War Zone
Veteran reporter Chris Hedges on Iraq, the media, and 20 years of war journalism.
By Kate Sheppard, Ithaca College
Thursday May 4, 2006
As the recent controversy surrounding the release of American reporter Jill Carroll demonstrates, journalists covering Iraq have often become part of the story themselves. (According to Reporters Without Borders, at least 86 journalists and media assistants have been killed in Iraq while 39 others have been kidnapped.) Meanwhile pressure to withdraw from Iraq mounts at home on the left, while pressure to bomb Iran builds on the right. Against this tense geopolitical backdrop, we spoke to veteran war zone reporter Chris Hedges about the nature of war in general, the Iraq war in particular, and the challenges for those who cover it.
Chris Hedges has spent all of his adult life covering war and violent conflict around the globe. Since first covering the civil war in El Salvador in the early 1980s, Hedges has reported from the Balkans, Central America, the Middle East, the Gulf War and the Gaza Strip.
In 2001, Hedges won a Pulitzer Prize as part of the team of New York Times reporters covering global terrorism. He has also reported for Harper’s, National Public Radio and the Christian Science Monitor. Currently, Hedges teaches journalism at Princeton University’s American Studies program and serves as a fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City.
Shortly before the start of the Iraq War, Hedges published War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, a vivid reflection on war culture and war reporting. Hedges spoke with Buzzsaw Haircut editor and Campus Progress contributor Kate Sheppard via telephone. The following is a portion of that interview.
BH: How did you first become a war correspondent?
CH: I became a war correspondent more because of the political situation in Latin America in the early 1980s, when these despotic military regimes were carrying out horrific, repressive campaigns against their own populace in countries like Argentina, where 30,000 people were disappeared, or Pinochet in Chile, or the insurgency in El Salvador where nearly 800-1,000 people were killed a month by death squads. And being deeply influence by George Orwell, I felt it was as close as my generation was going to come to fighting fascism. So off I went. I went off to war as an idealist. I didn’t go off because I was a gun nut or loved the military. I got sucked into the culture of war. That’s why I ended up [in] some place like El Salvador.
BH: What does it take to be a war correspondent? Would you say there are any defining features of someone who covers wars?
CH: It’s definitely a personality type. I mean, most war correspondents are adrenaline junkies, they obviously like risk to a certain extent, and they can tolerate physical hardship. I mean, physically it’s quite demanding. You’re sick a lot. It’s very stressful. You don’t get much sleep. I mean, I like war photographers and war correspondents—they don’t think of themselves as so precious. You don’t go off to cover war if you think you’re an invaluable member of the human race. They usually don’t have much of a personal life, and they drink too much. But they’re wonderful people. Unfortunately, when you do it for too long of a time, it becomes a really unhealthy lifestyle.
BH: In all the years you spent covering war, what was it that kept you following it, from country to country after that first experience in Central America?
CH: It becomes the only reality you can cope in. You just don’t cope in a world not at war. You feel disconnected, which you are, from everyone around you. You have learned to thrive on this high-octane lifestyle, where it’s just one rush after another. You have cachet—that’s where your cachet comes from within the news organization that you work for. Every time a war ended, all of us would sit around talking about how we’re going to get to another one.
BH: War clearly changes both the combatants and those who cover the war. What sorts of changes did you witness in yourself as you continued to cover wars all over the world?
CH: It distances you from people who haven’t had that experience. Your universe is sort of turned upside down. You have a hard time adjusting every time you leave a war, and there’s always kind of yearning to go back to it. And there’s the very real trauma. All of us who have been around that much organized, industrial slaughter suffer trauma. It’s unavoidable. I mean, there are greater and lesser degrees, but it affects you. You have many, many experiences and visual memories that are deeply disturbing, which is why none of us ever really sleep very well.
BH: What was it that made you decide to stop covering wars and come back to the United States?
CH: I realized that after doing it for almost 20 years, it was probably inevitable that it was going to get me. I got caught in a very bad ambush. I had stopped and taken a year off and then was a Neiman Fellow at Harvard, and then had gone back to the Balkans, then back to Gaza during the beginning of the second Palestinian uprising. And I got caught in a very bad ambush and I realized that I had to stop—I had been lucky—and that my luck had run out. I didn’t have the physical and emotional resiliency that I’d had when I was younger. So it was time to grow up.
BH: During the first Gulf War, you were captured in Iraq, and you’d also been captured in previous conflicts. Did that change how you felt about war, or how you covered it?
