’t going to be muzzled. I’m one of the few Americans in this country- one of a few thousand – that has intimate experience in the Middle East, and of course months of my life in Iraq, and I just felt that it was worth leaving the paper, which I did.