People I know count on Paul Krugman in The Times to give us all the bad news we can believe in. But Kevin Phillips (a Nixon-brain turned populist grand historian) not only trumps Krugman in the Cassandra Stakes, he also explains why Krugman and media in general have gone soft and squishy (”now that the financial clouds have lifted a bit”) on the global apocalypse coming in the convergence of our housing collapse, the explosion of public and private debt, the fall of the dollar, the rise of (a) China and (b) $125 oil, and the consolidation of finance (the debt business) as our leading industry. Phillips notes that the best of big media, meaning the Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, hate to be out front with bad news. And Krugman, the best of the best, is too heavily invested in the Clinton Democrats’ myth of a renewable once-and-future politics of prosperity — and too polite to dwell, for example, on the financialization of the Clinton campaign base. Nobody I know tells the story of catastrophe with higher style and a broader sweep of knowledge than Kevin Phillips — in his new book, Bad Money and in conversation here:

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Kevin Phillips here (36 minutes, 16 MB MP3)

There’s a growing sense that the imperial era of the United States is over almost before it started. I think we’re seeing the weakness of the United States that has allowed the financial sector to take over the private economy… 20 to 21 percent of GDP is now finance, pushing manufacturing way down. I think what you’ll see happen to the US is… a degree of implosion that will involve everything from too much debt, collapsing home prices, rising oil prices and the declining dollar. It doesn’t spell the end of the United States, but it spells the end of the United States as the total big cheese in the world. We’re going to lose some of the yardsticks that everybody enjoyed for a long time…

We used to be leading world creditor nation, lead world manufacturer, leading world producer of oil; we’re now leading the world’s leading debtor, the largest importer of manufactures in the world, and we’re the worlds largest oil importer. It’s a disastrous transformation. The only part of the economy that’s really profited is the financial sector because an awful lot of the transition is towards more debt,
more credit, more living on things you can’t afford, more keeping up pretenses, and more ambition around the world and less to back it up. And the consummation of this in many ways has been the George W Bush administration…

They invade Iraq, partly in order to get Iraq’s oil which hasn’t been tapped too much historically, and they thought they might be able to get 6 or 7 million barrels a day, and they could use that to bust open OPEC, and that would bring the price down — that was their ambition. And the futures market showed briefly in 2003, that there was an expectation that oil would come down to $15-18 dollars a barrel. At the time it was $20-25 — and now its $120-125. The notion that this imbecility was orchestrated, totally contrary to what they wanted, by two people who came from the oil industry — we could have done better with two bums or two Good Humor men, than these two men from the oil industry who knew nothing about the forces they were unleashing…

There was the ‘neutron loan’ - it kills the people but leaves the housing standing. The real thing they did that made this thing gain legs, is that no matter how crummy the loans were, most were securitized…. It’s mindboggling — If these people were in the manufacturing business, production of these things would have been enjoined because they were unsafe. You have consumer safety product commissions and things like that — you don’t have a financial products safety commission, which we sure as hell should have.

Kevin Phillips, in conversation with Chris Lydon on Open Source, May 14, 2008

Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure is a shocking, depressing work of art that might tell you almost nothing you didn’t know in your bones: that the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib were a perfect kernel of the war on Iraq. See the movie anyway, for confirmation or as penance. It is a blood sample of a gross policy of humiliation, emasculation, sophisticated mental cruelty and pitiless domination in the Arab Middle East. Errol Morris makes no bones about it. He says: we are looking at icons of American foreign policy.

Click to listen to Chris’s classroom conversation with Errol Morris (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3)

One of the most infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib is a photograph of Lynndie England: 20 years old at the time; 5 feet tall, I believe under 100 pounds, holding what in effect is a tie-down strap [on] a prisoner named ‘Gus’, who is naked on the ground. The photo is taken by Lynndie England’s then boyfriend Chuck Graner. Well, the photograph of course has fascinated me for many, many reasons. Here would be the central reason. I believe the picture is a graphic representation of American foreign policy, pure and simple.

Errol Morris: “the word is denial”

Pictures become iconic for some reason. They answer a certain idea we have. It’s not just simply by happenstance. Oddly enough I know that that method of removing Gus from his cell had been approved by the medical authorities at Abu Ghraib. There was nothing “illegal” about what was happening. But in fact the photograph is absolutely appalling, because part of our foreign policy — and make no mistake about this — was this idea that American women should be used to humiliate Iraqi men, without a thought of course that this might be degrading to the American women as well. It’s not something that was devised by a handful of MPs on one tier at Abu Ghraib. It was part of our foreign policy.