CH: I don’t know that that experience changed how I covered it. By the time I was captured in the Gulf War, I’d spent several years in combat zones and I knew the deal pretty well. Certainly, to be a prisoner is to be stripped of all your power. Not willingly, but you’ve handed over control to someone else, oftentimes an adolescent with an automatic weapon. It’s very frightening, very disturbing. It was certainly an experience that had a deep impact on me. After that capture in Iraq, I worked a lot in Northern Iraq with Kurds, and I’d have Kurdish bodyguards because there was a price on our heads. And I just did not want to get captured again. I would rather that my bodyguards engage in a firefight than put up a white flag. I just didn’t want to go through that again.
BH: I’ve read that your father became a pacifist after fighting in World War II. Though you’ve written extensively about the horrors of war, you don’t identify as a pacifist. Why is that?
CH: I lived in Sarajevo during the siege, when we knew full well that if the Serbs broke through the lines, they’d massacre a huge portion of the city, burn it down and drive the residents of the city into refugee camps or displaced persons camps. And living in that kind of environment, where you know that there are powerful forces trying to annihilate you, your family, your community, and your country, I think it’s a very natural response to pick up a weapon and fight back. It doesn’t save you from the pernicious effects of war, but I think there are times when violence becomes inevitable. When people are seeking your annihilation, I think you have a right to defend yourself. That’s certainly what the Bosnians were dealing with.
BH: You’ve talked about the “seductive myth of war.” What do you mean by that, and how is that myth used to rally a nation behind a specific war?
CH: The myth is…We did it after 9/11, about how powerful we are and how righteous we are, and the perfidiousness of the enemy, of a raid against us, that we’ll always be victorious. The myth is the same throughout human history. You can go back and read it in Homer…It hasn’t changed. It’s very effective. It’s really narcissism. It’s self-exaltation. But it works.
BH: You’ve described war as a “state of almost pure sin.” Could you describe what you mean by that?
CH: The essence of war is death. The goal of war is hatred and destruction of the other. That comes pretty close to being pure sin.
BH: How does this state affect the people who are living within it?
CH: It turns the moral universe upside down. Killing becomes laudatory. It’s all about destruction. The more you destroy, the better you are. It’s an inverted moral universe.
Preservation, nurturing and care for life are not something you see on a battlefront. You’ll see it among people within their own unit, where people will carry out tremendous self-sacrifice to protect members of their unit. But the common goal of the unit is the destruction of the enemy, of the other.
BH: When you talk about the wars you’ve covered, you often refer to the ardent nationalism and patriotism that become a uniting force for soldiers. But you’ve also covered some wars that are predominantly domestic conflicts, like the Salvadoran war. Do the dynamics then change? Is it a different force that drives people to kill their fellow countrymen than that which drives us to fight other nations?
CH: It’s fratricide, so as Freud understood, fratricides are always more atrocious than wars between nation states because it’s the “narcissism of minor differences,” to quote another Freudian term. Because the differences are so minute, you almost have to create reasons for conflict, and that becomes atrocity. That was certainly the case in the war in Bosnia. Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs were racially, linguistically, and ethnically indistinguishable. So you have to create differences, and that’s usually done through atrocity.
BH: And then is that what becomes what drives people to fight each other?
CH: When somebody comes in and rapes your sister and murders your father, it’s a pretty natural response to want to pick up a gun and go kill them.
BH: You’ve criticized the media for sanitizing war and making it seem glamorous and heroic. Can the media ever accurately portray the actuality of war?
CH: Well, it could. Whether it ever will, I don’t know. War is so repugnant, and so disgusting, awful and disturbing, that if real images of war were ever seen, people probably wouldn’t be able to watch. They’d be revolted. I think it’s very frustrating for those of us who have been there to come back and see this totally cleaned up vision of war that bears no resemblance to what real combat is like.
BH: From your perspective, what are some of the specific failures of press coverage in the War on Terror?
CH: Well, they didn’t report. They just repeated the company line. They acted as stenographers for the people in power who were lying to us. That’s not in my view journalism. That’s not why I became a journalist.
BH: What are some of the things going on that we’re missing now in Iraq, that the press is totally failing to cover?
CH: I don’t think Americans grasp the fact that we’re losing the war.
BH: Where do you see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going then?
CH: Well, we’re going to have to withdraw from Iraq. It’s not sustainable. We’ll either withdraw responsibly, which means a phased withdraw, with mechanisms that hopefully can prevent Iraq from sliding into civil war. Or, we’ll keep lying to ourselves until we’re just so exhausted and beaten that we pack up and go way and just let the place descend into a bloodbath.
