The Outer Limits of Empire

[Guest guest]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/09/howard_zinn.html

 

The Outer Limits of Empire

 

News: An Interview With Howard Zinn

 

Interviewed By Tom Engelhardt

 

September 8, 2005

 

 

 

 

You have to be careful these days about predicting the obvious. In my

last piece, Iraq in America, I wrote, " don't hold your breath about

either the Pentagon's or the administration's nation-building skills

in the U.S. (But count on 'reconstruction' contracts going to

Halliburton.) " Well, as readers were quick to inform me, I was already

behind the times. The first contract -- to repair Katrina storm damage

at Gulf Coast naval facilities -- had already been issued to our Vice

President's former company. In fact, as National Guards and other

troops finally poured into New Orleans, the Iraq-in-America parallels

only grew. There was the FEMA attempt to prevent the taking of news

photos of dead bodies -- think of those bodies coming home to Dover

Air Force Base from Iraq -- and the Army Times piece that referred to

" the insurgency " in New Orleans, not to speak of GIs in that city and

Iraq who noted eerie resonances between the two situations, or the

Louisiana National Guardsman who referred to potential snipers in New

Orleans as " terrorists. " And let's not forget all those " private

security contractors that specialize in supporting military operations

in war-torn countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan " now heading for

the Big Easy to protect businesses and private residences. Talk about

the war coming home...

 

Then I suggested that the administration's initial moves in the

Katrina crisis -- easing pollution standards for gas blends and

bolstering the Pentagon's new Northcom command -- did little more than

forward their usual agenda. No sooner had I written that than David

Rogers and John J. Fialka of the Wall Street Journal reported

( " Hurricane Reorders Capitol Hill, " September 8) on Republicans in

Congress weighing in with plans to ease yet more pollution standards,

pursue further tax cuts " to ease the price squeeze, " and (doh!) allow

" exploration for oil and gas along the coast of the Arctic National

Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. " Talk about bulldogs in a storm!

 

In any case, with an urge not to let this site grow either predictable

or obvious, and armed with two cheap tape recorders and a reasonable

amount of nerve, I'm launching a new feature: the Tomdispatch

interview. I often have the feeling that between brief quotes in the

newspapers and the normal 12-second comments by " newsmakers " on TV, we

seldom hear voices speaking directly to us for long. I also like the

idea of watching people think aloud about matters that concern us all.

And then, for me, there's just the pleasure of talking to a Howard Zinn.

 

The Outer Limits of Empire:

A Tomdispatch Interview with Howard Zinn

 

He's tall and thin, with a shock of white hair. A bombardier in the

great war against fascism and an antiwar veteran of America's wars

ever since, he's best known as the author of the pathbreaking A

People's History of the United States, and as an expert on the

unexpected voices of resistance that have so regularly made themselves

heard throughout our history. At 83 (though he looks a decade

younger), he is also a veteran of a rugged century and yet there's

nothing backward looking about him. His voice is quiet and he clearly

takes himself with a grain of salt, chuckling wryly on occasion at his

own comments. From time to time, when a thought pleases him and his

well-used face lights up or breaks out in a bona fide grin, he looks

positively boyish.

 

We sit down on the back porch of the small coffee shop, alone, on a

vacation morning. He has a croissant and coffee in front of him. I

suggest that perhaps we should start after breakfast, but he assures

me that there's no particular contradiction between eating and talking

and so, as a novice interviewer, I awkwardly turn on my two tape

recorders ? one of which, on pause, will still miss several minutes of

our conversation (our equivalent, we joke, of Nixon's infamous

18-minute gap). In preparation, he pushes aside his half-eaten

breakfast, never to touch it again, and we begin.

 

Tomdispatch: You and Anthony Arnove just came out with a new book,

Voices of a People's History of the United States, featuring American

voices of resistance from our earliest moments to late last night.

Now, we have a striking new voice of resistance, Cindy Sheehan. I was

wondering what you made of her?

