EPISODE TWO: "WAR AND CONFLICT IN THE POST-COLD WAR, POST-9/11 ERA" From Public Radio International, I'm Christopher Lydon. This is the Whole Wide World. On the matter of conflict and war in the global era, is there a way to understand, or rationalize, or contain it? The old Cold War imposed a kind of logic on the world – a superpower symmetry that enforced restraint and peace (compared to now, anyway). 9/11 unleashed new fury and fear, new players and insecurity, for the world to grapple with. The war on terror, designed to confront the bad news, is now in the shadow of an unfolding war in Iraq that may be eclipsed by a blueprint for war in North Korea. But who can say just what this world is fighting about? Is it regime change, or democracy in the Middle East? Is it about weapons or resources, oil, water, diamonds, timber? Is it about civilizations clashing or new empires ascending? We're tracking the causes of war, next, on the Whole Wide World. [Music piece] I'm Christopher Lydon. This is the Whole Wide World…a rumination in a time of war on the rhyme or reason of global conflict… [Montage of short bites:] … "The world is being reconfigured along cultural lines"… …"When resources are at stake, we've always overlooked the civilizational or identity issues"… …"I think this could be a war about democracy in the Middle East. I say it 'could be;' I don't know if it is going to be that"… …"What you're seeing now is a disintegration into a Hobbesian vision, a Hobbesian vision, which means a war of all against all"… …"I think ultimately war is probably is best definable as a drug, and perhaps the most powerful narcotic invented by humankind"… CL: This hour we're taking a sort of museum tour of reasons and rationalizations for war, reasons why the 90s, after the end of the Cold War, were shockingly bloody in the Balkans, in the old Soviet Union, in Africa, and the Middle East. Reasons for a doomsday pall over the new century. In the global era, what is war about? Oil, democracy, terror, freedom, empire, culture, water, diamonds, modernizing Islam or nation-building in the Middle East? These are all some of the clues we've been offered on the way to the battlefield. In the mix this hour: an anthropologist of Islam; a New York Times war correspondent, an Iraqi democrat, a Nobel Prize poet, a war economist, and two American scholars whose books foresaw 9/11 – almost 20/20 – from virtually opposite angles. The Whole Wide World is the radio program that kicks the tires of global trends: trends in money and music that travel further, faster than ever; trends in disease and medicines, dreams and panics, that can be planetary events overnight as a wired world keeps shrinking. If there's a big idea on the throne of American life in the second Bush era, it's the notion of a clash – of cultures or civilizations, with Muslims today, maybe Chinese tomorrow. The Israeli-Palestinian impasse has been one grim, endless rehearsal of that clash. 9/11 drove it into American hearts and minds, into the nerve center of our greatest city. So it feels now like a much bigger showdown – maybe the West against the rest. The Bush team has taken up the cause with some of Israel's style, willing to go it alone in a hostile world, wary even of old friends, ready to jump into a fight first, according to the Bush Doctrine. That's the short form of an oversimplified "battle map" of us against them in our minds. Question is: what if it's wrong? Samuel Huntington at Harvard anticipated a "clash of civilizations" – not quite holy war but a lethal new division of the world along lines of tribe and faith, superseding differences of wealth or market ideology. SH: Since the end of the Cold War, the alignments are shifting much more along civilizational lines. CL: The Huntington book was fodder for fights in the faculty club, paper wars among the policy wonks. But then "Muhammad Atta and Company" blew out the World Trade Center, and Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," five years old, in paperback, was a sudden bestseller, and his title seemed to be the text of our times. Huntington himself had taken another flight out of Boston to Washington that fateful morning of September 11. Since your first thought was, "This is an Islamic fundamentalist sneak attack of some sort," but was it the clash? SH: Well, I don't know what you mean by "the clash." I mean, obviously, Osama bin Laden has declared war on the United States, and that's a clash of civilizations; he's against the western civilization. CL: But what's the connection with the clash that you made famous, in book form? SH: Well, I was talking there about the extent to which cultural and civilizational identities were coming to the fore, among peoples all over the world in the wake of the Cold War. We had a large number of local conflicts going on around the world, largely, but not exclusively, involving Muslims fighting non-Muslims, and that the major danger here was that these small-scale conflicts could escalate into broader conflicts, drawing in countries and groups from each of the two civilizations involved. That's the main theme of my book. CL: Huntington's alarm bells about the Islamic resurgence sounded exaggerated when I first heard them in the mid-90s. This was our radio conversation in 1996: SH: They are the people who become militants and at times fanatics and terrorists and migrants… CL: When his book was new, seven years ago, I asked skeptically if his "clash" wasn't really a sort of