War Made Easy: An interview with Norman Solomon

There is a largely accepted, culturally reinforced madness that greases the wheels of the war machine. Some of the dynamics are certainly different. During the Vietnam War, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the career military brass were pressuring for expansion of the war for many years. It’s the reverse now where the Bush White House was pushing an often reluctant Joint Chiefs of Staff into the invasion of Iraq. Yet, from a media contagion standpoint, it’s very recognizable. If Rip Van Winkle rubbed his eyes and here he is, despite all the technological and cultural differences between the Vietnam War era and today, a lot of these similar attitudes would be readily recognizable. Some of them are summarized in the table of contents of the book: “Our Leaders Will Do Everything They Can to Avoid War,” “Our Leaders Would Never Tell Us Outright Lies,” “This Guy Is a Modern-Day Hitler,” “This is About Human Rights,” “This Is Not at All about Oil or Corporate Profits,” “They Are the Aggressors, Not Us,” “If This War Is Wrong, Congress Will Stop It,” “If This War Is Wrong, the Media Will Tell Us.” These notions are part of a socialized psychological set of mechanisms so that we lie to ourselves about what’s being done with our tax dollars and our names. 

Is this unique to the U.S.? 

I think there’s a commonality of militarism that many societies have experienced, but it’s especially—and sickeningly—seductive when a country holds such a huge amount of military power. If you drop a lot of bombs, you’re not only writing the history as victor, you’re also silencing those who are the most victimized by your lies and militarism. I think it’s a blend between generic militarism and a kind of U.S. zeal to dominate even while denying that this is an empire- building exercise. 

What is the lesson for peace workers and alternative media advocates? 

I think naming the propaganda techniques and confronting them is very important. Activism against war in this country could do a lot better job of challenging the propaganda mechanisms that make these wars possible. Just from the standpoint of debunking the prevalent arguments in the news media for war, those of us engaged in activism—and I certainly include myself—have nothing to be comfortable about. We’re losing the propaganda wars. It’s small comfort that we can point to poll numbers that indicate disquiet or opposition to a war. It’s a reticence to confront the essence of the war that is inflicting death on people on behalf of a totally illegitimate agenda. The propaganda machine has these standard techniques that are used to restrain opposition to war so that no matter how you feel about how we got into it, now that we’re there all these terrible things would happen if we stop killing people. So if you want to be considered reasonable, you’d better not insist on an end to U.S. fueling of the flames of that war. I talk about it in the book: “You’re undermining our troops” and “Now that we’re there, we have to stay there”—as if we have a responsibility to the people we’re killing to keep killing them. 

A peace activist put this to me, and I’m paraphrasing: “When people like us are for peace issues and so forth, are we really having a significant impact?” It sounds to me that with regard to the long term you’re saying no. Is that correct? 

I’m not critiquing action, I’m critiquing inaction. I think that there are huge effects that we sometimes have and don’t even know it—that the activity of keeping the flame going and trying to nurture and build flames is an essential process. Nothing that I’m saying is intended to discourage people. I think if people were not active then the wars would be bigger, they’d be more frequent, and they’d last longer. Through our work in the streets, in communities, in electoral arenas and lobbying, we become part of the political calculus that the war-makers need to take into account. I think our problems involve how we restrain ourselves and are persuaded to be unduly restrained by our caution.

How do we move from this level of knowledge to getting it to a critical mass of people and then getting people to do what needs to be done? 

I think the twin hazards to try and avoid are self-marginalization and undue self-restraint. I believe we should be less rhetorical and more radical in our analysis and what we have to say. Sometimes we mistake rhetoric for radicalism or we mistake in-house language with really presenting a strong critique in a way that can make a difference politically. This is an ongoing challenge—to find ways to speak to the broad population. There’s a tremendous amount of really good work that’s been done and certainly much earlier in the first couple of years in this war than during the Vietnam War. The role of soldiers and family members of troops has been much clearer earlier on in terms of Military Families Speak Out and other wonderful groups and individuals who’ve prevented— more than we were able to early in the Vietnam War—this stereotype that anti-war people do not relate to the humanity of U.S. soldiers. 

Speaking as a foreigner, I am amazed by the extent to which Americans have bought into this whole belief system and these media falsehoods and misconceptions that make up the chapters of War Made Easy. Why is it that the U.S. in the age of the Internet can still be so resistant to outside messages? 