And one of the things I find most appalling is that the photographs were used to blame a handful of MPs, really letting everybody else off the hook, as though nobody else was involved and this was just a few guys on this one tier. By the way Abu Ghraib was not one one tier or two tiers. It was a city. There were close to 10,000 people in there — a vast concentration camp in the middle of the Sunni Triangle. The pictures are misleading in that respect as well. They made you think you were dealing with something much, much smaller and more confined than the reality of what was there.

Filmmaker Errol Morris, talking about Standard Operating Procedure at the Watson Institute at Brown, May 7, 2008.

A lot of pretty forgettable questions buzz around Standard Operating Procedure. There are Errol’s own philosophical distractions: is it true that “seeing is believing”? Or must we commit ourselves to “believing” before we can “see” the truth of these pictures. Do photographs in fact encourage us not to look (or think) further? Then there are the critical nit-picks: can we credit the witnesses that Errol Morris paid to be interviewed? Do some visualizations and reenactments belong in the picture?

There’s a darker set of political questions, nested like those Russian dolls, around many levels of cowardice, scapegoating and denial of responsibility for Abu Ghraib. Only a few lost souls (and no civilians) went on trial for the wholesale dirty-work. The officer class and the political chiefs excused themselves. The voters in 2004 seemed to absolve George Bush in reelecting him. And by now moviegoers (in a stampede to get behind the armor of Marvel Comics’ Iron Man) have made it clear that they don’t much want to see S.O.P. or any other movie about the war in Iraq. See Errol Morris’ movie anyway, and take your kids. It’s sickening, but your kids should know what was done in our name — and what their kids, too, will pay for those world-famous pictures.

Up with poets. Send us your favorites, please. We begin a new series of poetry conversations with the well-known American formalist, Mary Jo Salter, who teaches at Mount Holyoke and Johns Hopkins and co-edits The Norton Anthology of Poetry.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mary Jo Salter (34 minutes, 16 mb mp3)

In the poem below, we are standing in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The poet is spinning out a tribute to Nicolael Maes, a student of Rembrandt’s, and his painting of a girl with an apple-round, red-ribboned head. The girl is paring an apple, and dangling a fragile coil of apple skin as she goes. The poet’s coil is plain in the layout and the links of rhyme — “pun… bun” in the heart of the first stanza, “unbroken… spoken” at the start and finish of the last. So this is a formal paean to craft — in the peeler, the painter, the poet, and in poetry itself: “this spiral of making while unmaking while the world goes round.”

    Young Girl Peeling Apples
         (Nicholaes Maes)

          It’s all
      an elaborate pun:
the red peel of ribbon
      twisted tightly around the bun
          at the crown of her apple-

          round head;
the ribbon coming loose in the real
apple-peel she allows to dangle
      from her lifted hand; the table
       on which a basket of red

          apples
      waits to be turned into more
white-fleshed apples in a water-
      filled pail on the floor;
       her apron that fills and falls

          empty,
      a lapful of apples piling on
like the apron itself, the napkin,
      the hem of her skirts — each a skin
         layered over her heart, just as he

          who has
      painted her at her knife
paints the brush that puts life
      in her, apple of his eye: if
         there’s anything on earth but this

          unbroken
      concentration, this spiral
of making while unmaking while
      the world goes round, neither the girl
         nor he has yet looked up, or spoken.

from A Phone Call to the Future, New and Collected Poems by Mary Jo Salter, Knopf, 2008, page 100.

In our conversation, I volunteer that Ms. Salter, a student of Elizabeth Bishop and a famous teacher in real life, has given us a modern American manual of lessons — about form, beauty, womanhood, wifehood, artistic and family life. She can sound like our daughter and our mother, both. There are just a few “public” poems here — about paying for a war in Iraq that shocks us into silence; about feeling like a fossil in a digital age. But most of her interests are inward, even domestic. She writes in “Au Pair,” a poem on a Swiss girl’s encounter with small-town America: “she had no boyfriend yet, but she was hoping.” There, and in “Lullaby for a Daughter,” she can encompass the lifetime of womanhood in a few lines:

Someday, when the sands of time
Invert, may you find perfect rest
as a newborn nurses from
the hourglass of your breast.

We are speaking here about tradition and a contemporary poet’s reality — and about what may be a renewed appeal of formal poetry. With all the poets we engage, we want to hear also about the place of new poetry in the wider American conversation. Nominations, please!