methadone for policy guys who'd got hooked on the Cold War. There is the underlying problem between the West and Islam. In the Sam Huntington "Armageddon" nightmare of the 21st Century, that population, that resentment, that cultural energy, gets allied with China and China's technological and nuclear capacity in a kind of ultimate civilizational showdown with the West. How do we get there, and then what happens? SH: Well, first of all, Chris, I don't talk about "Armageddon" or "nightmares." CL: Well, the reader concludes that. SH: Well, the reader's reading in lots of things, I think. CL: After 9/11, "The Clash of Civilizations" flew out of the bookstores, and we interviewed Huntington anew. SH: Since the book was published, a number of different things have occurred, not just 9/11, that made the arguments that I advanced in the book more relevant; these include, obviously, the second Intifada, the explosion by both India and Pakistan of nuclear weapons, and the extent to which they were on the brink of war this past year. CL: Do you claim a certain paternity here, or prophecy? SH: Well, I think the…what I argued in the book, unfortunately, has acquired a certain validity in terms of what has happened. I regret this greatly, but unfortunately, as I say, it turned out to have a fair degree of accuracy. CL: You're in some strange way bound up with Osama bin Laden's view of the world. SH: Well, as I said, Osama bin Laden is fighting a war of civilizations against the western civilization; he makes no bones about it. CL: But are you? SH: Am I doing what? CL: Are you fighting a war of civilizations? SH: I'm not fighting a war against anybody. All I'm saying is: this is a phenomenon in the world today, and it's an unfortunate phenomenon, and it can be a major danger. CL: But the question in my mind would be: is civilization at the core of it? Take the second Intifada, which you make an incidence of in "The Clash of Civilizations;" it's also a piece of a long history of Palestinian nationalism; it's also a part of a very specific real estate fight in Jerusalem and the Middle East. What…why do we make it a civilizational matter, when it can be defined so many other ways? SH: Well, it is. It has many dimensions, and…including those you've just mentioned. But it also happens that the two peoples involved, on either side, do come from different civilizations, and this produces, as I said, a great identification with the Palestinians by other Arabs, and other Muslims, who are supportive of the Palestinians, and it produces – certainly in the US – great support for Israel, which is viewed as sort of an appendage of western civilization (less so in Europe, obviously). And so it does have this dimension, and the danger, as we saw in the wars in Yugoslavia, is that other parties, to what starts as a local conflict, can become involved. And in Yugoslavia, you had the Catholic countries in Europe coming to the support of the Slovenes and the Croats. You had Greece and Russia supporting the Serbs, and helping them. And you had Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Iran and Malaysia, all providing very substantial support to the Bosnian Muslims, including people coming from those countries to fight in the wars in Yugoslavia. Now, that didn't escalate very far, but it certainly had the makings of an escalation there, as people in civilizations rallied to the support of their "co-civilizationists," who are engaged in fighting. CL: Religion makes a great rallying cry – think of Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland – but when it is also a class, colonial, and economic fight, does calling it religious make it so? SH: "Religification" of these wars makes it…I think it's significant…it makes them much more difficult to settle, and you have all this religious symbolism…attacks on religious targets. And so wars, which may have begun over simple squabbles over pieces of real estate, grow beyond that. I'm not saying that culture and civilization explain everything going on in the world; that obviously is not the case, but, it seems to me, it's a good place to start. [Music] Akbar Ahmed: There is a great deal of power in the idea of the clash of civilizations. It's not a new idea; it's an old idea and, in a sense, it's been around for a thousand years. That's why it resonates, that's why it has the power and, after 9/11, it suddenly becomes "The Idea." [Music] CL: So, Huntington's "Clash," whether you like it or not, is the theory that all the others have to contend with. Akbar Ahmed is the anthropologist at American University, from Pakistan originally, who started hearing the Huntington feedback in the mid-90s from Muslims. AA: I was on a lecture tour. I went to Morocco and I went to the Middle East, and then to Pakistan, and the Huntington "clash of theories" idea followed me wherever I went, and people were talking about this crazy Harvard professor who's advocating clash. So that is the power of ideas and that is precisely the power of the idea of a clash, and I believe it's embedded in the history of the West, it's embedded in the psychology of the West, and it's embedded in the culture of the West. CL: Are you saying that it's really our problem? AA: Yes, it is your problem because…Remember the clash comes from the West. Don't forget that the Crusades are started by Europe, that for two centuries the Middle East (and that does not mean Muslims; it means Christians and Jews and Muslims living in the Middle East – what is now the Middle East) are subjected to wave upon wave of crusaders who come there, who loot and burn and destroy synagogues…they destroy churches. And that is the first experience that the world of Islam has with the West and that, of course, for half a millennium later, is repeated with the imperialist powers expanding for a century…so 18th, 19th centuries into Africa and Asia…and once again occupying, conquering, plundering, and so on. So the idea of a clash is really rooted in western civilization. CL: Akbar Ahmed defines his work as an anthropologist as observing how people in a culture (Islam in this case) see themselves. AA: What I'm seeing going on is a complete crisis within Islam itself for all kinds of reasons. One of the reasons is the ongoing impact of the West on the Muslim world, which is interference in Muslim politics, support for dictatorships, support for regimes that are friendly with the West and regimes, which oppress Muslim peoples. You're seeing the divisions within societies between the rich and the poor; you're seeing the literacy rates, which are appalling; you're seeing a youth, which doesn't have jobs, a youth which is illiterate. You have an explosive situation. So then the definition of Islam becomes the central fact. And here we have this debate around the definition of Islam within Muslim society itself. AA: The Holy Book says: no killing no matter who and where. No exceptions to the rule. Killing one innocent person is like killing all of humanity. Now Osama bin Laden would say that's all very well but we are in the middle of a war situation and therefore sending in a suicide bomber into a pizza hut is also a continuation of the war. CL: How do you measure the breadth of the support for that idea? AA: Well it's interesting, Chris, because I would say, one year back, this was very much a marginal movement; it had a marginal base to it, but I would say, one year later, it is now moving into the mainstream; it has wide support now. I am alarmed and this again (I would regret to say) I blame it partly, not entirely, on the West and its disastrous misunderstanding of the situation in the Muslim world. That is how a terrorist renegade is suddenly elevated into a pseudo-religious figure. When you have someone like Osama, who has very shrewdly, very effectively, focused on the key issues within Muslim society…He's focused on the Palestinians, he's focused now on the Kashmiris (thus bringing in South Asia,) he's focused on the Chechens, and he's focused on the Iraqi people. He has pushed the right emotional buttons…I would say, after the Cold War, the symmetry of conflict, the neat patterns of conflict, have completely been scrambled. What you're seeing now is a disintegration into a Hobbesian vision, a Hobbesian vision, which means a war of all against all and that's why I don't really accept Huntington's theory any more, because in the 21st century you're going to be seeing a kind of anarchy, a free fall global anarchy. One year back, situation different. Today I would say it's very different…and changing…and dangerous. [Music] CL: So it's not so much a "clash" in Akbar Ahmed's diagnosis; it's more nearly an implosion in the Islamic world. "Not so fast!" says the war economist, Michael Klare. The new conflict isn't about anything so grand as civilization, he says. It's a resource war, about oil. MK: You have to go back throughout entire American history to see that, when resources are at stake, we have always overlooked the civilizational or the identity issues. Think of WWII, when the United States was the leader of the free world, the leader of the democracies, and our adored president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, traveled to the Middle East to meet with King Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi Dynasty. When they met, King Saud was accompanied by slaves. This is the President of the United States meeting with the ruler who brings slaves to the meeting; and they formed a pact, which said that the U.S. would get Saudi oil in return for a U.S. pledge to protect the Saudi royal family indefinitely. Now that pact is still in place; it is the basis for 9/11, by the way, and the U.S. continues to overlook issues of identity or civilization in our quest for oil. CL: Michael Klare is a Cold War scholar who bought into the "End of History" idea after Communism. It was a long era of peace that never began… MK: I came to the conclusion that what's going on is an intensified fight over resources: oil, water, diamonds (in some places), timber, fisheries, land. If you look at the wars of the 1990s, you see that almost all of them – not all, but most of them – have a resource connection. Religion is a secondary consideration in most cases – not absent, but a secondary consideration. If you look at the history of warfare in the Middle East or elsewhere, you see that, more often than not, it's a war about power and wealth and vital resources. So, for example, the conflicts in Somalia and Sudan and Angola and Sierra Leon…yes, there are ethnic issues involved and religion, but, a lot of the times, they are fighting over diamonds. In Angola, what kept that horrible war going was a struggle between the government and UNITA over who would control the diamond mines. In Sudan, it's become a war over oil. The southern Sudanese people want to have autonomy, but that's where the oil is, and so the Sudanese government in the north is using all of its military power to suppress