Archive for October, 2007

Peter Liberman of Queens College at the City University in New York forms his own category in this sampling. Let us call him an Optimistic Realist. Meaning: he doesn’t expect the US can or will attack Iran. It’s his observation that the popular American feeling after the Iraq misadventure has turned decisively against the “collective psychosis” involved in attacking countries that had nothing to do with an attack on us. And he believes that Israel has never been in anything like nuclear danger from either Iraq or Iran, and that this wisdom is sinking in here, and there. Shouldn’t we be hearing more from the brave sages who pegged the dangers — even called the outcome — of the Iraq war remarkably, precisely right. This is a series of interviews with a slate of them. On my office wall I keep posted a quarter-page New York Times ad ad from September 26, 2002 — paid for by the signatories because the Times wouldn’t accept it as an op-ed — in which 33 scholars of international relations spelled out the reasons why “WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST.”

Steve Van Evera, in security studies at MIT, foresees a US air assault on Iran that could run to five days and 1000 sorties; and then a certainty that “Iranians will respond.” Why are we playing with this fire? Mainly, Van Evera argues, because the neo-conservative cult in the Bush-Cheney White House — “isolated… cloistered… the wrong crowd to run anything” — has not been broken. Shouldn’t we be hearing more from the brave sages who pegged the dangers — even called the outcome — of the Iraq war remarkably, precisely right. This is a series of interviews with a slate of them. On my office wall I keep posted a quarter-page New York Times ad ad from September 26, 2002 — paid for by the signatories because the Times wouldn’t accept it as an op-ed — in which 33 scholars of international relations spelled out the reasons why “WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST.”

Barry Posen, in security studies at MIT, sees a US military strike coming on Iran — executed and cheered on by the same people who misjudged all the consequences of our war on Iraq. I am trying to learn why this is happening, how the “party of war” insulated itself from correction, why we citizens, we media, and the chatter along the 2008 campaign trail all sound so helpless, so oblivious about the extended catastrophe. As always, Posen is ebullient, accessible, informed; but there sounds like a dark turn in his wider view. “It’s going to take an accumulation of costly mistakes to turn the elite in this country toward a policy of realism and a policy of restraint,” he said to me. Shouldn’t we be hearing more from the brave sages who pegged the dangers — even called the outcome — of the Iraq war remarkably, precisely right. This is a series of interviews with a slate of them. On my office wall I keep posted a quarter-page New York Times ad ad from September 26, 2002 — paid for by the signatories because the Times wouldn’t accept it as an op-ed — in which 33 scholars of international relations spelled out the reasons why “WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST.”

Michael Desch, then at the University of Kentucky, observed just as the US invasion of Iraq began, that the Ominous Precedent and in a sense the strategic model for the Bush warriors was Israel’s war on Lebanon, led by Ariel Sharon in 1982 and ended 18 years later by Ehud Barak’s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon. As chance would have it, Michael Desch now holds a Texas A and M professorship named for the Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in the school of public policy named for the President of the United States. He remains, in our conversation, unflinchingly critical of “the party of war” and the thinking that took us to Iraq. Shouldn’t we be hearing more from the brave sages who pegged the dangers — even called the outcome — of the Iraq war remarkably, precisely right. This is a series of interviews with a slate of them. On my office wall I keep posted a quarter-page New York Times ad ad from September 26, 2002 — paid for by the signatories because the Times wouldn’t accept it as an op-ed — in which 33 scholars of international relations spelled out the reasons why “WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST.”

Robert J. Art of Brandeis University calls himself “a realist with a heart.” Colleagues respect him as the textbook type of strategic analyst, often consulted by the Pentagon and the CIA and well connected in the network of academic think tanks. His most recent of many books casts a rueful, independent eye on the modern US record of Coercive Diplomacy, meaning the use of military force or threats to change behavior, from Haiti to North Korea. Shouldn’t we be hearing more from the brave sages who pegged the dangers — even called the outcome — of the Iraq war remarkably, precisely right. This is a series of interviews with a slate of them. On my office wall I keep posted a quarter-page New York Times ad ad from September 26, 2002 — paid for by the signatories because the Times wouldn’t accept it as an op-ed — in which 33 scholars of international relations spelled out the reasons why “WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST.”