The writer Etgar Keret was our Open Source witness in Israel two years ago to a general (local, global, existential) disbelief and alienation from the war on Lebanon. And now we have the pleasure of meeting him in the flesh on a campus visit to Brown.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Etgar keret here (24 minutes, 11 MB MP3)

Edgar Keret’s bizarre, violent, popular short stories (in a collection The Girl on the Fridge) are cited as a register of Israel’s consciousness, post-Intifada and post-peace process. Crowbar beatings, sledge-hammer murders and other grotesque happenings abound in these fictions. In one, a kids’ party magician reaches into the hat and pulls out, first, a rabbit’s bleeding severed head and, later, a dead baby. He concludes: “It’s as if someone was trying to tell me this is no time to be a rabbit, or a baby. Or a magician.”

Keret’s Israeli characters are caught in states of mind and spirit between love and suicide, between boredom and brutal anger. As in this story, “Asthma Attack,” reproduced here in full, the writer keeps fighting through the frenzy, for words:

When you have an asthma attack, you can’t breathe. When you can’t breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn’t much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones — those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asmatic says “I love you,” and when an asthmatic says “I love you madly,” there’s a difference. The difference of a word. A word’s a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.

Etgar Keret, “Asthma Attack,” in The Girl on the Fridge, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008.

In our conversation, Etgar Keret and I were both trying (and failing!) to remember the source of the notion that art, including fiction, is the layer of the human record (unlike the monuments of warfare and politics) that does not lie.

CL: Imagine a hundred years from now people are reading this red-hot popular Israeli writer from 2008, Etgar Keret, for the truth about Israel. What would they learn?

Etgar Keret: Well, I think that they would learn that people in Israel know a little bit less than what they pretend to know; that they’re a little bit bit less confident than they want their neighbor to think; that there’s a very strong ambiguity and confusion among the Israeli people — the same ambiguity and confusion that all human beings tend to share.

CL: Can you explain how you became the rage among young Israelis in the last few years? Not the familiar image of the Israeli writer, you’re anti-epic and anti-macho, a cuddly, eccentric vegetarian who writes about people who are beset with perplexity and pain and fearful violence and, as you say, confusion.

EK: Well, I think that growing up In Israel, I think the one thing that’s not allowed is to be confused. Being surrounded by so many enemies who want to attack us, the last thing you want to do is to raise more questions, or to be more confused and uncertain. But at some stage you realize it’s actually the fact that you live in such an unsafe situation that makes all those questions that you are supposed to postpone more urgent. Because if you know you are going to die for something you want to know what you are going to die for. You don’t want to postpone it for later.

CL: Are these stories written from the perspective of a writer who’s worrying what he’s going to die for?

EK: Well, yeah… It’s not to die for, or live for. There is something about life, especially when you come from Israel, in a region where everything is so extreme, there’s something very overwhelming about life, you know. And it leaves you with your mouth open, with your jaw falling down, you know. And this is the situation I wanted to write about. Because there is something about Israelis that whenever you speak to people they give you this feeling that they are certain about all those answers. And they have all those answers, but those answers don’t seem to be working all around us.

So if there’s anything I want to say about this reality, it is maybe: take some sort of Socratic position and just say that we may know less about what’s right, and what we are feeling at a certain moment and what should be done. I’m saying I feel it’s important to admit our limitations and our confusion just so we can start finding the real answers, and it’s much better than kind of doing that than settling for some fake answers that seem to be going around in circulation for the last 60 years.

Etgar Keret, in conversation with Chris Lydon, May 1, 2008.

We are hanging out at the piano here with the composer and Renaissance man David Amram, who has hung with the best — starting with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Jack Kerouac in the 1950’s. Each of those associates, as David observes in this conversation, was an encyclopedia of music in himself. From them he absorbed an ideal he is still practicing: not multi-cultural balancing or eclectic blending but “lovingly trying to learn some of the fundamentals about some of the most beautiful things that touch your heart.” Charlie Parker introduced him to the pentatonic music of Frederick Delius. Dizzy transmitted his taste for Bartok and Stravinsky. Kerouac, David testifies, could improvise well at the piano and had, above all, “a phenomenal ear.” Musicians “were always glad to see him, because we knew that meant at least one person would be listening.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Amram (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

David Amram is the quiet, almost anonymous listener in many photos with cultural icons — the guy next to Charles Mingus, or Leonard Bernstein, or Machito. David’s the one who didn’t burn out or go away, or change his style much. He is, not least, a fair embodiment of an “open source” ideal — an entirely distinctive voice who’s hard to imagine apart from the conversation that educated and produced him. At Brown, we have been listening to his work for ten days now. His movie scores (The Manchurian Candidate) and his chamber pieces can make a connection with Charles Ives or Dvorak or Alex North, with jazz and Jewish roots music. But it always sounds like David. We were blessed to get him at the keyboard. In an age of copyright madness, he reminds me that music is not something we human beings have, much less own. Music is something people do.