the southern Sudanese, so they could control the oil wells in that area, [at a] terrible cost of human life. CL: So, conflict going back beyond Biblical times has always been about land and treasure, Michael Klare says. Today's the same…and altogether different… MK: What's new is the type of worlds we're in today, where the demand for resources is growing at an unsustainable rate and leading, I think, to conflict. And several factors contribute to this new situation: population growth at unprecedented levels, putting enormous pressure on the carrying capacity of the planet, especially for water and for land. Then you have the growth in consumption, especially through automobiles and other vehicles that consume oil. The world's population is buying cars at an absolutely phenomenal rate. China alone has a potential market for hundreds of millions of new cars. The statistics about what would happen in China are really quite terrifying. Right now the United States has about 750 cars for every thousand people; in China it is only about five car or ten cars for every thousand people. You see the vast difference. But China's population is five times ours and, if they ever approach the same level of car ownership as we do, what the department of energy calls the motorization rate (a wonderful term), if China ever had as many cars as we do per capita, the amount of oil in the world would disappear in a year. CL: I think we can recommend that China develop a S.U.B., a sports utility bicycle. MK: You combine all of this and you simply have an unsustainable pressure on the world's resource space. And unless we resolve that, somehow…I am afraid…we are going to have more wars over what's left. [Music] CL: Michael Klare is looking ahead to resource wars, a category quite apart from culture clashes or the crisis in Islam. When we come back, the case for a human-rights war in Iraq... Kanan Makiya: …This is not a war that's existing in a state of peace; this is a war that will end that war upon the people of Iraq… CL: We'll hear about Kanan Makiya's democratic struggle and his very nervous alliance with George Bush. This is the Whole Wide World, produced in association with WGBH Radio Boston, from PRI, Public Radio International. [Music Break] CL: I'm Christopher Lydon. This is the Whole Wide World, testing rationales for war in a single-superpower planet. We've been taking a sort of museum tour of war theories. Here's a very personal take on the real thing…on the ground in northern Iraq. KM: I don't view it as a (war of) colonization war. It's a war of liberation; that's the word we use here. There's not an Iraqi around here, there's not a Kurd in existence, there's nowhere I can walk fifty miles in either direction…you ask anywhere, "What's this American war all about?" They will tell you it's a war of liberation. CL: Here's the question: What if it is noble idealism that justifies war – not oil, not empire, not the cruel friction of cultures, that clash of civilizations? Kanan Makiya is one of those true believers in exporting modern democracy to his fellow Iraqis – with force, as need be. He is an architect, a writer, a '60s rebel grown up. His scathing book, titled "The Republic of Fear," exposed Saddam's system before the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, before it was fashionable to be anti-Saddam or pro-the Kurdish minority. In the past year Kanan Makiya has taken up with Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, and the war-on- Saddam idea. His long-shot bet is that the U.S. can break all its bad, old habits of putting oil and stability over democracy, favoring Turkey at the Kurds' expense. We got him by phone the other day, under the snow-capped mountains of Salahuddin in northern Iraq. He was talking brave and bracing at the same time for betrayal by the Bush administration. KM: Well, Chris, let me put it this way, I think this could be a war about democracy in the Middle East. I say it could be. I don't know that it is going to be that, but it could be. That's what I stand for, that's what I'm fighting for, that's why I'm here. CL: How would it go? KM: If it were a war about democracy in the Middle East, then it would have to begin…it would have to be based on certain premises: number one, the United States would be going in there not only to change the Saddam regime and search for weapons of mass destruction, but actually [to] dismantle the repressive institutions of the Bath party, [to] undergo a "de-Bathification" program in Iraq, sort of like the de-Nazification program in Germany and [to] work with, in partnership with a provisional government formed out of the meeting of the Iraqi opposition, which is currently taking place. CL: He will feel damned if he sees Tommy Franks or any other American general setting up a military government for Iraq. Kanan Makiya wants to see Iraqi oppositionists in power the very day after liberation. For the Kurds, he's also demanding Federalism in Iraq, modeled on our states within the American union. The Bush team, on the contrary, is ready to usher in Turkish police to keep a lid on the Kurds. [CL to KM]: You're out there on the line in Iraq for a democratic revolution, but you've got grave doubts that that's really what the Bush administration is invested in. What's the gap here? KM: There is, I believe, a real struggle going on inside the Bush administration. There is the forces of the past…I mean…American foreign policy has been about nothing if not support