The reasons why so many Americans have a willingness to accept such outrageous militaristic policies out of Washington are multi-factoral. It’s in the culture, it’s in the mass media environment, it’s constant messages from politicians and news outlets, and part of the political economy that reinforces it. I received an email a couple of years ago from a TV columnist of a major U.S. newspaper. He’d read a column I wrote questioning the extreme double standards of how the media use the word “terrorism.” I had suggested a single standard for terrorism. He said, “If my newspaper adopted such a standard there would be an uproar from advertisers and many subscribers and it would quickly become a financial disaster.” This is where the economics of the corporate system intersect with what we often think of as something quite distinct, which is war propaganda. So when Colin Powell says, as he did on the day of 9/11, we condemn people who are willing to blow up buildings for political ends—well if Osama Bin Laden is a terrorist, then George W. Bush is a terrorist. That would be a logical conclusion if one takes what Powell said at his word. But that kind of assessment can’t be allowed psychologically. 

Is the U.S. ever going to be ready to see presidents for what they are and not be so forgiving or fall for the hokey one-liners of a Reagan and so on? 

The United States has such a diverse population and the cliché is we’re divided into red states and blue states. But if you were going to look at the percentages, you have pretty marked regional differences. For the most part, the South is extremely militaristic and the militarism is coded with religion. There are enclaves of the country where a large proportion of people already see the president as a war criminal. But  I think for most people, the president as a war criminal is an oxymoron. It’s just not a concept that seems plausible. But the proportion of people who are open to considering the evidence, those proportions may shift. Part of the task for people who are doing progressive work is to find better ways to explore publicly the essence of what’s at stake. What’s the human cost? What are the logical fallacies and deceptions involved in setting an agenda for war and then trying to justify a war’s perpetuation. I think this is ongoing work that needs to be done. 

The embedding of reporters for the Iraq invasion was a brilliant propaganda mechanism. The Pentagon flipped over what happened during the Gulf War a dozen years earlier. I remember some nauseating interviews with U.S. troops on television, including on “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer”—then called the “McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.” So it’s not new that you would have this kind of human interest sandwich that is served up with reporting on the carnage, as limited as that reporting is. There were appreciable media complaints—not very vigorous—but still appreciable media complaints about the limits set on the Gulf War coverage. So the embedding process implemented by the Pentagon was a way to make grand use of cable television, in particular and turn the war into a more multi-dimensional TV show. 

What will it take for the truth to get through? 

I think that any effective anti-war movement needs to combine the emotional with the intellectual. People respond in a wide variety of ways. One person may be changed by a totally intellectual argument, with the marshaling of facts and historical evidence. Another person may be moved by the story of a mother who lost her child. I’m really in favor of trying to combine all of that because I think it’s part of the picture. Television and visual images, in and of themselves, may reinforce militarism as much as undermine it. I’m pretty convinced by an argument that Susan Sontag made about the imagery of war depending on the mindset of those who see and the political environment—how it may be interpreted as the need to continue with this heroic struggle. I think there has been an assumption that if only we can convey the suffering from war, that people will be repelled by it enough to oppose the war. 

What do you think about this notion that Michael Moore and others have propounded that Americans are afraid? Is fear a powerful tool that helps prop up this propaganda status quo as well? 

I think fear is definitely powerful. The antidote to fear has been pedaled as the military fist that Uncle Sam can keep swinging to keep adversaries at bay. Many people around the world have much more reason to be fearful than Americans in terms of their own physical well-being. Yet our national narcissism is cranked up to such an extent that, with a straight face, media outlets could say that 9/11 changed everything everywhere. We are the world. Our pain dwarfs the pain of anybody else. So our fear must trump anybody else’s fears, which are often unrecognized in media. One can go into a kind of psychological mode and say that fear drives so much of what goes on in American life, including the fascination with wealth and the kind of delusional, tacit belief that if we can gain enough wealth and own enough expensive things, that we’re going to be protected. Well, we’re all going to die and these are very ephemeral comforts at best. At a kind of very overt level, the Pentagon is the agency that is supposed to make sure that if anybody dies, it isn’t Americans. This is a very human and very pernicious dynamic. You hear it sometimes in its raw form—I think often it’s more subtle—which is, “Who cares if those people are incinerated? Who cares if they’re tortured? They’re not going to do it to us, that’s for damn sure.” That’s the point of the entire enterprise of what’s called “national defense.” I personally refuse to call the military budget the defense budget. It’s interesting that so many anti-war activists and peace advocates will refer to this as a “defense budget.” It’s wrong. I’m not against a defense budget, but if it was a real defense budget it would be much smaller. 

In reading your book I felt it was necessarily bleak, but if I might read the closing paragraph of the Afterword: “Conscience is not on the military’s radar screen and it’s not on our television screen but government officials and media messages do not define the limits and possibilities of conscience. We do.” That’s rather empowering. Are you optimistic? 

I like to quote something I heard Eduardo Galeano say at the World Social Forum in early 2001. He recalled walking down a street of a Latin American city and written in big letters on the wall was, “Let’s save pessimism for better times.” I think that’s relevant to where we are. There’s the statement written by Antonio Gramsci when he was in prison under Mussolini that translates something like: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Those are, so to speak, the two legs that I feel we need to be walking on.