BH: Do you think there is anyone doing responsible reporting on the situation in Iraq?
CH: I don’t think you can report out of Iraq. You can’t go out, unless you’re embedded, and then you have to play by their rules. I don’t fault the press for that. You can’t report. It’s just too risky.
This article originally ran in Buzzsaw Haircut, a Campus Progress sponsored publication.
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ten commands…TEN COMMANDS
I.
Make war exorbitantly expensive so common people and even uncommon people will believe they are getting something important. The great turn-of-the-century economist Thorstein Veblen—who so adroitly documented and labeled this value of “conspicuous consumption”—has left to us the application, not only to further capitalize it but also to “make a killing” with capital gains.
II.
Create suspicion around all skeptics and always have increasingly expensive military hardware proposals so peace initiatives are seldom given serious consideration. Advance ludicrous peace proposals on occasion to show absurdity of counter plans to ‘’military intelligence.” Use oxymorons to military profit.
III.
Always use slogan language closely related to the science, facts and fantasies of the popular culture. The great film actor and two term President, Ronald Reagan, used us and Star Wars with uncanny skill, borrowing his scripts and scenes from Star Trek. Our proto-economists and Pentagon potentates skillfully went “off budget” with many military expenditures and relied exclusively on military lexicons for terms like preparedness, security, “peace is our profession,” strategic defense systems, smart bombs and patriotism. Desert Storm was a logical consequence of desert invasions. Make the reports show provoked response and self defense. Mirage derives from mirages. Spuds scrub, reversing the scrubbing of spuds, our old familiar term for potatoes, in the Kitchen…
Use colorful language.
IV.
Engage in brinkmanship in staff and material allocations which cast doubt on the patriotism of any and ALL skeptics. However, create rumors and speculations that the brinkmanship is a modest response to gargantuan threats from “evil empires.”
V.
Show dramatically the unemployment threats to civilians when military cutbacks are proposed for deficit reduction. Deny ignorance and incompetence in transition from defense spending to civilian development.
VI.
Isolate and intimidate any doubters of valiant militarism.
VII.
Propose multilateral support from allied tribes. Appear generous with special materials. Never appear to be causing hardship to enemy civilian populations.
VIII.
Finance propaganda on disloyalty and subversion from within and blatantly show treason and terrorism by depressed, unassimilated ethnics of the same or related background of the alleged enemy.
IX.
Create. manipulate and distribute military media, toys, medals, photographs, and ribbons which support the credibility of war solutions in other eras, using not only our own history but that of current allies (being careful never to indicate that have been arch enemies in other wars).
X.
Appear honorable even when behaving in the most dishonorable ways of war. Pretend that the worst losses we have suffered are due to some scrimping of loyalty or some error of judgment of an unpopular military commander, leading astray his troops. Sacrifice occasional commanders when circumstances are propitious. Make martyrs of lost-troops such as the servicemen “lost” at Pearl Harbor and “gallantly” sacrificed on Iwo Jima. Closet the most traumatic reports of suffering as military secrets except when reports can show perfidy.
xi
Be stingy with the honor of martyrdom. Create a generous supply of live heroes with very few disabilities. Avoid letting any disabilities verify the horrors of war. Be very, very careful to judge the appropriate number of heroes and make them all politically, socially, economically, racially, linguistically correct… Under-represent minority groups among the heroes, because disgruntled minority heroes can make excessive post hoc demands unbecoming to war causes.
xii
Dramatize the comradeship, victory processions, and music of war. Disavow that “since wars begin in the minds of children…”
xiii
Create splendid shrines of some utility. Spare no expense on exquisite cemeteries, but limit occupancy so as not to show the high mortality of militarism. (We did not miscount. The military gives many more orders than it counts. Overkill?)
— david inkey - May 4, 06:22 PM - #—————————No One drew the line at Ten…
Thanks so much for this choice of interviewee. Mr. Hedges is both reflective and provocative, and what he’s seen and covered about war is harrowing enough to give pause to even the most knee-jerk patriotic hawk.
— Ava Morgenstern - May 4, 06:29 PM - #given the enormous supranational problems of planet earth, i have determined that it is essential for the UNITED NATIONS to have a poet laureate. to alleviate stresses on both the general assembly and the security council, i have usurped the title of UNITED NATIONS POET LAUREATE until such time as UN reform allocates time to create poesis….... love, david inkey ….
some poets may wish to goggle my POEMS OF A PERFECT POET.
— david inkey - Jul 22, 12:02 PM - #