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Tomdispatch Interview: James Carroll on Our Post-9/11 World, by Tom Engelhardt

Tomdispatch.com

Tomdispatch Interview: James Carroll on Our Post-9/11 World

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: This is the second in an ongoing series of interviews at the site. The first was with Howard Zinn. More will appear later in the month or in October. Tom ]


The Mosquito and the Hammer
A Tomdispatch Interview with James Carroll

We pull into the parking lot at the same moment in separate cars, both of us slightly vacation-disheveled. He wears a baseball-style cap and a half-length purple raincoat in anticipation of the downpour which begins soon after we huddle safely in a local coffee shop. As I fumble with my two tape recorders, he immediately demurs about the interview. He may have nothing new to say, he assures me, and then absolves me, now and forever, of the need to make any use whatsoever of anything we produce through our conversation.

The son of a lieutenant-general who was the founding director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, a former Catholic priest and antiwar activist in the Vietnam era (the subject of his book, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us), Carroll has long pursued his interest in the ways in which faith and force can coalesce into historically fatal brews. From this came, for instance, his bestselling book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews.

Within days of the attacks of September 11, 2001, he became perhaps our most passionate -- and prophetic -- columnist in the mainstream media. His columns continue to appear, now every Monday, in the Boston Globe. The Bush administration, with its fundamentalist religious base, its Manichaean worldview, its urge toward a civilizational conflict against Islam, and its deeply held fascination with and belief in the all-encompassing powers of military force, was, in a sense, made for him. And he grasped the consequences of its actions with uncanny accuracy from the first moments after our President announced his "war on terror," just days after 9/11. A remarkable collection of his Globe columns that begins with the fall of the World Trade Center towers and the damaging of the Pentagon and ends on the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, will certainly prove one of the best running records of that crucial period we have.

He speaks quietly and straightforwardly. You can almost see him thinking as he talks. As he reenters the world we've passed through these last years, his speech speeds up and gains a certain emphatic cadence. You can feel in his voice the same impressive combination of passion and intelligence, engagement and thoughtfulness that is a hallmark of his weekly column. I turn on the tape recorders and we begin to consider the world since September 11, 2001.

Tomdispatch: In September 2003, only five months after the invasion of Iraq, you wrote in a column, "The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?" Here we are two years later. What has it taken, what will it take, to face that truth?

Click here to read more of this dispatch.


** To read more of Tom Engelhardt's poignant dispatches, please go to: Tomdispatch.com

posted by Annamarie at 5:51 PM