Tom Engelhardt on "Mission Unaccomplished"
    By Sari Gelzer
    t r u t h o u t | Interview

    Wednesday 13 December 2006

    On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier in a military jumpsuit and declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. On that same day, fifteen Iraqis were killed, shot down by US soldiers for protesting the occupation of an elementary school in Fallujah.

    The irony of these events as, three years later, America continues to occupy Iraq and people continue to die, is the subject of the introduction to Tom Engelhardt's new book, Mission Unaccomplished. Engelhardt's book, which spans the past year, delivers in-depth interviews with key "iconoclasts and dissenters."

    The collection of interviews surpasses the usual mainstream media's soundbytes and the reader enters the realm of intimate discussion with some of the most interesting and intelligent peace activists, former military personnel, scholars, journalists, and everyday Americans.

    The discussions travel from historian Howard Zinn, who contrasts Vietnam with Iraq, to Ann Wright's description of her first act of civil disobedience. Boston Globe columnist James Carroll speaks of America's destructive response to 9/11, Juan Cole articulates his thoughts on withdrawal from Iraq, and Engelhardt, as a citizen journalist, joins a peace protest to cover a range of voices including Hurricane Katrina victims and the daughters and parents of soldiers in Iraq.

    Engelhardt has been tracking the state of America for five years in his writings at TomDispatch.com, a project of the Nation Institute. We spoke with him about his new book, and asked him to debunk the media's representation of the occupation of Iraq.

    Sari Gelzer: You begin your book with what you describe as a battle of headlines. First you recount how, in 2003, the media portrayed Bush landing on a naval jet next to a banner that declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, and that same day 15 Iraqis were killed in Fallujah. Do you find yourself engaged in this battle of headlines?

    Tom Engelhardt: I am an observer of the constant battle of the headlines. At TomDispatch, what I mostly try to do is create a series of contexts for people. There is often some quite good reporting out there if you're looking for it in the mainstream media, but generally, particularly in this period, for complicated reasons, the media have not been connecting the dots in any significant way.

    It's not so much that I'm battling the headlines, but that the headlines and the stories that follow are so fragmented, I try to create a context so that when the next set of headlines comes in you go, oh, yes, I can think of it this way. I try to give people a different way of connecting our world together so they can see it a little differently, so they can see some of what I feel are the realities of our calamitous world. And that is a lot of what I did in these interviews - I picked people I admired, who I felt had been active in trying to create other contexts for thinking about our planet and how it runs.

    As I see it, we are in the heart of an enormous imperial structure, and it's very hard from within that context to see the world in a non-imperial way: to see the world as others out there might see it, to see ourselves as others might see us.

    Gelzer: You interviewed Katrina vanden Heuvel in your book, and she talks about the role of The Nation magazine after the 9/11 attacks as one of the only publications willing to raise tough questions. What are some of the topics you have raised on your web site that you feel were being overlooked by the mainstream media?

    Engelhardt: I think there is a whole series of issues. Let me give you an example of just one that I think literally only TomDispatch has raised and that I'm about to raise again in a couple of weeks: Air power as the American way of war.

    When you read about the ongoing occupation and war in Iraq or in Afghanistan, after the shock-and-awe stuff, which was obviously from the air, reporters embedded themselves with troops on the ground, reporters embedded themselves in patrol boats going down the Tigris and Euphrates. You could find all sorts of perspectives in the press, but you could not find anything about the air war. And yet, the military itself was passing out information on this daily. You can go to the Air Force web site and check out the daily information on bombing runs, mainly in Iraq's urban areas, for yourself.

    We've been bombing or missiling in heavily-populated areas since the invasion. It's never stopped. Sometimes, as in the assault on Fallujah or the fighting for the Shiite Najaf in the south in 2004, it's been fierce. So, I asked the question, "Why don't journalists look up?" Interesting enough, there was a BBC guy who wrote me from Baghdad and he said, "you know, it is strange, if I do look up there are contrails in the sky, we can see the Predators (which are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles); there are helicopters all the time. I don't know why we are not writing about this." But until Seymour Hersh, also not in Iraq, looked up about a year ago in his New Yorker piece "Up in the Air," nobody other than TomDispatch had bothered to cover it and nobody has bothered since.

    Gelzer: You have been intimately following the Iraq war since the invasion began. You describe some of the key words that the media uses to create a picture of Iraq for the American public. How are the media and politicians currently framing Iraq; what have you noticed in recent coverage?

