Howard Zinn is one of America’s most well-known and influential intellectuals. A professor emeritus at Boston University, Zinn has been a passionate and articulate dissident, speaking out against the injustices of war, racism and corporate rule. An author and playwright, Zinn has published countless critical essays and books, including the bestselling A People’s History of the United States.

RW: During the first Iraq war you wrote that “Bush [Sr.] did talk about oil. Then hegot the notion that this is embarrassing. People will not die for oil. They willdie for words; democracy, liberation, freedom…” To what degree does this applyto this war and this president?

HZ: It applies to this president as much as it did to Bush Sr., because the whole Bush family has been involved with the oil industry for a very long time. Aside from that, it’s not just the Bush family. It’s that American foreign policy has been based on the control of mid-east oil ever since the end of World War II. Every administration, Democrat or Republican, since World War II has been concerned with the control of mid-east oil.

RW: Do you agree with the Bush administration’s argument that this is a war for freedom?

HZ: No. Historically, every war that we have fought has been a war for “our freedom” or “somebody’s freedom.” Most of the time this has turned out not to be true. The war in Vietnam was considered a war for freedom and it certainly wasn’t. Most of our foreign policy and military interventions have not been on behalf of free societies but on behalf of dictatorships. In fact, we have overthrown governments which were free, which had freely elected leaders like Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973. We have overthrown democratically elected governments and set up dictatorships. The idea that we are fighting in Iraq for freedom just does not square with history and doesn’t square with what we are doing in Iraq.

It’s obvious that the Iraqi people want us out. If we stood for freedom, they would not want us out. What we stand for is a military occupation of brutality. Breaking into their homes, dragging people out. The American military is holding 15, 000 Iraqis in detention without trial. They’re very often released six months later without even being told what the charges were that were against them, if there were charges against them.

So we have not brought freedom to Iraq, we have not brought security to Iraq, we have not brought democracy and our aims in Iraq are not democracy or liberty, our aims in Iraq are very crass. They are the aims of imperial powers throughout modern times. The aims are the control of their governments, control of their resources, and in this case it’s the control of oil.

There are political reasons for going to war and we have also seen this historically. John F. Kennedy was making the decision as to whether or not to withdraw troops from Vietnam on the basis of what would happen in the 1964 presidential election.

RW: Over the past year people across the world have protested the occupation ofIraq in record numbers. How important have these citizen protests been?

HZ: Well, the protests around the world obviously did not stop the Bush administration from going to war. On February 15 of last year, which was shortly before the United States went to war, 10-15 million people around the world protested on a single day against the idea of a war in Iraq. That did not stop the Bush administration. However, I wouldn’t say that it did not have an effect. It had an effect, I think, on encouraging people around the world to continue to struggle against war. It had an effect, most recently, on the election in Spain, where the people in Spain, 90 per cent of whom had opposed the war and who certainly were in tune with that 10-15 million people last February 15 voted out of office a Prime Minister who supported a war.

RW: Saddam Hussein has been removed but that hasn’t stopped the Iraqi resistance. What happens now?

HW: Things are going to get worse so long as the American occupation exists. American political leaders, Democrats as well as Republicans, [John] Kerry as well as Bush, are saying we must stay in Iraq, we must stay the course, we must be resolute and even send more troops. This is the same disastrous advice that was given in Vietnam in the early years of the war when it became apparent that this was not going to be an easy victory. There was huge Vietnamese resistance to us and when some people called for withdrawal from Vietnam the political leaders said no, we cannot cut and run and the result was that we stayed in Vietnam and huge numbers of people lost their lives, and in the end we had to cut and run. In the end we are going to have to get out of Iraq. If not sooner, then later. Iraq does not belong to us.

RW: You have written a great deal about the press and the role that it hasplayed in gaining support for this war and past wars. How can citizens work to regain a free press?

HZ:Even when the press is criticizing the administration it is criticizing it in a very superficial way. It is not getting down to fundamentals; it is criticizing the administration the way that John Kerry is criticizing the administration. [It’s] saying “well it’s just waging a war the wrong way,” instead of saying we should not be waging war at all. Or to say “we need to fight terrorism in a different way, maybe not in Iraq, maybe somewhere else.” It’s not discussing the more fundamental question and that is can you fight terrorism by military action? Terrorism cannot be brought to an end until you get rid of [the] underlying grievances that people have, that huge numbers of people have.

RW: You talked about the “war on terrorism.” The U.S. has been fighting this so-called war now for nearly three years and the impact is being felt everywhere. For example, in Canada we are seeing a crackdown on civil liberties and on immigrants. Is there a precedent for such an open-ended war and such an attack on citizen’s rights and what can be done?

HZ: A crackdown on civil liberties, [is there] a precedent? Of course. Every time there is a foreign policy crisis there is a crackdown on civil liberties. Starting with 1798 and the Alien Sedition Act where people were put in prison for criticizing the government. During the Civil War, President Lincoln violated the constitution and did away with the right of habeas corpus and put people in jail merely on suspicion — the kind of things that are happening now under the Patriot Act.

In World War I there were very gross violations of civil liberties. About a thousand people were put in jail simply for criticizing the American entrance into the war. Thousands of people were deported from the United States. Foreign-born people who were not citizens were deported without trial, without hearings and so we’ve seen again and again that whenever there is a foreign policy crisis there is a violation of civil liberties. The Cold War brought McCarthyism, it brought loyalty oaths, it brought the FBI putting seven million people on its various lists.

So this is nothing new, except that this may be one of the worst civil liberties situations we’ve had in a long time because of the Patriot Act which enables the Attorney General and the government to simply pick up people, American citizens, and charge them on suspicion with being connected with terrorism and keep them without hearings, without access to lawyers, without a trial — methods that are gross violations of constitutional rights. That’s the kind of thing that happens in a totalitarian state. It shouldn’t happen in a democracy.