 

Howard Zinn: Often a protest movement that's already underway -- and

the present antiwar movement was underway even before the Iraq War

began -- gets a special impetus, a special spark, from one person's

act of defiance. I think of Rosa Parks and that one act of hers and

what it meant.

 

TD: Can you think of other Cindy Sheehan-like figures in the past who

made movements coalesce?

 

Zinn: In the antiwar movement of the Vietnam years, there wasn't one

person, but when I think back to the abolitionist movement, Frederick

Douglass was a special figure in that way. When he came north, out of

slavery, and spoke for the first time to a group of antislavery

people, the beginnings of a movement existed. [William Lloyd] Garrison

had already started [his antislavery newspaper] the Liberator, but

Frederick Douglass was able to represent slavery itself in a way that

Garrison and the other abolitionists could not. His dramatic

appearance, his eloquence, provided a special spark for the

abolitionist movement.

 

TD: I guess Cindy Sheehan also represents something that can't be

represented by anyone else, almost, in fact, can't be represented --

the American dead in the war and, of course, her own dead son.

 

Zinn: It's interesting. There have been mothers other than Cindy

Sheehan who have spoken out, but she decided on an act that had a

special resonance, which was simply to find where Bush was going [he

chuckles to himself at the thought] and have a confrontation between

the two poles of this war, between its maker and the opposition. She

just parked herself near Bush and become the center of national

attention, of gravity, around which people gathered, hundreds and

hundreds of people.

 

TD: The Bush administration has had such a long-term strategy of never

venturing anywhere that the President might be challenged, but now,

unless he's literally on a military base, I suspect he's no longer

safe from that, and even then?

 

Zinn: Did you read about the Mayor of Salt Lake City speaking out

before 2,000 people to protest a presidential speech there? This is

just what began to happen in the Vietnam War. After a while,

[President Lyndon] Johnson and [Vice President Hubert] Humphrey

couldn't go anywhere except military bases. And the thing about Cindy

Sheehan is that she's not a moderate voice either. I mean, she's

saying we must withdraw from Iraq so boldly and clearly that even an

antiwar person like [New York Times columnist] Frank Rich refers to

her position as " apocalyptic " and kind of outside the pale. And that's

terrible, because on the issue of withdrawal she represents, I think,

the unspoken desires of a huge number of people and is willing to say

what the politicians and the journalists have not yet dared to say.

There are very few newspapers in the country -- maybe the Seattle

Post-Intelligencer and one other -- that have simply called for

withdrawal without talking about timetables and conditions.

 

The Logic of Withdrawal in Two Wars

 

TD: As the person who, in 1967, wrote Vietnam: The Logic of

Withdrawal, how do you compare the logic of withdrawal discussions in

this moment with that one?

 

Zinn: There was a point early in the Vietnam War when no major figure

and no critic of the war was simply calling for immediate withdrawal.

Everybody was hedging in some way. We must negotiate. We must

compromise. We must stop the bombing north of this or that parallel. I

think we're at a comparable point now, two years after the beginning

of the Iraq War. When my book came out in the Spring of ?67, it was

just two years after the escalation in early '65 when Johnson sent in

the first major infusions of American troops. What's comparable, I

think, are the arguments then and now. Even the language is similar.

We mustn't cut and run. We mustn't give them a victory. We mustn't

lose prestige in the world.

 

TD: ...credibility was the word then.

 

Zinn: Yes, exactly, credibility. There will be chaos and civil war if

we leave...

 

TD: ...and a bloodbath.

 

Zinn: Yes, and a bloodbath -- because the one way you can justify an

ongoing catastrophe is to posit a greater catastrophe if you don't

continue with the present one. We've seen that psychology operating

again and again. We saw it, for instance, with Hiroshima. I mean, we

have to kill hundreds of thousands of people to avert a greater

catastrophe, the death of a million people in the invasion of Japan.

