BILL MOYERS: What is the narcotic (of war)? What is it that's the poisonous allure?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well the Bible calls it, "The lust of the eye." And warns believers against it. It's that great landscape of the grotesque. It's that power to destroy. I mean one of the most chilling things you learn in war is that human beings like to destroy. Not only other things but other human beings. And when unit discipline would break down or there was no unit discipline to begin with, you would go into a town and people's eyes were glazed over. They sputtered gibberish. Houses were burning. They had that power to revoke the charter. That divine-like power, to revoke the charter of another human being's place on this planet. And they used it...

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.

At the end of the Vietnam War, we became a better country in our defeat. We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before. We were humbled, maybe even humiliated. We were forced to step outside of ourselves and look at us as others saw us. And it wasn't a pretty sight.

But we became a better country for it. A much better country. Gradually war's good name if we can-- between quotes, can say was resurrected. Certainly during the Reagan Era. Granada, Panama. Culminating with the Persian Gulf War. We're in a war — the very essence of war was hidden from us. And the essence of war is death. War is necrophilia. That's what it is.

MOYERS: What would you most like us to be thinking about this weekend as it looks as if war is about to happen?
HEDGES: That this isn't just about the destruction of Iraq and the death of Iraqis. It's about self-destruction.
MOYERS: How so? What's happening to us?

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... Chris Hedges Interview with Bill Moyers