The Real Story of the Bush Years

The Real News Network

 
Editor and author Tom Engelhardt runs one of the most influential political
Web sites on the net - Tomdispatch.com. In this interview Engelhardt and Pepe
Escobar discuss the tribulations of Empire, the relationship of oil and war,
and how mainstream media in the US
constantly edits out crucial stories.

Bio

Tom Engelhardt runs the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation
Institute. His books include The End of Victory Culrure - a history of American
triumphalism in the Cold War - the novel The Last Days of Publishing, and
Mission Unaccomplished, a collection of his Tomdispatch interviews. One of the
top US book editors, he is Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books as well as
co-founder and co-editor of Metropolitan's The American Empire Project. Many of
the authors whose books he has edited and published over the years now write
for Tomdispatch.com.

Transcript

PEPE ESCOBAR, REAL NEWS ANALYST: I'm here with Tom Engelhardt, the leader
and the editor of TomDispatch.com, which may seem like a huge corporate
operation, but in fact it's practically a two-man team. And the other important
part of the team is Nick Turse, the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. Guys,
welcome to The Real News. So it's you, Nick, and a group of fabulous writers,
they are in this book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the
New Age of Empire. How would you define "empire" to an American who
believes that US is not an empire?

TOM ENGELHARDT, TOM>DISPATCH,COM: I have a kind of a gut reaction to empire.
I mean, think of it this way. If you sit inside the United States, you're not
enormously aware that we're on a one-way planet. You know. So you can have on
any day—I mean, it just happened recently. You can have, say, the head of the
CIA get up in front of Congress and both congratulate himself and be
congratulated on getting secret spies into Iran. Now, if you were to try and
reverse that and you imagine the head of the Iranian secret service publicly in
Tehran saying, "Great news: we've finally
got our guys inside the corridors of power in Washington," I mean, this country would
declare war. We would be horrified. So I think it's things like that, you know,
the fact that, for instance, we can take a Predator, an unarmed aerial vehicle,
one of these drones, and we can fly it over Somalia, we can decide there's a
terrorist on the ground, we can shoot a Hellfire missile into some peasant's
hut and kill a couple of people, and then, "Oh my gosh. It's not a
terrorist. We're kind of sorry." Now, if you reverse that and that
Predator was an Iranian Predator, say, or a Chinese Predator, something flying
over southern California
and the same thing happened, we would declare war. We would go crazy. I think
what you can say is in a way you know when you're an empire when it all goes in
the other direction. That's the world that I think we're in.

ESCOBAR: Could we say that the world according to TomDispatch and the work of
you guys these past five years, it's telling a story of basically oil and
weapons? Because you broke stories that the mainstream media refused to break,
like the empire of bases, the Pentagonization of American life, transformation
of the world into a planet of slums—a Mike Davis piece.

ENGELHARDT: Although we've dealt a lot with Bush administration policy, we've
dealt with the way in which what the neocons, you know, just in a turn of
phrase back in, say, 2002 used to call the arc of instability, which extends
from North Africa to the Chinese border, and it's more or less the oil
heartlands of the planet. We dealt with how they made it into a genuine arc of
instability. So that's been a lot of TomDispatch. And in the process we focused
a fair amount on the disastrous war in Iraq
and within Iraq
a series of missing stories, you know, the missing stories, which really are
weapons, oil, bases. You know, that is the air war, the fact that even though
air wars, the American way of war, American reporters remarkably enough simply
don't look up. It's not covered here, or largely not covered. The vast bases
that we've been building in Iraq, multi-billions of dollars going into bases
that reek of permanency, even if we don't call them permanent and are
obviously—I like to call them Bush's ["ZIH-guh-rots"] that are meant
to outlast this administration. They're millennial objects, even though,
obviously, we won't be there in anything like that length. And, finally, the
most embarrassing story of the Iraq War, which is the one thing that Iraq
really produces, which is oil, which couldn't for years be put in the same
paragraph with "we're fighting" or any serious piece in the
mainstream about the situation in Iraq.

ESCOBAR: You're one of the top US book editors. Is this a matter of editing
out?

ENGELHARDT: Yes.

ESCOBAR: In terms of the behavior of the US corporate media?

ENGELHARDT: Yes. It's a kind of collective editing-out. I usually say the
mainstream media is a conspiracy. And what's fascinating about it is it's a
conspiracy in which none of the conspirators know they're a part of it. Certain
stories get left out, things get shaped in a certain way, and they get shaped
in a certain way. If you sit at night and you click from one prime-time news
show to another, you click to the same stories. If you're on story five, it's the
president's getting off the plane, whether you're on ABC, NBC, or CBS. We're
now at a strange moment in which, for the first time, the stories that
TomDispatch has been covering with people like Chalmers Johnson, Dahr Jamail,
Mike Klare, Mike Davidson, a wonderful set of people who have covered these
missing stories, suddenly some of these stories are in our world again. Oil has
just been broken by The New York Times, you know, the big oil companies.

ESCOBAR: Yeah, it's five years late.

ENGELHARDT: Yeah, five years late. The bases are suddenly—these bases that
nobody has been willing to look at or basically show Americans, which we've
been building with billions of dollars, of tax dollars, are suddenly back in
the news. And what fascinates me as I watch this—and it would be funny if it
weren't so grim—is that when the mainstream media picks up these stories and
starts running with them, they act as though it's just been part of the
discussion for the last five years. Nobody stops and says, "Oh, wait—we
really have a new story now. We've managed not to cover this for five
years." They've just talked about it as if they were talking about it the
same way yesterday. So everything's edited out until it's in, and then it's as
if it's always been in.

ESCOBAR: Would you say that Americans should give up on US corporate media?

ENGELHARDT: If we completely gave up on it, there's a lot of information I
wouldn't have, because the fact is in bits and pieces things are covered
everywhere and often covered fairly well. I mean, to give you just one example,
to me the great and obvious story of the Bush years in Washington has been the expansion of the
Pentagon. It's expanded in every way because the Bush people put such emphasis
on the military. And this is Nick's great subject, of course. And that
expansion has been covered bit by bit. The budgetary part, the weapons trading,
you know, various aspects of it have been covered in the mainstream media, and
yet it took TomDispatch and a woman named Frida Berrigan, who's an arms expert,
to do a piece that should have been on the front page of The New York Times or
The Wall Street Journal, part of a series on the overall expansion of the
Pentagon. You can't find that anywhere. It's just not there, even though it is
one of the two or three most striking aspects of what's happened in the Bush
years here.