Douglas Blackmon of the Wall Street Journal has written a newsman’s history book with staggering implications about racial reality in America today.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Douglas Blackmon here (53 minutes, 24 MB MP3)

The heart of the story is that slavery in the American South ended not with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the end of the Civil War, but at the onset of World War 2. That is: state-sanctioned brutal and abusive bondage ended less than 70 years ago, well within the living memory of millions of Americans, black and white. The gap between “slave time” and now is not five or six generations, but one or two at most.

The sidewalks of Atlanta today were paved in the 20th Century with millions of bricks made by “slaves by another name” — by black men the city had seized and leased over to the ex-Mayor James English’s Chattahoochee Brick Company. Some of Atlanta’s finest families were in on neo-slavery, in Blackmon’s telling — men like Joel Hurt of Atlanta’s Trust Company. No guard could ever “do enough whipping for Mr. Hurt,” it was said. “He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing.”

Slavery by Another Name is Doug Blackmon’s complete revision of the Jim Crow story, with an astonishing breadth and depth of documentation and none of the old sugar-coating or vagueness around phrases like peonage and sharecropping. “Neo-slavery” was the hard-core of a public-private system that undid the freedoms that came with Reconstruction for most of thirty years after the Civil War, and then enforced a new reign of terror over all African-Americans in the South.

What began to happen at the end of the 19th Century was the crushing new phenomenon in which whites in the North gave up on the process and made the decision that whites in the South were going to be allowed to do whatever they wished. The Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that sanctified segregation in 1896 gave a legal basis for all this. And by 1900 all of the Southern states had passed an array of laws designed to make it impossible for a black man to avoid being in violation of some ridiculous statute at all times.

Being black became the crime, and so any black man who could not prove that he had a job at a given time, any black man who sought to change employers, any black man who chose to sell the produce of his farm after dark, rather than selling to the white man nearest him… An endless number of statutes were passed which made it nearly impossible to avoid prosecution. These laws were designed to finish off the process of disenfranchising all black Americans in the South; and they effectively did it by creating this legal jeopardy that all African Americans had to live with.

The hammer that hung over their heads was the idea that if you get convicted of any of these meaningless crimes, you’ll end up in the horrifying circumstances of a slave mine or some other forced labor camp… There were endless beatings. In a relatively small work camp where you had 75 or 80 forced laborers, there might well be three to four hundred floggings in a given month. The men in the mines were beaten in the mornings if they failed to remove eight tons of coal the day before; and they were beaten at the end of the day if they failed to remove eight tons of coal that day. They were starved, and they were deprived of health care. The general attitude of the people who controlled these laborers was: as long as I’m able to keep them for a year or two years, I’ll get back my investment in the cost of acquiring them. If they die I can cheaply find another…

Douglas Blackmon in conversation with Chris Lydon about Slavery by Another Name, April 21, 2008

Slavery by Another Name is hard reading that ought to be required. At a moment of reckoning around race in our country, Doug Blackmon, a studious child of the Mississippi Delta, has offered a monumental contribution to an agonizing re-learning of who we all are.

Today’s visiting fireman at the Watson Institute is under more pressure than most.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Christopher Hill (16 minutes, 7 mb mp3)

Our man in East Asia, Christopher R. Hill, negotiating North Korea’s nuclear disarmament, is evidently having a tougher time with the Bush principals in Washington than with the Pyongyang end of the wobbly old “axis of evil.” David Sanger in the New York Times yesterday wrote that Bush administration support has “wavered” for the Hill-crafted deal that would take North Korea off the state terrorism hit list in return for a final dismantling of its now abandoned nuclear program. In Washington, Sanger writes, it is Hill, the asssistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, who is feeling abandoned by President Bush and Secretary of State Rice — and beset by the opposition of Vice President Cheney and former UN Ambassador John Bolton, on the lookout for “appeasement.” It was Cheney, by implication, who has cleared for publication what sounds like awkward video evidence that North Korean technicians were working around the Syrian nuclear plant that Israel blew up last September.

There’s no abandonment, no appeasement in the conversation here. But there’s a short course on diplomatic chess in three dimensions — between Middle and Far East, between Rice and Cheney for the president’s ear, between the rise of China as the “second agent of development” in Asia and the forseeable end of a century of American hegemony in the Pacific Rim.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Nicholson Baker (53 minutes, 25 mb mp3)

A wing commander in the [British] Royal Air Force [in Iraq], J. A. Chamier, published his views on how best to deal with tribal rebellions.