    Engelhardt: Well, just to give you a simple example, James Baker's Iraq Study Group is being termed "the last best chance" to solve the Iraq problem. Well, I've been following the imagery of war and occupation and we've been granting ourselves innumerable "last chances" since last spring. Another example I noticed just before the election. Just after the North Korean bomb went off, the president, who had been unable to get any face time on TV for a couple of weeks due to the Foley scandal, called a press conference in which he listed the enemies in Iraq. It was a relatively normal list for him. There were the terrorists from al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, there were what he's long liked to call "criminal elements from the former regime," you know Saddam's Baath Party, and the third one was Shiite militias and death squads, which is kind of an add-on in the last six months, because this has arrived with the civil war. Those, he said, are our enemies.

    Now over at the Pentagon, General George W. Casey, the top commander of our forces in Iraq, got up with Donald Rumsfeld and did a press briefing the next day. Casey also got to a list of the forces in Iraq that were creating problems for the US. Part of it was the same, there were the terrorists - he called them "Sunni extremists and al-Qaeda terrorists"; there were the Shiite militias and death squads; the third one, those criminal elements of the former regime which General Casey would not so long before have called "anti-Iraqi forces," or more neutrally, "insurgents," he referred to as "the resistance." Now that's a fascinating, term.

    A year ago, people from the left often wrote me to ask why didn't I call the Iraqi insurgency "the resistance." This was an argument of the fringes. Now, here is the US commanding general referring to the Sunni insurgency that way and terming them groups that see themselves as "an honorable resistance to foreign occupation."

    Now, this is a little signal of policy change. You know from that that some American right then and there was reaching out to at least some of the Sunni groups. Nobody wrote about it, no journalist picked it up, but if you were paying attention over the years to this terminology, then this was significant. And it went hand in hand with the recent roiling urge in Washington for some sort of mid-course correction in Iraq, which probably doesn't mean getting out at all. But this little change in terminology did signal big policy changes bubbling up in Washington. Words can be terribly important in this way.

    Gelzer: In your new book, you have a variety of interviews that raise the topic of withdrawal from Iraq. What are your thoughts on withdrawal?

    Engelhardt: I've been very clear at the site on this subject. I have to say as a start that I was obviously against the invasion. I wrote vigorously against it. I could just see from early on that this was going to be a catastrophe. I was against it on other grounds, but I could also see that those neo-con dreamers were simply not dealing with the world as it is. I had gone out to every demonstration, I had reported on them, but I didn't turn to the topic of withdrawal directly until October of 2003. I then had a friend challenge me. He said, "Listen, you're shooting sitting ducks in Iraq with your criticism. What do you think we should do? How about writing about that."

    I took him seriously, and in October 2003 I wrote a piece called "Time of Withdrawal," in which I made the basic point that it's part of the imperial mindset to believe that you are the solution to other people's problems. I wrote then, "We are not and never have been the solution to the problem of Iraq, but a significant part of the problem." To this day, the Iraq Study Group is telling us in 79 "recommendations" how we can solve the Iraqi conundrum. As if we can solve it. I wrote a piece back then calling for withdrawal - very simply and clearly - saying, look, the truth of it is, time is against us. History is against us. And the longer we wait, the worse it will get. That we have to get it through our heads that we are part of the problem, not part of the solution. With one exception, my analysis was totally on target. I was wrong only in imagining that, in time, there would be an enormous anti-war movement, which never appeared. Otherwise, it remains my position today.

    The argument now is if we were to get out of Iraq - if we were to withdraw from Iraq - there would be a terrible bloodbath. That the US military stands between Iraq and genocide. What Howard Zinn said in the initial interview in my book, Mission Unaccomplished, is very true. If the United States were really to get out, we don't know what would happen; there might in fact be a terrible bloodbath - or not. What we do know, and what we know very vividly, is that, right now, as the recent Lancet study of casualties reported, an actual bloodbath is going on, and the US military is part of the motor causing that bloodbath. We know that it is a nightmare now in Iraq, that we are part of that nightmare, which we are not just caught in the middle of, but which we have in every way provoked.

    Gelzer: In your coverage of Iraq, what do you think is currently the most misunderstood or overlooked part of the conflict?

