Apply this to Iraq. You've been to Iraq three times. It must be startling to arrive in this described land and see the actual country.
One of the striking things about going to Iraq is the extraordinarily large chasm between what people know about the story here and what the story actually is. First of all, the lurid, security-imposed landscape of the country is very hard to convey to people here: the miles of concrete blast walls, the miles of barbed wire, the constant fear in driving around and trying to report, and the absolute, constant accompaniment of death. Most of the killings in Iraq are not reported here and yet American viewers think that they're seeing the war when what they're seeing is a television reporter doing a stand-up on the roof of a heavily guarded hotel, behind blast walls and barbed wire and countless armed guards, who may or may not have exited that hotel that day. Many reporters are doing extraordinary jobs under horrific conditions, but those conditions make adequate reporting, as we know it, nearly impossible.
The result is that the Iraq we see is a tiny, tiny sliver of a very complex, very violent reality, and the constant repetition of the bad news, of the continual deaths there, has been absorbed by the news system of the United States. By that I mean, whereas 10 deaths might have made the front page of the paper or been not "a tell" but an actual filmed report on a network newscast, now it takes more death than that. The country and the news media are gradually absorbing how badly the war has gone so that the normal pace of death there, which, had we predicted it before the war, would have been a horrible outcome -- an outcome that, had we known, no one would have supported the war in the first place -- this horrible outcome has become the baseline that we take for granted.
For the story to occupy the news space, a particularly catastrophic attack is necessary. Today in the New York Times, there was a striking report about the steady upsurge in the number of attacks since the beginning of the insurgency. This has been inexorable, which shows that the insurgency is growing more formidable, despite all these reports about American and Iraqi successes in the war. That story appeared on Page A12 of the New York Times. It wasn't even news. Accompanying it was a piece about the failure of infrastructure in Iraq. Though the United States has put roughly $16 billion of American money into the Iraqi infrastructure, the number of hours of average electricity available to an inhabitant of Baghdad has gone from 24 hours to 4. All the figures on infrastructure point downward, so that if you're an Iraqi, you have seen your standard of living steadily decline under the Americans even as you now have a much greater chance of being kidnapped or killed or blown up in an explosion or having your children kidnapped. Very little of this gets through to Americans. In fact, the story has generally been migrating off the front pages and becoming a small version of Orwell's famed distant and never-ending war between East Asia and Oceania.
I think it's widely known at the top of the administration that Iraq is a failure. It's also been recognized by many that, in strategic terms, the Iraq war could turn out to be a catastrophe because it's essentially created a Shia Islamist government sympathetic to Iran and, among other things, made it impossible for the U.S. to adequately pressure Iran on the nuclear issue. The result of this occupation is going to be a reversal of 50 years of American policy in the Gulf, which has been a reliance on the Sunni autocracies in the area. That policy had an awful lot wrong with it; its support of those autocracies over many decades certainly helped lead to al-Qaida and its epigones. The fact is, though, that the Bush administration has essentially overthrown that policy with nothing to put in its place.
You've written, "I think I became a writer in part because I found that yawning distance between what I was told and what I could see to be inescapable." Now, that yawning gap is available to everybody. And we're in a strangely demobilized moment, it seems to me. I was wondering: If you're a reporter, what's the story now? Remind me?
Thank you, Tom, for putting a deeply depressing point in such a deeply depressing way. I congratulate you on that, and indeed that yawning gap is now available to everyone and it's debilitating, partly because one is perilously close to arriving at the conclusion that reality doesn't matter. When I look at the pieces on the inside pages of the papers about the stealing of funds in Iraq by American officials, when I realize that no one is likely to be punished for this, I think of the novels of [Milan] Kundera, of his vivid descriptions of what it was like to live in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and '60s -- in the Soviet system where everyone realized the corruption, the abuse of power, the mediocrity of the government, the yawning gap between what was said and what was really going on, but no one could do anything about it.
