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HEDGES: Well, I don't think you can justify unleashing 3,000 precision-guided missiles in 48 hours because Saddam Hussein is a torturer. Which he is. And I covered that whole withdrawal of the Iraqi forces from Northern Iraq. I was not only in the subterranean bowels of the Secret Police Headquarters where we found not only documentation but videotapes of executions. Horrible torture centers. People being— you know where the meat hooks were still sort of fastened into the ceiling of soundproof rooms.
And then these mass graves. We were digging up as many as a thousand, 1,500 people. But that does not give you a moral justification to carry out what is, quite candidly, indiscriminate attack against civilians. That's what's going to happen when you drop this number of high explosive devices in an urban area.
MOYERS: Does the inevitability of civilian casualties make this war illegitimate?
HEDGES: Well, I think the war is illegitimate not because civilians will die. Civilians die in every conflict. It's illegitimate because the administration has not, to my mind, provided any evidence of any credible threat. And we can't go to war just because we think somebody might do something eventually.
There has to be hard intelligence. There has to be a real threat if we're going to ask our young men and women to die.
Because once you unleash the "dogs of war" and I know this from every war I've ever covered, war has a force of its own. It's not surgical. We talk about taking out Saddam Hussein. Once you use the blunt instrument of war, it has all sorts of consequences when you use violence on that scale that you can't anticipate. I'm not opposed to the use of force. But force is always has to be the last resort because those who wield force become tainted or contaminated by it. And one of the things that most frightens me about the moment our nation is in now, is that we've lost touch with the notion of what war is.
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MOYERS: Tell me, having covered the first Gulf War, what the men and women who are about to go into Iraq are going to experience.
HEDGES: Well, the ones who are up on the front line are — especially as they prepare to go into battle — are going to have to come face-to-face with the myth of war. The myth of heroism, the myth of patriotism. The myth of glory. All those myths that have the ability to arouse us when we're not in mortal danger.
And they're going to have to confront their own mortality. And at that moment some people will be crying, some people will be vomiting. People will not speak much. Everyone will realize that from here on out, at least until the fighting ends, it will be a constant minute-by-minute battle with fear. And that sometimes fear wins. And anybody who tells you differently has never been in a war.
MOYERS: And yet you say in your book that the first Gulf War, that we made war fun.
HEDGES: For those who weren't there. You know the — I was with the U.S. Marine Corps and they hated CNN. They hated that flag-waving, jingoism that dominated the coverage on, or dominated so much of the coverage…all those abstract terms that create the excitement back home become obscene to those who are in combat.
MOYERS: You say also in the book that the first Gulf War made war more fashionable again.
HEDGES: Right.
MOYERS: What do you mean by that?
HEDGES: Well, it was you know so much of commercial news has not become an extension of the entertainment industry. And the war became entertainment. The Army had no more candor than they did in Vietnam. But what they perfected was the appearance of candor. Live press conferences. And well-packaged video clips of Sidewinder missiles hitting planes or going down chimneys. You know this kind of stuff.
It's— and the fact that they covered up death. Not only the death of our own. But the death of tens of thousands of Iraqis who were killed. They were nameless, faceless phantoms. When we the victims, if you watch the news reports carefully, were our young men who were out in the desert having to sort of bathe out of a bucket and eat MRE's.
So it was completely mythic, or mendacious narrative that was presented to us. And I was a little delayed getting back to New York because I was a prisoner with the Iraqi Republican Guard. But I remember landing into New York and even then the mood was that we'd just won the Super Bowl.
And it frightened me and it disgusted me. And it wasn't because I didn't believe that we shouldn't have gone into Kuwait. I believe we had no choice. But I certainly understood that we, as a nation, had completely lost touch with what war is. And when we lose touch with what war is, when we believe that our technology makes us invulnerable. That we can wage war and others can die and we won't — then eventually, if history is any guide, we are going to stumble into a horrific swamp.
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HEDGES: Our whole civil society is being torn apart. Once again, as is true in every war, the media parrots back the clichés and jingles of the state. Imbibes and promotes the myth. In wartime, a press is-- the press is always part of the problem.
And that we are about to engage in that ecstatic, exciting, narcotic that is war. And that if we don't get a grasp on the poison that war is, then that poison can ultimately kills us just as surely as the disease.
MOYERS: What have you learned as a journalist covering war that we ought to know on the eve of this attack on Iraq?
HEDGES: That everybody or every generation seems to have— seems not to listen to those who went through it before and bore witness to it. But falls again for the myth. And has to learn it through a tragedy inflicted upon their young.
That war is always about betrayal. It's about betrayal of soldiers by politicians. And it's about betrayal of the young by the old.
MOYERS: I believe that George W. Bush tonight as you and I talk is convinced he's about to do good. A necessary act that he thinks is making a moral claim on the world. Do you believe that?
HEDGES: I believe that he feels that. But I think anybody who believes that they understand the will of God and can act as an agent for God is dangerous.
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