    Engelhardt: We have had the most geopolitically mobilized administration in our history. Our vice president, Dick Cheney, viewed the planet as a nasty version of the Gaia Hypothesis. He and his neo-con cohorts saw it as a single entity, a planet with veins, and those veins were energy flows. And at the same moment the mainstream media, cowed by the Bush administration, essentially demobilized. For several years they basically stopped connecting the global dots for the rest of us. While the Bush administration was connecting India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, the various "stans" of Central Asia, Iraq, Israel and so on into a system, which they called "the arc of instability," aka the oil heartlands of our planet, for the first few years after 9/11 it was hard to find newspaper pieces that mentioned more than one country in the area at a time.

    When it came to subjects like our permanent bases being built in Iraq, I reported at TomDispatch as best I could, while American reporters, even visiting the bases, tended until recently to make nothing of them. And yet they are massive, like little American towns, with their own Starbucks, Burger Kings, and mini-golf courses, some of them big enough to have their own multiple bus routes.

    Gelzer: You interview journalist Mark Danner, and he says the Bush administration's choice to explicitly approve and defend their own breaches of the law, such as wiretapping and torture, makes them different from any administration in history. What is your take on the public response to the actions of the Bush administration?

    Engelhardt: For perspective, I have the experience of living through the Vietnam era. There are a number of real differences between the two periods. One is, I think, that popular disapproval of the war has actually grown faster than in the Vietnam era. The polls seem to show that. But no Vietnam-era style anti-war movement has arisen, perhaps because people now feel more distant from, less connected to, our political system. In the Vietnam era, people still had that sense that I grew up with in the 1950s that this was a democracy and you could do something. We were closer to a tradition that said you were empowered then. I think Americans now generally feel more helpless.

    One of the great reasons they are more removed is that we now have an all-volunteer military. There's no draft, no element left of the citizens' Army. What exists is increasingly a mercenary Army or, at least, an Army surrounded by mercenaries - contractors and private hired hands. While American deaths - today, as we're talking, reports on the deaths of ten American soldiers have come in - generally don't even make the front pages, and most of those deaths will be located in a relatively small number of communities. They don't hit the country as a whole, and people don't feel as involved. The Iraq war is a more distant thing. When people recall how the draft touched young men in the Vietnam years, they think mainly of fear. But I think it left larger numbers of people with a sense that the war actually touched their lives.

    Larry Wilkerson, former secretary of state Colin Powell's chief of staff, has called the present ruling crew - Cheney and Rumsfeld in particular - a "cabal," and I don't think it's a bad word for it. In the sixties, even when Richard Nixon ostentatiously pretended not to notice the anti-war demonstrations, we all knew that he was focused on us, that we mattered. This group of people has, until recently, been impermeable to outside pressure of almost any sort, even, as we see right now, to establishment inside-the-Beltway advisors from the elder Bush's world. They have really been in a bubble world all their own.

    As for torture, in the sixties in Vietnam, the CIA had extensive torture centers. Lots of torture went on, but you still could not imagine a vice president of the United States going to Congress to lobby on the issue of getting the CIA an official torture exemption. It would have been inconceivable. We are in a more extreme moment and, alas, a more conservative moment as a whole.

    Gelzer: How has the Internet opened up debate surrounding the occupation of Iraq?

    Engelhardt: In the political context, that's not complicated to describe. Just take one simple moment, the release of the Downing Street Memo. Mark Danner talks about it in his interview very vividly. This memo, which leaked from the highest levels of the British government, more or less nailed down just how the intelligence had been fixed to rush us into war. The memo was published in a British paper, but nowhere in the mainstream here. Authoritative as it was, it wasn't in the news; the press ignored it, but this is where the Internet proved something new. Political web sites began picking it up almost immediately. It was viral online. People began writing about it in the online world. It was a scandal there - and first readers, then journalists, started to notice. After all, the same people who were reading the papers in print were also increasingly going onto the Internet to read the news.

    As with the Downing Street Memo, in case after case it was the Internet that brought news to our American world first, and from the Internet it slowly made its way toward - and then, however grudgingly, into - the mainstream. Otherwise that information just would have not been anywhere near the vicinity. So much that was important in terms of the Iraq War, for instance, those permanent bases, the American air war in Iraq's urban areas, issues having to do with oil, appeared at TomDispatch at a time when you would have been hard-pressed to find out much about them in the mainstream news world. That was a service that in a whole range of areas not just TomDispatch.com, but Truthout, CommonDreams, AlterNet, Juan Cole's Informed Comment, and Antiwar.com, among many others were performing. And I think by now we know that it made a difference. That's a civic service we should all be proud of.