of dictators and god-awful regimes and replacing democracies with dictatorships and so on throughout the world, by in large. After September 11th, that policy began to be questioned inside the Bush administration. I am convinced that that is the case. Now there are forces that…of course, naturally, bureaucracies and so on…individuals who have whole careers invested in the previous policy. These are the people that do not want to see democracy in Iraq. These are the people with the connections to the autocratic regimes of the Arab world. These are the people who were formerly ambassadors and fellow travelers who want to appease the Arab countries, who want to, who are interested in accommodation and keeping the existing status quo. CL: Would you call this a fight for the mind of President Bush? KM: Yes, absolutely, for the heart and soul of America also, if I might put it that way. That is, if the US is going to work at its foreign policy through the values it holds internally to itself, close to its own heart…that is…inside America. Or is it going to be about the crassest form of self-interest and supporting dictatorships and so on? Is it the case that the values upon which the United States was built are universal values that belong to other people's culture, or are they strictly American values in American eyes themselves. That's what this is really about in the end. CL: Kanan, the argument is all over this country too: is this a war for oil, for empire, for liberation, for democracy? How will we know, on the evidence from Iraq, that you have won or lost your fight for a real democratization? KM: Well, it is going to take a number of years before that question is settled. CL: Can we use the Kurds, in a certain way, as a litmus [test] of the integrity and the good faith of this war operation by the Bush administration? KM: Well that's a very good question, Chris, because the counterparts to this military government idea is (sic) a sending in of Turkish troops (Would you believe it!) into northern Iraq. So, here you had an opportunity when people of Iraq would welcome with sweets and sours (as I told the President when I met him on January 10th, you know), where an army would be viewed as liberated, suddenly sending in the most hated enemies of the Kurds imaginable. Kurds are terrified of that. You have the beginning of a feeling of betrayal amongst the Kurds in this case. That is…I hope it is not going to be a kind of …dress rehearsal for what might happen in the whole of Iraq if this military government idea, excluding Iraqis, proceeds. CL: Kanan, we've got such mixed feeling about this war, but we have nothing but faith in you so take good care of yourself and all the best. KM: That's very kind of you, Chris. CL: And all the best…I know that man well. He's no cynic and no sell-out for war, either. You hear war's exhilaration in Kanan Makiya's breathlessness, and war's dread. Real lives are at risk now in a war to validate his dreams. You also ask yourself: how often, really, does war make dreams come true? [Music] CL: Chalmers Johnson has a colder, cautionary eye on another big picture entirely. Beware the pawns of empire, he says, including those true believers and American dreamers. CJ: We teach that usually no empire ever dismantled itself, ever reversed its course; it simply proceeds on to its own miserable end. CL: Chalmers Johnson of Berkeley and U.C. San Diego is a lifelong student of Asian politics who had an epiphany on a formal visit to Okinawa in the mid-1990s. What he saw in the far Pacific was an American outpost of something very like the late Soviet empire. CJ: I was shocked to see the obvious signs of the American "raj," of the fact that there was no strategy behind these deployments. There was simply these: the Marines had been there since 1945 and they were extremely comfortable, playing golf and enjoying apartments and the quality of life that would be much better than they could have, if they were located say in Oceanside, California, next door to Camp Pendleton. They reminded me of the Soviet troops in East Germany, who did not want to go home after the wall came down, because they lived so comfortably in East Germany. I took up the study of Okinawa. I guess the thing that then began to dawn on me is that I thought Okinawa was unique. I now realize that, no, it's typical of the seven hundred American military bases located in other people's countries… CL: With empire, Johnson says, comes what the CIA used to call "blowback" – the unintended consequences of U.S. meddling in the world. With boldness to match Sam Huntington's, Chalmers Johnson wrote a book, titled "Blowback," a year before 9/11. It foresaw imperial chickens coming home to roost…with a vengeance. CJ: This book was written quite explicitly as a warning to my fellow citizens that the trend of events since the end of the Cold War was leading toward very strong possibilities of major retaliation against the United States. CL: What is it that's coming back to haunt us in the case of 9/11? CJ: Precisely our actions that began actually back in 1953 with the overthrow of the elected government of Iran for the sake of the British Petroleum Company and the installation of the Shah of Iran, who led to an extremely repressive…and a government that sacrificed the human rights of very intelligent people. CL: How does that get you to 9/11, Osama bin Laden? s CJ: I'm explaining that…you asked me what was my immediate reaction on 9/11. My first reaction