Welcome to Current Affairs.

My name is Nathan Robinson.

I'm the editor and chief of Current Affairs Magazine.'m my name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

My guest today is the legendary Chris Hedges, who you may have heard on the program a few

months ago. But he is back because he is the author of a new book that I think is tremendously important and want to discuss with him.

It is called The Greatest Evil is War.

Chris Hedges, welcome back to current affairs.

Thank you.

You've written, obviously, you spent decades as a war correspondent,

and you have written previous books on war,

war as a force that gives us meaning, for example.

But this book has a very, very fierce urgency to it.

And so I wonder if we could start with, you know, what you are trying to convey by putting out this message now.

Well, one, the kind of euphoria around the war in Ukraine is again disconnected from the reality of industrial violence and how horrific it is.

That's of course something I know well, having covered various conflicts.

Secondly, there's no endgame, there's no plan. Nobody knows where this is going. And having covered all sorts of

conflicts, I know that once you open that Pandora's box of war, you don't control these centrifugal

forces, which constantly up the ante. I mean, we see that in the conflict in Ukraine. So, for instance,

we gloat over the heavy Russian casualties, and Putin starts conscripting. We help provide intelligence for blowing up the bridge, and Putin reigns

missiles down on Ukrainian cities, prompting us to provide more sophisticated surface-to-air

missiles. Putin is now destroying the infrastructure in Ukraine, especially the electrical grid.

That's of course what we did in southern Iraq before on the eve of both of the incursions into Iraq and the first and the second Gulf War.

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