>"I have a problem with reporters who play war correspondent, sit
>around hotels in Saudi Arabia bitching about restrictions," he tells
>E&P. "It was the press that administered the system -- it couldn't
>have happened without the cooperation of the press."
>
>The Pentagon's new "embedding" policy, while less restrictive than a
>press pool, prohibits journalists from having their own vehicles. To
>Hedges, who says the first thing he would do if he were covering
>this war is get a jeep, the limitations are significant. "I'm not
>saying people shouldn't be embedded," he insists, "but they're not
>going to get an accurate picture unless people are allowed to do
>their job. When you're embedded in a unit, you rely on the military
>for transportation: they will decide where you go, what you see, and
>what you report. They're not going to drive the press vehicle to
>sites if things go terribly wrong."
>
>He cites what happened early in the Gulf War in Al-Khafji, where he
>witnessed Saudi soldiers fleeing in panic from Iraqi soldiers. U.S.
>Marines were called in to push back the Iraqis. But back in Riyadh
>and Dhahran, "the press put out that the Saudis were defending their
>homeland. When the military has a war to win, everything gets
>sacrificed before that objective, including the truth."
>
>Hedges believes only a small percentage of the assembled press truly
>want to cover the conflict and the rest "just want to be hotel-room
>warriors, don't want to get anywhere near the fighting. The 10% that
>tries to get out will be stomped on. We saw that with Doug Struck,
>The Washington Post correspondent, when he tried to investigate
>civilian casualties in Afghanistan, by the U.S. military. He was
>made to lie down with a gun pointed to his head."
<http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec02/force_12-26.html>
>War as the drug of human existence
>
>TERENCE SMITH: You also describe war as a narcotic to which people,
>you included, can and have become addicted.
>
>CHRIS HEDGES: Yes, I... yeah, I think war is a drug, and maybe the
>supreme drug of human existence.
>
>TERENCE SMITH: Explain that.
>
>CHRIS HEDGES: It has a fantastic... a quality of the grotesque, a
>dark beauty; and the bible called it "the lust of the eye," and
>warned believers against it. It creates a landscape that's almost
>beyond the realm of imagination.
>
>Of course you have the adrenaline rush, you have that exhilaration
>that comes with that constant flirtation with danger. And it becomes
>hard to live outside of its environment, often even for the victims.
>
>I remember sitting after the war in Sarajevo with friends of mine,
>and while they didn't wish back the suffering, they missed what war
>had brought, that sense of immediately... that sense of belonging.
>
>I mean, you know, with everybody sort of under the threat of a death
>sentence, with everybody as a crowd together fighting an external
>enemy, that loneliness that we all feel in terms of having to face
>death alone is vanquished and somehow made easier by facing it as a
>group.
>
>TERENCE SMITH: You also write about how war tends to destroy and
>distort reality, how we tend-- anybody does-- to demonize our
>enemies and then excuse our own excesses. Tell me about that.
>
>The distortion of reality
>
>CHRIS HEDGES: I think that's always part of wartime. When you... you
>know, war always begins with the dehumanizing of the other through
>rhetoric, making the other... and I think that's... the flip side of
>that, of course, is patriotism, which is very thinly veiled self-
>glorification. And as we glorify and raise ourselves in our own
>eyes, the natural consequence is that we belittle the other.
>
>If you look at the language even now, since post 9/11, we call them
>"barbarians," they call us "infidels." We speak in wartime-- and
>this is not unique to us, but I think in all wartime societies, you
>speak in the jingoism or the clichés that are handed to you by the
>state.
>
>And that's pounded to you, I mean, by... from everywhere, from... by
>the press, by the government, by even the entertainment industry.
>And it becomes very, very hard to think outside the box, to
>articulate whatever disquiet you feel. We saw this in Bosnia, for
>instance. And that is very much... that's what makes it so hard to
>voice or articulate dissent in wartime.
>
>TERENCE SMITH: Reading this book, I got the impression that you
>wrote it in a kind of a fury, and that the fury was maybe partly
>directed at yourself.