was not that it came from the Middle East. I thought of any numbers of places it might have come from, including Southeast Asia, from Indonesia. I regarded among the most tragic sights I had ever seen in watching television in the days after 9/11, was the sights of young American women standing in lower Manhattan holding up photographs of their husbands, sons, daughters, etc. And I stared at these pictures and I said, "That really is bringing it home to the Americans." But as I stared at these pictures, it finally dawned on me: I've seen these pictures before. These are a term invented in Spanish – it's not standard Spanish, "Los desaparecidos," the "disappeareds," – that women in Buenos Aires ([correcting self] or in Santiago) held up under the regimes of General Pinochet and others, because they knew what had happened to their loved ones. They had been carried off by military regimes, installed and supported by the United States government, and they were tortured and executed. They disappeared. And I thought, "Well it could have been in Argentina. It could have been a group of Argentines. It could have been a group of Chileans." With perfectly good justice, it could have been any number of people from Central America, where the Reagan Administration in the 1980s delivered to those small countries, (particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua,) the worst decade since the Spanish Conquest. If I were a Guatemalan, I might well have thought of getting even with the gringos. It did turn out that it was Muslims this time, when, in my view, it could have been any number of different groups that caused 9/11…and that we have every reason to expect they do…that this will continue until we acknowledge what happened in the past and begin to alter our policies accordingly (sic). CL: To Chalmers Johnson's mind, what 9/11 recalls is a turning point in the history of the British Empire in India. In the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Indian troops known as "Sepoys" rebelled against their English masters and took back the capital city of Delhi… for a while. CJ: The Indians do not call the Sepoy Mutiny "the Sepoy Mutiny." They call it the first battle of the war of independence that ended a century later. That strikes me as something like a clash of civilizations, and that…if you want to use it in that sense, that may well be what happened on 9/11 in that the people who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were our Sepoys. They were people we had trained for our military purposes, armed, paid no real attention to what they though…we're not even sure that we could imagine that they did think. But it turns out they did think. They observed us a lot more closely than we observed them, and they discovered that they had signed up with some very unscrupulous people, and they got even with us. CL: In the aftermath, there seems to be a lot more itching to get even everywhere. CJ: War now, in the period after the Cold War, seems much more likely. We have lost the constraint that the existence of the Soviet Union imposed upon us toward at least elementary prudence. We have begun to become hubristic and to talk about odd and inflated terms like "civilization" and "clash of civilizations" and to denigrate the cultures of other people, when it is almost impossible to imagine that one culture is superior to another. I mean, that's one of the things that is bedeviling the Bush Administration. It loves clichés about evil people or other such things, which are instantaneously used by Putin over the Chechens or by the Indians and the Pakistanis, who have hated each other for a very long time and both have nuclear weapons, used by Ariel Sharon to now say that he is the world's greatest student of George Bush and he is punishing terrorists who are evildoers. These kinds of things lead on toward anarchy and chaos. That is why I would say it is no time to envy the young. Those of us who are getting closer to the end of our lives must look back on a period of peace. It would be wise to try and avoid these wars, but talking about "clashes of civilization" is assuredly one of the worst possible ways to do it. CL: Chalmers Johnson rejects the Huntington "Clash of Civilizations" as a rallying cry for war and armaments. He also discounts the dread that Huntington and the Bush team seem to share of a coming contest with China for hegemony in East Asia. CJ: Why on earth should a rich and comfortable China, with high levels of living and pride in their country…why should that be to the disadvantage of either the United States or Japan? That is to say, the Chinese are undoubtedly going to have enormous influence in East Asia and are going to ask, what are we [Americans] continuing to do there, particularly if we can't do anything more than place marines in various bases around the place, or air bases with B2 bombers? Under these circumstances, it's up to the United States to change or face the consequences. CL: So Chalmers Johnson's bumper-sticker is: empire, heal thyself, with the footnote that very few empires do. But what if war-lust runs deeper than imperialism? When we come back, Chris Hedges of the New York Times talks about what he learned in too many wars…and a parting poem from Seamus Heaney. You're listening to the Whole Wide World, from PRI, Public Radio International. [Music Break] I'm Christopher Lydon and this is the Whole Wide World. Chris Hedges of the New York Times spent 15 years reporting wars