An Interview with Les Roberts

ePulse: Do you know anyone who has been killed in Iraq?

LR: Yeah.

ePulse: People you have worked with?

LR: Well, the first person that I started this study with, Riyadh Lafta’s best friend died in an auto accident in the middle of our email exchanges with him. There was an American gal named Marla [Ruzicka] and she worked with this group in Washington called CIVIC. They essentially tried to find families who had lost someone so that they could get reparations from the U.S. government and she was killed in Iraq.

ePulse: How should the U.S. proceed in Iraq?

LR: Apologetically. I think that, in spite of what others would say, our study shines no light on the question of what to do next. Our study is about what has been and we started out using too much force and being extremely cavalier about being respectful and inclusive of Iraqis in our efforts. And now it has evolved so that it is mostly Iraqis killing Iraqis.

I think that Iraq is like California. There is not one situation. There are many places right now where neighborhoods are ecstatic to have America soldiers there. There are many neighborhoods where the vast majority of people want the Americans killed. There isn’t one right answer

ePulse: What’s your impression of the media coverage of your reports?

LR: It’s been mixed. Most has been reasonable. The media needs to make things controversial. The New York Times wrote a mostly favorable article when this came out, but I know they called several people who were supportive that they didn’t quote. They shopped around until they found a statistician in Texas with no experience in this area who said he thought the methodology was inappropriate.

I think that there is a certain shallowness in the media today, by which essentially, out of incompetence or cowardice, they are afraid to take a stand or to sound like they are endorsing something. They need to find a contrary voice even if they have to call ten people to find it. In Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, he has a lovely vignette describing this. Over a window of time, every peer-reviewed article that they could find - I think it was up to around 800 articles - concluded that global warming was happening and from most of them that man wa causing it. Over half of newspaper articles in the same window of time cited contradictory evidence or opinions. That’s one thing that’s disheartening.

Another thing is that there are a couple of numbers essentially all based on the Iraqi government's figures that the press continues to quote. And if you believe these numbers, then New Orleans and Baltimore have been more violent over the last four years than has Iraq, as a rate. That’s just asinine. I’m sorry that because it is safe and easy, people quote the Iraqi government or quote the UN who is quoting the Iraqi government without any consideration of the absurdity of those estimates.