>
>CHRIS HEDGES: Yes, a fury. It was a hard book to write. Parts of the
>book were very painful to write. If there was a fury, it was a fury
>at all the lies that are used to justify war, all the myths of war
>-- all of the things we're told about war that I had to find out the
>hard way and very painfully are not true. And if there's a fury at
>that, it's the mendacity of the entire enterprise.
>
>TERENCE SMITH: There's a passage which, if you would, read to us
>that sort of addresses this. You have it there.
>
>CHRIS HEDGES: Yes. "We believe in the nobility and self-sacrifice
>demanded by war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of
>war. We discover in the communal struggle the shared sense of
>meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills our spiritual void. I do not
>miss war, but I miss what it brought. I can never say I was happy in
>the midst of the fighting in El Salvador or Bosnia or Kosovo, but I
>had a sense of purpose, of calling. And this is a quality war shares
>with love, for we are in love, also able to choose fealty and
>self-sacrifice over security."
>
>TERENCE SMITH: And security, is that what you have chosen now for yourself?
>
>CHRIS HEDGES: I wouldn't put it that way. I would say I've chosen
>not to engage in the necrophilia that is war, not to flirt with my
>own destruction anymore.
>
>You know, the ancient Greeks and Romans... for the ancient Greeks
>and Romans, war was a god. And it began with the sacrifice of the
>other, but it always ended with self-sacrifice and
>self-annihilation. And I think when you don't understand war, when
>you allow war to control you, that's what war's final cost entails:
>Self-obliteration.
>
>The rhetoric of today
>
>TERENCE SMITH: You know, the book comes out and we're having this
>conversation at a time when this country is anticipating, possibly
>moving towards war. Does the rhetoric today echo some of the themes
>in the book?
>
>CHRIS HEDGES: Very much so. I mean, that... it is the same... it is
>the same poison, and we have ingested it along with everyone else.
>
>I think one of the things that... and in the last chapter I talk
>about Freud from Civilization and Its Discontents, where he talks
>about Eros and Thanatos and that instinct to preserve and conserve,
>or love and Eros, always vying with the death instinct, the instinct
>to destroy -- and that for Freud, both within individuals and
>society, one of these instincts was always ascendant.
>
>I think after the Vietnam War we asked questions about ourselves and
>our nation that made us a better people. In that defeat we were
>humbled. And there has been a slow, but very steady rehabilitation
>of war, certainly through the Reagan years, culminating with the
>Persian Gulf War.We have come to believe, and I think even revel and
>exalt, in our military prowess, in our strength with the illusion
>that we can fight wars that are cost- free. Kosovo has done this to
>us; Bosnia has done this to us.
>
>And if history is any guide, our technology will not save us. It did
>not save the European empires at the end of the 19th century, and it
>will not save us. And I think that if we steal a line from Freud,
>"Thanatos is ascendant." We've forgotten what war is; the awful,
>awful cost that war can exact, and we revel in the death instinct--
>and that's what frightens me. And it takes, unfortunately, a lot of
>bloodletting for societies to wake up.
>
>TERENCE SMITH: So this talk which we hear today of a short war, one
>that will be over quickly, an illusion?
>
>CHRIS HEDGES: It's hard to say. I think we don't really know what
>we're getting into Iraq. We know that in the Persian Gulf War, he
>did want to use his biological and chemical weapons. He could not
>because he couldn't get the orders down to the front line soldiers.
>
>You know, in the Persian... I went into Kuwait with the Marines, and
>we clashed first with the reservists and the militias, all the good
>troops. The Republican Guard were up North. And the idea was that he
>was going to drop this stuff on his own -- and of course us. So we
>know he can use it. And it doesn't take much to take out a Marine
>Corps battalion.
>
>Will we get in? Hopefully we will. I think that's an unknown. But if
>we continue this open- ended war on terror, if we keep leapfrogging
>from conflict into conflict, we're going to get burned eventually.
>And you have to remember that everybody signed up as fast as they
>could in 1914 because they thought the war would be over by
>Christmas.
>
>It... once you engage in a war, especially when you engage in a war
>without the kind of intelligence that you should have, you don't
>know what you're going to fall into, and once you're in there, it's
>very hard to get out.