Lincoln Chafee is a soft-spoken patrician with fire in his heart. His corridor chatter at the Watson Institute at Brown University (where we're both visiting fellows) is unfailingly cheerful and correct, virtually Senatorial, but often the last word has a spur in it. Chafee takes a hard line here that you haven't heard on the campaign trail or read in a newspaper editorial: that Senators who voted to authorize the Iraq war should be disqualified for the presidency. On grounds of judgment, I ask him, or honesty? "On grounds of ability," he almost roars. "These individuals rendered a grossly wrong decision. It was important. Post 9.11 we needed to keep our heads. We've attained this pinnacle of worldwide, global supremacy. How are we going to use it? And the first thing we do is use it irresponsibly. It's a disqualifier for me." Lincoln Chafee, in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 9, 2007 at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University

In the second part of our chat former Senator Lincoln Chafee makes the Iraq war vote "totally disqualifying" for higher office. It's a ban on all the Senators running except Barack Obama, an anti-war voice who hadn't reached the Senate in 2002. The premise that Saddam Hussein, contained by arms inspectors and no-fly zones, was a threat beyond his borders "was so grossly hollow," Chafee remembers from his own researches. "Even the Kuwaitis, who'd been invaded by Saddam, were telling us: don't do it." It's Chafee's guess that some unpredictable reckoning of responsibility for the war is still to come; that the striking feature of the early race for '08 is the quiet unhappiness with the choices so far. "Americans would rather have a vigorous exchange," he says. "We need a good tilt."

The New York Times' pithy, punchy jazz critic, Ben Ratliff has written not fan stuff or a biography but a catalog of ways to think about Coltrane: an athlete of improvisation who pushed forward through "an atmosphere of almost violent incomprehension." Coltrane was a main builder of the jazz tradition "of not sounding like anybody else," or like himself six months before. He had as many artistic periods as Picasso, starting with bebop, ballads and blues; but Coltrane's development fit into just 12 essential years, not Picasso's nearly 80. How did it feel that John Coltrane was "back," I asked the drummer Roy Haynes a dozen years ago, when Impulse reissued his classics and Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker solemnized a Coltrane revival. "I didn't know he ever left!" Roy shot back -- all we needed to know, delivered with Haynesian snap, crackle and pop. In this 40th anniversary autumn after his death, at 40, what lives with Coltrane and his music is the idea of love's forgiveness, of redemption through suffering, and the excruciating sort of beauty that Dostoevsky thought "will save the world."

Amiri Baraka (then: Leroi Jones) chanced to live over the Five Spot in Manhattan in the summer of 1957 when Coltrane and Thelonius Monk had a five-month learning-by-doing gig on the Bowery. Willem de Kooning and Jack Kerouac were also among the listeners and drinkers at the Five Spot. Baraka says he missed barely a session of the music that culminated in the Monk-Coltrane Carnegie Hall concert in November, 1957 -- a Blue Note best-seller only after the Library of Congress unearthed the tapes in 2005. This was early, lyrical Coltrane, at the dawn of the civil-rights era -- "the rebellion" in Baraka's phrasing, then and now -- for which Coltrane became a sort of soundtrack. How did it feel that John Coltrane was "back," I asked the drummer Roy Haynes a dozen years ago, when Impulse reissued his classics and Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker solemnized a Coltrane revival. "I didn't know he ever left!" Roy shot back -- all we needed to know, delivered with Haynesian snap, crackle and pop. In this 40th anniversary autumn after his death, at 40, what lives with Coltrane and his music is the idea of love's forgiveness, of redemption through suffering, and the excruciating sort of beauty that Dostoevsky thought "will save the world."