Description: The media squashed voices of opposition, says Williams, and those voices are still attempting to be heard.

Question: How did it come to this?

Transcript:  We’ll never really know what drove them to have that war. All the reasons that were given we know are lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no terrorist connection between Hussein and terrorism. I think in some ways it was sheer arrogance. It was a sheer belief that if you have power you have to express it where you can express it and I think that that came out pretty clearly. We are the most powerful, we can do whatever we want, this is the next thing we’re going to do, and if Iraq had worked out there would have been a next thing, probably Iran, which they still might try to get away with. So I think there have been everything from psychoanalyzing Bush and his relationship with his father, which, sure, that may have had something to do with it, to Cheney’s--  Cheney obviously just had a sheer thirst, a ravishing-- ravous-- ravenous thirst for the expression of power. He still does. His great illuminating moment a few weeks ago was when someone said, “What about the fact that the American people are so against the war now?”  And he said, “So?”  That’s really the expression of power. It means I have so much power I don’t have to listen to even the American people. So I think that’s where the war started.

Question: Why did the voices of opposition go unheard?

Transcript:  The media takes a lot of the blame. The New York Times takes a lot of the blame as the journal of record as it’s called or Judith Miller takes a lot of the blame, but basically it was the media following. Someone did a commercial recently or a documentary showing how the Republican party would say something about what was the justification for the war and then you’d hear members of the House and Senate using precisely the same words, and between the government controlling the House and the Senate at the time and the media being so malleable and gullible and not doing its proper work there just wasn’t enough force in the opposition.

I’ll read the poem relating to what we were just speaking of, relating to the frustration of knowing that before the war started what was going to happen. It’s called Cassandra, Iraq. Cassandra was the Greek prophet at Troy who foresaw what was going to happen, that Troy was going to fall, and when she spoke people couldn’t understand her. They actually thought that she was speaking like a bird, that they heard bird song, and of course she was right, and then at the end after Troy falls she’s carried away by Agamemnon and ends up dying as he dies. Cassandra, Iraq:  “She’s magnificent, as we imagine women must be who foresee and foretell and are right and disdained. This is the difference between us who are like her in having been right and disdained, and us as we are. Because we, in our foreseeings, our having been right, are repulsive to ourselves, fat and immobile, like toads. Not toads in the garden, who after all are what they are, but toads in the tale of death in the desert of sludge. In this tale of lies, of treachery, of superfluous dead, were there ever so many who were right and disdained? With no notion what to do next? If we were true seers, as prescient as she, as frenzied, we’d know what to do next. We’d twitter, as she did, like birds; we’d warble, we’d trill. But what would it be really, to twitter, to warble, to trill? Is it ee-ee-ee, like having a child? Is it uh-uh-uh, like a wound? Or is it inside, like a blow, silent to everyone but yourself? Yes, inside, I remember, oh-oh-oh: it’s where grief is just about to be spoken, but all at once can’t be: oh. When you no longer can “think” of what things like lies, like superfluous dead, so many, might mean: oh. Cassandra will be abducted at the end of her tale, and die. Even she can’t predict how. Stabbed? Shot? Blown to bits? Her abductor dies, too, though, in a gush of gore, in a net. That we know; she foresaw that-- in a gush of gore, in a net.”  Should I reread that place where I bubbled a little? “Cassandra will be abducted at the end of her tale, and die. Even she can’t predict how. Stabbed? Shot? Blown to bits? Her abductor dies, too, though, in a gush of gore, in a net. That we know; she foresaw that-- in a gush of gore, in a net.” 

Question: Is political writing about Iraq being heard?

Transcript:  There’s a huge amount of political writing in our time and there’s a huge amount being heard. Whether that means anything or not is another question. You don’t know. There’s this fusion in history between moments when people can hear just like Cassandra, when people can hear what’s being said and what’s urgent and when they can’t, and you can’t predict, you can’t know when the times are that people will hear what they’re supposed to be hearing or should be hearing.

Recorded on: 7/3/08