in Central America, the Balkans, and the Middle East. What he discovered was not "the big truth" but "the big lie" about war – that there is lasting good and glory in it for men and nations. CH: You know, killing human beings is not as it's presented to us either by the press or by the entertainment industry; killing human beings is often much more akin to slaughtering animals. It's very messy, it often takes a long time, it's dirty, it's disgusting, it's unsettling; and you find in firefights, when you finish a firefight, one of the first things you begin to do is create a narrative in your head: how am I going to explain this? How am I going to turn this event, where I spent all of my time in terror trying to figure out what was happening, into a story, and that is probably the inception of myth. You know, you see it in Troilus and Cressida, in Shakespeare, where he has Achilles kill Hector. Hector is unarmed; he's surrounded (in Shakespeare) by 300 Myrmidon soldiers, who thrust their spears into Hector. It's murder and, I think, that's the other thing – murder is always part of war, murder is an integral part of war, and murder of innocents is an integral part of war. And after Hector is killed, Achilles turns to the Myrmidons and tells them to go on the battlefield and save Hector [whom] the mighty Achilles has slain; it's that very instant in which you create heroic myth, you create a false narrative and it's that false narrative that's fundamental to the selling or packaging of war. CL: The title of the Chris Hedges book last year summed it up in a sentence: "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." That force is a compound of fear, hysteria, intoxication, tribal nationalism, and madness: so powerful a force that [in] the ancient times, Greeks and Romans honored war with the name of a god, Ares or Mars – still a power to contend with. Chris Hedges, you write that the first Gulf War in 1991 made war fashionable again. What did you mean by that? CH: At the end of the Vietnam War, at the end of our defeat, we became a better nation. We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before; we were forced to confront our own capacity for evil and atrocity; we were humbled and probably even humiliated; we struggled to see ourselves as the outsider saw us and what we saw was not particularly flattering; we knew the cost of war and the danger of war, what it did not only to others but what it did to ourselves. Freud writes in "Civilizations and its Discontents" that life is a battle between the forces of love, of Eros, to preserve and conserve and protect and the forces of death, Thanatos, those forces that seek to destroy other living things and ourselves, and that life is within the individual and within societies a constant battle between these two forces, and for this reason Freud believed that war would never be eradicated. Always for Freud one of these forces was ascendant. I think after the Vietnam War, the forces of Eros were ascendant. But gradually we again began to court death; we did this during the Reagan years when we used the preponderance of military force to invade Grenada, Panama… CL:…Nicaragua… CH: Yeah, and by the time the Persian Gulf War arrived, we were all ready again to restore war's good name, to revel in our own military prowess and strength, and the military (with the complete connivance of the press) presented to us a mythic narrative of our own greatness, there was no death, those who died were nameless, faceless, phantoms, especially of course the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It was, war was, presented quite effectively as a form of entertainment. Video clips, sidewinder missiles, (those abstract notions of patriotism, of glory, of heroism, things that allowed us to stop thinking and just revel in ourselves,) were dished up, you know, hour by hour on CNN; and one must remember that the media is a business and mythic narratives of war boost ratings and sell newspapers. They have since the Crimean War, when the modern war correspondent was invented. CL: Detachment is perhaps the war reporter's toughest trick – to cover the battle and see beyond it. CH: You know, you saw this is Bosnia…I mean, I covered the war in Bosnia and I wasn't a Serb a Croat or a Muslim, so I covered it for what it was, which was disgusting, human slaughter. And in the war in Bosnia, as in many wars, it was primarily the slaughter of innocents. But if I was a Serb, I would cover it through that mythic narrative and I would have looked at the war as people in Belgrade did – very differently. I would have gone into the town and I would have first found that brave Serb soldier who's a hero, then I would have found that trapped Serb family in the village who waited to be saved by the gallant Serb militia that came into the town and then I would have interviewed Serb refugees about the terrible atrocities by the evil Muslims or Croats. You don't report outside of that narrative and if you do, you don't get published. I mean, that's why you have on TV these newscasters with their flag lapel pins and Dan Rather saying, "Where do I sign up?" The mass media, especially the electronic media, loves this stuff and eats it up. Wait till the war starts, wait till we start getting hour by hour coverage; there's a kind of brain washing that goes on – it's very hard to think; you can't think; you're just bombarded with it night and day. CL: That's the war high, which as Chris Hedges observes, plunges