Bill Moyers: How Can the U.S. Be an Empire and a Democracy at the Same Time?

The following is a transcript from Bill Moyers' interview with journalist Mark Danner on his new book, Stripping Bare the Body, broadcast on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal.

Bill Moyers: President Obama has been holding one meeting after another trying to decide whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He would do well to hold off another discussion until he has sent everyone home for the weekend to read this new book with the provocative title, Stripping Bare the Body, and a cover that holds the eye like a magnet.

The subject is politics, violence, and war, and running through it is an old truth often forgot: you start a war knowing what you are fighting, but in the end you find yourself fighting for things you had never thought of.

In the meantime, you make decisions that inflict on people in far-off places suffering you never imagined.

That's but one stark truth you will find in these pages. The wars we fight, and the violence that feeds them, reveal like nothing else the hidden structures of power in Washington: the personal rivalries, the in-fighting and deal-making, the ambitions that decide our policies and often our fate. Stripping Bare the Body, you will discover, is a moral history of American power over the past quarter century.

Its author is Mark Danner, who throughout those 25 years reported from more mean places in the world than any journalist I know -- Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, and Washington, among them. Despite more than one close brush with death, he keeps going back. He writes for some of our leading magazines and has produced a series of acclaimed books, winning awards left and right as well as receiving the MacArthur Fellowship. All the while Mark Danner has been teaching journalism and foreign affairs at both the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College in upstate New York. He's been at this table before, and it's good to welcome you back. ... First, the title. Very provocative. Where did it come from?

Mark Danner: Well, it comes from a former Haitian president, who survived in office for about four months before being overthrown in a coup d'etat, and he said he told me and said in speeches subsequently that political violence is like Stripping Bare the Body, the better to place the stethoscope and hear what's going on beneath the skin. He meant that times of revolution, coup d'etat, war, any kind of social violence going on tends to form anyone moment of nudity, as he put it. In which you can actually see the forces at work within the society stripped bare.

It's like one of those models in biology class, where you see the body, you see all the organs beneath it, and suddenly you see who's oppressing whom, who has the money, who has the power, how that power is exerted. And that that is the time to seize a society and look at it, to X-ray it, try to understand what exactly is going on in its intimate recesses.

Moyers: That's what one finds in the book, that when you do these moments of nudity or nakedness reveal power structures that you don't see without that violence.

Danner: Exactly. Exactly. Whether it's in the Balkans or Haiti or certainly Iraq the struggle between the Shia and the Sunni, for example, which was complex, multifarious, sectarian, and intrasectarian. Haiti itself struggles over poverty and power. Places a place where we thought a democracy could take root immediately after the Duvalier dictatorship.

But where any democratic vote in which everyone you know, one man, one person has one vote was deeply threatening to the power structure that had existed there for 200 years. Same thing in the Balkans. You know, complex social interaction, complex ethnic makeup which, as so often the case with when it comes to American power, the assumptions of our leaders are that we can apply discrete specific power in a given spot and alter the social landscape. And solve political problems. And in all of these places, I mean, Haiti's a very good example. 7 million people. Very poor country that the United States has occupied twice in the last century. And was essentially unable to change things. Given all its great power, you know, a country of 300 million, the most powerful military power in the world, and trying to alter the dynamics of a country of 7 million. And we failed miserably. Not least because when you apply American power, and certainly when you send American troops, you start the forces of nationalism in reaction. And we've seen that in every place Americans have intervened, including Afghanistan.