 

It's interesting that when we finally did leave Vietnam, none of those

dire warnings really came true. It's not that things were good after

we left. The Chinese were expelled, and there were the boat people and

the reeducation camps, but none of that compared to the ongoing

slaughter taking place when the American troops were there. So while

no one can predict what will happen -- I think this is important to

say -- when the United States withdraws its troops from Iraq, the

point is that we're choosing between the certainty of an ongoing

disaster, the chaos and violence that are taking place in Iraq today,

and an eventuality we can't predict which may be bad. But what may be

bad is uncertain; what's bad with our occupation right now is certain.

It seems to me that, choosing between the two, you have to take a

chance on what might happen if you end the occupation. At the same

time, of course, you do whatever you can to mitigate the worst

possibilities of your leaving.

 

Resistance in the Military

 

TD: I want to return for a moment to Cindy Sheehan. By the last years

of the Vietnam War, the American military was almost incapable of

fighting and, though there were military families against the war, the

main resistance to the war was by then coming from draft-age soldiers

themselves. Now we have an all-volunteer army; we know that morale is

sinking and that there are specific cases of resistance -- refusals to

return to Iraq, for instance -- within the military, but most of the

resistance this time seems to be coming from the families of the

soldiers. I wonder whether there's any historical precedent for that?

 

Zinn: I don't know of any previous war where something like this

happened? in the United States anyway. The closest you might get would

be in the Confederacy in the Civil War, when the wives of soldiers

rioted because their husbands were dying and the plantation owners

were profiting from the sale of cotton, refusing to grow grains for

civilians to eat. David Williams in Valdosta, Georgia, is coming out

this fall with A People's History of the Civil War in which he

describes that phenomenon.

 

In the case of the Soviet Union, though, there may be a closer

parallel. Russian mothers protested the continuing war in Afghanistan,

their Vietnam. I don't know how strong a part that played in the

Soviet decision to withdraw, but certainly there was something

dramatic about that.

 

We had gold star mothers against the war in the Vietnam era, but

nothing like this and I think you've pointed to the reason. The GIs in

Iraq are not in the same position the draftees were in -- although I

have to temper that by noting that a lot of the resistance in the

Vietnam War came from people who had enlisted in the Army. And, in a

certain sense, there are also draftees in this war, people who didn't

sign up to fight, or National Guards and Reserves who didn't expect to

go to war. You might say that they had been drafted.

 

Still, because it's a largely all-volunteer army, the protesting has

been left to the parents in an unprecedented way. Their children just

aren't in a position to protest as easily, and yet I think there's

going to be more and more GI protest as the war goes on. That's

inevitable. I imagine -- there's no way of proving this -- that

there's already a lot more subterranean protest and disaffection in

the military than has been reported, maybe much more than can be

reported because it's probably not visible.

 

When I try to think what would really compel the Bush administration

to get out of Iraq, the one thing is a rebellion in the military.

David Cortright [author of Soldiers In Revolt: GI Resistance During

The Vietnam War] believes that what happened to the military in

Vietnam was the crucial factor in finally bringing the United States

out of Vietnam.

 

TD: And what about military resistance at the top rather than the

bottom? As far back as Korea, there was a feeling among officers of

being in the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time and that

was replicated in Vietnam. It's clear that the top people in the field

in Iraq have known for a long time that they're involved in a

catastrophe. They were the ones recently who began talking about

draw-downs and withdrawals without permission from the Bush

administration.

 

Zinn: It's a very important development, because when cracks occur in

what had previously seemed to be the solidity of the top, it becomes

that much more difficult to carry on. One example I think of -- it's

not a war situation -- is McCarthyism. When [red-baiting Senator

Joseph] McCarthy began to go after important figures in the Eisenhower

administration, when he went after General [George] Marshall and his

forays came closer and closer to the top, more and more people moved

away from him, and that was critical to his demise. Disaffection in

the top ranks of the military has been evident for some time now.

[Retired Centcom commander] General [Anthony] Zinni, for instance, has

been speaking out from the beginning. For a while I was worried about

the similarity between our names [he laughs], but I feel better about

it now that he's come out speaking the way he has.

