Going After Conventional Politics (Leftist Ted Rall interviewed)

By Paul Morton
Spectator Senior Writer

At this time last year, Ted Rall was in Afghanistan, witnessing the war on terror first-hand. His experience was miserable, frightening, and fascinating. The living conditions, he says, "were unbelievably atrocious." Every bed was infested with lice and fleas. There was never any decent food, and what food there was couldn't be eaten in the daytime, since it was Ramadan. There were bombs flying overhead every day, "killing the wrong people." And there was corruption among the journalists, particularly the television journalists. They paid the wrong people for the wrong stories. Rall's new book, To Afghanistan and Back: A Graphic Travelogue, a collection of columns and comics, is an attempt to correct those stories, and all the misrepresentations of the war he believes have been propagated by the mainstream press. "Everyone who's paid attention knows it's a dismal failure," Rall said.

Rall, a graduate of Columbia's General Studies program, is best known as the syndicated cartoonist (printed locally in The Village Voice) whose post-Sept. 11 work has riled many people. Since the 2000 election, he has drawn George W. Bush as a Latin American dictator, Generalissimo El Busho. He continued to do so even after Sept. 11 when most of the media wanted to forget about the Florida election controversy. His most infamous cartoon, "Terror Widow," came out in the springtime. It was meant as a jab against Lisa Beamer, Marianne Pearl, and Ted Olson, whom he believes exploited their private tragedies in the media. That particular piece and others got him dropped by a number of publications, most notably Time.

At 39, Rall is a big, imposing man with wavy black hair offset by a nerdy charm. He lives on Morningside Drive and had just finished his morning jog when he sat down to do an interview at Tom's Restaurant.

We began with his claim that the war in Afghanistan had very little to do with the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The only thing that has happened in Afghanistan since Sept. 11 has been the establishment of an oil regime. Hamid Karzai worked for Unocal. Zalmai Khalizad is the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan. He's going to be the special envoy to the Iraqi opposition. He used to work for Unocal. That was his last job. Not only are they all oil guys, they all worked for the same exact company, the only company that came up with a Trans-Afghan pipe project. You can say this is all coincidence, but you'd have to be an idiot."

So the war in Afghanistan had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks?

"[The war in Afghanistan] certainly followed the World Trade Center attacks. And Al Qaeda certainly had bases in Afghanistan, as well as other hard-line Islamist groups like the Islamist Movement of Uzbekistan. But Afghanistan was just a sideshow to what happened on Sept. 11. The truth is the guys who pulled this off were all Egyptians and Saudis. There is certainly no evidence whatsoever that ties Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or the Taliban to what happened."

Really? Isn't it taken for granted at this point that all these three entities were involved?

"No, seriously .... Look at The Guardian. Look at a lot of mainline European media."

Many would say he sounds a bit like a conspiracy theorist. "I don't consider myself a conspiracy theorist at all. I get my news from mainline normal sources, like The New York Times. I'm not into what I would consider wacky theories. I don't know who killed JFK. Nobody knows. Whereas with the Afghan thing, it's not a conspiracy theory, it's more about using common sense to imagine what's likely. I've met conspiracy theorists who have their way of looking at the Afghan war and the pipeline thing: 'Well, George Bush's family helped fund the Nazi party in World War II and Dick Cheney's father was affiliated with Nelson Rockefeller.' These guys may all be right, but I don't see the world being run by a series of friendships, connections, relationships, all that. I think those things are important, but I think in the case of the Afghan pipeline, you have to use logic here. It's a conspiracy theory to say that this is anything but a pipeline."

We turn to his own experiences in Afghanistan and what he calls the hidden story of the behavior of the press.

"The television reporters were despicable scum. They came with literally 20, 30, 40 thousand dollars in cash. And they're throwing that money around like it's going out of style. We were all loaded by Afghan standards, but the TV people were the stars. They show up with all this heavy equipment, and they're paying absurd fees for everything: seven hundred dollars a night for living in squalor, five hundred dollars for a taxi. It's absurd, particularly in a country where the average salary is $1.20 a month. That profligacy turned all of us journalists into targets." The Afghans, Rall said, began to look at all the journalists as millionaires to be killed. "And those of us with the least money and the least ability to protect ourselves were the most targeted."

According to Rall, one of his colleagues, Swedish reporter Ulf Stromberg, was killed because of the situation the television journalists created. On the barge on their way back to Tajikistan, the BBC crew tried to kick his coffin out of the way so they could fit more of their satellite gear onto the barge. "If I had more energy, if I wasn't depressed, and if I had been eating, I would definitely have kicked these guys' asses."

Rall talks about how reporters paid soldiers to shoot at empty fields so they could get a good picture to send back home. They missed the real stories, hanging out "in the shittiest section of town and just talking to the people." Rall visited several of those areas where, he claims, "I was the only journalist."

He compares his experience there to the 1999 film Three Kings, a satire of the Gulf War. "The war commute, there was definitely humor there. You'd get up in the morning. 'Time to go see the war.' A couple of people would come by and offer their business. 'I am your translator for you.' You're driving around in the Dubai rental car that inexplicably still has the Dubai plate and the sticker from Avis. It's dusty and hot and there are goats on the side of the road, and then there's a parking lot with trucks full of troops. It's like going to the office. And everyone's disappointed if there's nothing going on."

How did he feel when he came back?

"I felt guilty as an American, paying taxes and tolerating the regime that carries out such barbarism in the name of democracy and freedom. To me that's such bullshit. If the American people knew half of what was being done in their name, it wouldn't happen. People don't know. They don't want to know."

I asked about the role of journalists who go to dangerous places like Afghanistan. After a brief diatribe calling for journalists to be treated with more dignity and respect, Rall said:

"The Pentagon literally wanted us all to die. That's not hyperbole. That's a fact. They would have liked every journalist in Afghanistan to die. To go away is not enough. Without journalists reporting from war zones you would never know about all the atrocities that go on. If it was a secret affair you would have a lot more dead. Look at the first Gulf War [where there were fewer journalists], where there were an estimated one to four hundred thousand civilian casualties. That's because of the lack of coverage. Journalists reduce civilian casualties severely. If the Pentagon can do things without anyone knowing about it, they would just drop everything they had."

There was a short pause, and then Rall said, almost as an afterthought, "That's what I would do. That's the smart thing to do."

I don't have a link to that tape and I'm unaware of its net presence, if any, but when a guy says something to the effect of "we had planned for casualties where the planes hit, but the entire building coming down was a blessing from Allah," I'm afraid I have to conclude that he wasn't exactly as pure as the driven snow in the matter. But if Rall is right, we didn't really do it for antiterrorism at all, it was all Bush and his big-oil buddies after that UNOCAL pipeline and the vast oil reserves in Afghanistan...neither of which exist. That is one little problem with that theory, but not for Rall.

What is maddening about this is the persistent and repeated demand "prove it to me, no I don't believe it, prove it to me, no, I don't believe it" mantra coming from the left much more eager for a conspiracy theory than to accept the possibility that perhaps Bush attacked al Qaeda in Afghanistan for precisely the reason that he said he did. Further, to argue, as Rall did, that "nothing has changed" in Afghanistan afterward, is a denial of a reality so complete that it obviates debate on the subject - a very great deal has changed, and anyone who doesn't believe it is free to go and ask the Afghan people. That, by the way, is the very first thing that has changed.

"It's all about oil" has been the stale old complaint of the left ever since Vietnam, about which the very same accusation was bruited about with abandon. That would be the same oil that is currently flowing from Afghanistan - none at all.

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