Are we in a kind of Brezhnev moment?
I'm not sure I would go so far as that because a Brezhnev moment means we're talking about a system that has reached its geriatric debility. I'm by no means saying that the U.S. now is equivalent to Eastern Europe back then, but there is a similarity in this gap between what you know is true and officially recognized reality -- and in the fact that that gap cannot be breached. On the other hand, the fall in Bush's approval ratings, and especially the catastrophic decline in the all-important "do you think the country is on the right track" question shows that this has had a broad effect among a lot of people. And I take some comfort from that.
The Democrats are doing very well in a generic poll about who you would want to run the country. This doesn't mean the midterm elections will turn out that way, of course. It does mean people have not been so dulled by fear as not to see that the war has been a mistake and that the administration has done a very bad job when it comes to, say, Katrina or the Medicare program. At the end of the day, the problem is that there needs to be a political alternative that is in some way viable and believable -- and the political elite that opposes this administration has been unable to formulate a believable program in opposition to it.
At the heart of this is the problem of national security. Since the end of the Vietnam War, in poll after poll the American people say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to protect them. This is a clichi of polling. At this particular time, it's been made worse by a paradox. If, with great skill, the Democrats attack the Republican handling not just of the Iraq war but of the more general war on terror -- and the Bush administration has been brilliant in connecting those two -- if the Democrats succeed in doing this, they are, in effect, igniting the overwhelming political emotion of fear. And the Republicans have been very successful in using fear; fear, whatever its cause, seems to benefit the Republicans and the self-described strong leadership they offer. Their basic strategy in the 2004 election was to say: Elect this guy Kerry with his surfboard, and he's going to get you killed. Enough people were willing to believe that then. It's unclear whether that old snake oil will still have as many willing buyers. I tend to doubt it.
As dusk settles in, let me end this way: You've reported on some countries in horrific situations over the years. You wrote somewhere that in State Department parlance they are called TFN, totally fucked up nations. Your mother, when you come home, has a tendency to say, "Can't you go someplace nice for a change?" So here we are on this patio, the sun going down, the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. This looks nice. My question is: Is it nice, or are you now reporting from and teaching in a TFN?
[Laughs heartily] Oh, you mean, this just a mask, a sunny, picturesque mask over what is, in reality, a totally fucked up nation? Actually, to reach the point of being a TFN, I think we have a long way to go. We're at a very low point in the political evolution of this country. I've certainly not lived under an administration as radical in its techniques, its methods, and its beliefs as this one. I've seen nothing like it in my lifetime.
It's a difficult time for those of us who care about the truth and who don't believe, as I think this administration does, that the truth is actually determined by what those in power think. I take comfort from the fact that a lot of people don't believe that.
There are two borderline dangers here. One is to go off into a state of political debility in which you think that none of this matters. To hell with politics, let's try to live our lives. And that's a very natural response, to kind of bow out of political engagement, but I think that would be very wrong and very harmful. The other risk is to equal the administration in their exaggerations and their distortions, in their stunning lack of fidelity to what is happening. To exaggerate, to overstate, to alter the truth in the cause of a political goal -- this, I think, is very tempting ... very tempting. When you see Fox News existing as it does, you want something of the same on the other side. But I don't think that's my job and I'm glad it's not the job of a lot of writers and journalists out there.
You asked a little while ago what reporters should do in a time like this. I think it's immensely important that people continue, with great determination, to report what is true, to investigate things like the NSA story, to make a record of all of this. Because, at the end of the day, that is what reporters do, and that is why their work is so valuable -- so, if you'll forgive this word, sacred. They try to tell what actually happened.
As I leave him at the now dark doorway and head up the stone steps to my car, he calls, "Watch out for the deer! They tend to be up there at this time of night!"
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.
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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of "The End of Victory Culture, a History of American Triumphalism in the Cold War." His novel, "The Last Days of Publishing," has recently come out in paperback.
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