 

TD: And retired generals like him are always speaking for others

inside the military.

 

Zinn: That's right. They're in a position to say what others can't

say. I mean there's been military resistance in many of our wars, but

until Vietnam it never reached the point where it actually changed

policy. There were mutinies against Washington in the revolutionary

army. In the Mexican War, even huge numbers of desertions didn't stop

the war. I can't think of any military resistance in World War I. Of

course, the United States was only in for a brief time, a year and a

half really. Certainly, World War II was a different situation. That's

what makes Vietnam such a historical phenomenon. It was the first time

you had a movement in the military that was an important factor in

changing government policy. And it's interesting that we've had short

wars ever since, except for this one, and those wars were deliberately

designed to be short so that there wouldn't be time for an antiwar

movement to develop. In this case, they miscalculated. Now, I don't

think it's a question of if, just when. When and how. I don't think

there's any question that the United States is going to have to get

out of Iraq. The only questions are: How long will it take? How many

more people will die? And how will it be done?

 

The Outer Limits of Empire

 

TD: Let me turn to another issue you certainly wrote about in the 60s,

war crimes. But " war crimes " was the last charge to arrive in the

mainstream in those years and the first to depart. We've certainly

experienced many crimes in the last few years, from Abu Ghraib and

Guantánamo to Afghanistan. I wonder why, as a concept, it sticks so

poorly with Americans?

 

Zinn: It does seem like a hard concept -- war crimes, war criminals --

to catch on here. There's a willingness to say the leadership is

wrong, but it's a great jump from there to saying that the leadership

is vicious. Unfortunately, in American culture, there's still a kind

of monarchical idea that the President, the people up there, are very

special people and while they may make mistakes, they couldn't be

criminals. Even after the public had turned against the Vietnam War,

there was no widespread talk about Johnson, [secretary of Defense

Robert] McNamara, and the rest of them being war criminals. And I

think it has to do with an American culture of deference to the

President and his men -- beyond which people refuse to think.

 

TD: How does an American culture of exceptionalism play into this?

 

Zinn: I would guess that a very large number of Americans against the

war in Vietnam still believed in the essential goodness of this

country. They thought of Vietnam as an aberration. Only a minority in

the antiwar movement saw it as part of a continuous policy of

imperialism and expansion. I think that's true today as well. It's

very hard for Americans to let go of the idea that we're an especially

good nation. It's comforting to know that, even though we do wrong

things from time to time, these are just individual aberrations. I

think it takes a great deal of political consciousness to extend the

criticism of a particular policy or a particular war to a general

negative appraisal of the country and its history. It strikes too

close to something Americans seem to need to hold onto.

 

Of course, there's an element that's right in this as well -- in that

there are principles for which the United States presumably stands

that are good. It's just that people confuse the principles with the

policies -- and so long as they can keep those principles in their

heads (justice for all, equality, and so on), they are very reluctant

to accept the fact that they have been crassly, consistently violated.

This is the only way I can account for the stopping short when it

comes to looking at the President and the people around him as war

criminals.

 

TD: Stepping back from the catastrophe in Iraq, what do you make of

the Bush administration's version of the American imperial project?

 

Zinn: I like to think that the American empire has reached its outer

limits with the Middle East. I don't believe it has a future in Latin

America. I think it's worn out whatever power it had there and we're

seeing the rise of governments that will not play ball with the United

States. This may be one of the reasons why the war in Iraq is so

important to this administration. Beyond Iraq there's no place to go.

So, let's put it this way, I see withdrawal from Iraq whenever it

takes place -- and think of this as partly wish and partly belief [he

chuckles at himself] -- as the first step in the retrenchment of the

American empire. After all we aren't the first country in history to

be forced to do this.