into a pit of amnesia, confusion, and despair when the killing stops. CH: I remember interviewing Serb soldiers who had taken part in the massacres in Srebrenica and…maybe remorse is too strong a word but certainly very deep disquiet over what they had done. Yet I know from having been in those situations that (caught up in that frenzy of destruction, in that high of being able to revoke another person's charter to live on this planet) they felt god-like, they felt or believed that they felt the power of the divine, that power to turn human beings into objects either to gratify or destroy or both. It is a sad and frightening fact that crowds of human beings like to destroy and they get…there is a perverse and powerful thrill that comes with that destruction. When you see units like that on a rampage, their eyes are glazed over, they can hardly speak, they mutter gibberish. It is as if they are on drugs and, indeed, I think ultimately war is probably best definable as a drug and perhaps the most powerful narcotic invented by human kind. CL: Do we know how to recognize the symptoms of our own nationalism? The warnings… CH: No, I think that, you know, a couple of weeks after 9/11, I woke up and thought we would all become the Serbs. That's what scares me, that you have to recognize the symptoms of the disease in order to fight, but it must be probed and understood and guarded against in a conscience way and, if it's not, the mass contagion takes over… CL: Talk about the symptoms, the spots that you recognized in our own world after 9/11. CH: The dichotomy of the world between them and us, the exaltation of ourself, the euphoria that comes with a sense of belonging. You know, you walk out your apartment door in New York and that neighbor, who you haven't been able to stand for years, suddenly becomes your brother. You go down the aisles of the supermarket and, instead of everyone averting your gaze, they look at you because we're all together in this, we're all one, we're comrades, and that's, I think, what people seek to recreate once war is over. Because, of course, once that external threat is gone, you can't sustain this, and it's this kind of ecstatic glow that is one of the many highs of war and of war's attractions. We have a sense of belonging that we didn't have before and that's very hard to fight even for intellectuals, even for social critics, because one can be leveled, everyone can be in this together, everybody can join the club, and to stand outside the club is to refuse the high, not only to refuse the high but to be hoisted and tacked onto a cross of your own creation. And it's painful and it's lonely; you have no one to talk to, you are reviled, and it's very, very difficult to fight against this tide. CL: Are you suffering from it? Have people made your life hard because of this book at this time? CH: In the event of another catastrophic terrorist attack and in the midst of a war, this kind of stuff is going to be really unpalatable to a lot of people; it's certainly going to be interpreted (I am sure) as…unpatriotic. But that's fine because I think patriotism is dangerous, both in others and in ourselves. CL: Count them up. We've heard six arguments in this hour about what drives war in this globalizing moment of 2003. A clash of civilizations, perhaps? A cultural crisis? Oil? Democracy? Overreaching empire? Or some deeper human perversity? Six rationales for war are enough for one museum tour, enough for an hour of radio. But doesn't it sound in the end like too many excuses, or too few, for a real killing contest, without even mentioning the alternatives to war, or counting the cost of war and the innocents who will pay it? Finally, the Irish (and global) poet, Seamus Heaney, reminds us to remember in the body counts "the single death" that must be attended to. Heaney is drawn back these days to the poetry, and the slaughter, of World War I, and particularly to the war poet, Wilfred Owen: SH: There's a little poem called "Futility;" it's very…it's about a casualty; it comes right down to the single death and, that's what I guess we have to attend to, single death: Move him into the sun – Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields unsown. Always it woke him, even in France, Until this morning and this snow. If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know. Think how it wakes the seeds, – Woke, once, the clays of a cold star. Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides Full-nerved, – still warm, – too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall? – O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all? CL: Please visit our global community online at thewholewideworld.net. The Whole Wide World is a collaboration of Lydon and McGrath Productions and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, in association with WGBH Radio Boston. We had help from producers Ben Walker and Katherine Bidwell, from engineer Tom Tiger, and Jake Shapiro of the Public Radio Exchange. Jay Allison of transom.org, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is our radio visionary. Thanks also to Keith Kiya Wilson, Justin Grotelueschen, Kezia Parsons, Josh Ward, the Christian Science Publishing Society, and public radio stations WCAI and WNAN on Cape Cod. Support for this program is made possible in part by the PRI Program Fund, whose contributors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Mary McGrath is our executive producer. I'm Christopher Lydon.