 

I'd like to say that this will be because of American domestic

opposition, but I suspect mostly it will be because the rest of the

world won't accept further American forays into places where we don't

belong. In the future, I believe 9/11 may be seen as representing the

beginning of the dissolution of the American empire; that is, the very

event that immediately crystallized popular support for war, in the

long run -- and I don't know how long that will be -- may be seen as

the beginning of the weakening and crumbling of the American empire.

 

TD: There would be an irony in that.

 

Zinn: Yes, certainly.

 

War's End

 

TD: I wanted to turn to the issue of war. You've written about the

possible end of war not being a purely utopian project. Do you really

believe war could end or is it in our genes?

 

Zinn: Although lots of things are unclear to me, one thing is very

clear. It's not in our genes. Whenever I read accounts, even by people

who have been in war, that suggest there's something in the masculine

psyche that requires this kind of violence and militarism I don't

believe it. I say this on the basis of historical experience; that is,

if you compare the instances in which people, mostly men, have

committed violent acts and gone to war to those in which people have

not gone to war, have rejected war, it seems people don't naturally

want war.

 

They may want a lot of things associated with war -- the comradeship,

the thrill that comes from holding a weapon. I think this is what

confuses people. Thrills, comradeship, all of that can come in many

different ways; it comes from war, though, only when people are

manipulated into it. To me the strongest argument against an inherent

drive to war is the extent to which governments have to resort to get

people to go to war, the huge amounts of propaganda and deception of

which we had an example very recently. And don't forget coercion. So I

discard that idea of a natural inclination to war.

 

TD: You went to war yourself?

 

Zinn: I was 20 years old. I was a bombardier in the 8th Air Force on a

B-17 crew that flew some of the last missions of the war out of

England. I went in as a young, radical, antifascist, believing in this

war and believing in the idea of a just war against fascism. At war's

end I was beginning to have doubts about whether the mayhem we had

engaged in was justified: the bombing of cities, Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, the bombings I had engaged in. And then I was beginning to

suspect the motives of the Allied leaders. Did they really care that

much about fascism? Did they care about the Jews? Was it a war for

empire? In the Air Force I encountered a young Trotskyite on another

air crew who said to me, " You know, this is an imperialist war. " I was

sort of shocked. I said, " Well, you're flying missions! Why are you

here? " He replied, " I'm here to talk to people like you. " [He laughs.]

I mean, he didn't convert me, but he shook me up a little.

 

After the war, as the years went by, I couldn't help contemplating the

promises that had been made about what the war would accomplish. You

know, General Marshall sent me -- and 16 million others -- a letter

congratulating us for winning the war and telling us how the world

would now be a different place. Fifty million people were dead and the

world was not really that different. I mean, Hitler and Mussolini were

gone, as was the Japanese military machine, but fascism and

militarism, and racism were still all over the world, and wars were

still continuing. So I came to the conclusion that war, whatever quick

fix it might give you -- Oh, we've defeated this phenomenon, fascism;

we've gotten rid of Hitler (like we've gotten rid of Saddam Hussein,

you see) -- whatever spurt of enthusiasm, the after-effects were like

those of a drug; first a high and then you settle back into something

horrible. So I began to think that any wars, even wars against evil,

simply don't accomplish much of anything. In the long run, they simply

don't solve the problem. In the interim, an enormous number of people die.

 

I also came to the conclusion that, given the technology of modern

warfare, war is inevitably a war against children, against civilians.

When you look at the ratio of civilian to military dead, it changes

from 50-50 in World War II to 80-20 in Vietnam, maybe as high as 90-10

today. Do you know this Italian war surgeon, Gino Strada? He wrote

Green Parrots: A War Surgeon's Diary. He was doing war surgery in

Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places. Ninety percent of the people he

operated on were civilians. When you face that fact, war is now always

a war against civilians, and so against children. No political goal

can justify it, and so the great challenge before the human race in

our time is to solve the problems of tyranny and aggression, and do it

without war. [He laughs quietly.] A very complex and difficult job,

but something that has to be faced -- and that's what accounts for my

becoming involved in antiwar movements ever since the end of World War II.

 

Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch

 

This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.