The commanding officer must choose the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe, said Chamier, and attack it with all available aircraft. “The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle,” Chamier wrote. “This sounds brutal, I know, but it must be made brutal to start with. The threat alone in the future will prove efficacious if the lesson is once properly learnt.” It was 1921.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 8.

Frederick Birchall, Berlin correspondent for The New York Times, published an article about Germany’s preparations for war. It was October 8, 1933.

Birchell quoted from a recent book by Ewald Banse, a teacher at the Technical High School in Brunswick, Germany. The book was called Wehrwissenschaft — “Military Science.” War was no longer a matter of marches and medals, Banse observed: “It is gas and plague. It is tank and aircraft horror. It is baseness and falsehood. It is hunger and poverty.” And because war is so horrible, Banse said, it must be incorporated into the school curriculum and taught as a new and comprehensive science: “The methods and aims of the new science are to create an unshakable belief in the high ethical value of war and to produce in the individual the psychological readiness for sacrifice in the cause of nation and state.”

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 44.

Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that England was officially at war with Germany… It was September 3, 1939.

Churchill’s mood, as he listened, wasn’t sad at all. He felt, he wrote later, a sense of uplifted serenity and a detachment from human affairs. “The glory of Old England, peace-loving and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation,” he said.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 138.

Dorothy Day, the editor of the Catholic Worker, wrote an editorial called “Our Stand.” “As in the Ethiopian war, the Spanish war, the Japanese and Chinese war, the Russian-Finnish war — so in the present war we stand unalterably opposed to the use of war as a means of saving ‘Christianity,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘democracy.’” She urged a nonviolent opposition to injustice and servitude: She called it the Folly of the Cross.

“We are bidden to love God and to love one another,” she wrote. “It is the whole law, it is all of life. Nothing else matters.” It was June 1940.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 192.

“This ordeal by fire has, in a certain sense, even exhilarated the manhood and the womanhood of Britain,” [Churchill] said [in a radio speech, seven months into the German Blitz.] It had lifted them above material facts “into that joyous serenity we think belongs to a better world than this.”

“There are less than seventy million malignant Huns — some of whom are curable and others killable,” Churchill said. The population of the British empire and the United States together amounded to some two hundred million. The Allies had more people and made more steel, he said. The Allies would win. It was April 27, 1941.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 192.

Some people want to make an issue of method and form around Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, subtitled The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. But the real problem is, of course, his message. In an afterword on almost 500 pages of vignettes, Nick Baker offers his own judgment that the pacifists and other resisters had the right strategic answer to the war-madness of the 20th Century — people like Gandhi, the Quakers, ex-President Herbert Hoover who wanted to break the British food blockade on starving Europe in October, 1941 (”Can you point to one benefit that has been gained from this holocaust?” Hoover asked in a radio speech) and the diarist Howard Schoenfeld, who went to prison in Danbury, CT for standing against the draft and “against war, which I believe to be the greatest evil known to man.”

Human Smoke reads like a wall of Post-It notes — pointilistic dots on a 40-year canvas — which Louis Menand in the New Yorker, for example, says should not be confused with responsible history. I felt it, on the contrary, as a very familiar, virtually cinematic, quick-cutting, frame-shifting, angular and episodic style of story telling. It’s not so unlike the method of Ken Burns’ PBS epic on The War, which took its perspective from GI letters home and family memories today in just four American cities, like Waterbury, Connecticut and Mobile, Alabama.

The difference is that the Burns TV film summoned up and revarnished a lot of old feelings. Baker tears into every bit of received sentiment about the war, and about its heroes — Churchill most especially — in the book and our conversation:

He’s fascinating. He’s brilliant. He had a mind well stocked with poetry… So one doesn’t want to dismantle Churchill in the sense of saying he was not a great man. He has hugeness of personality, but he was a man of many phases… In this period that I’m looking at him, he was really a maniac. He was absolutely intent on widening the war and on getting as many people — his own citizens and other countries — involved as possible. I don’t think I’m being unfair to him. It’s just that if you quote him properly you realize he was just hell bent on this confrontation. As the prime minister of Australia [Robert Menzies] said on first meeting Churchill: “This man is a great hater.” It was so fascinating to watch Menzies’ visit. He first reaction was: “humorless… a great hater.” A few nights later: “he’s a great hater, but he does know an awful lot.” And then, late night, 2:30 or 3 in the morning, he’s up again listening to war stories from Churchill, and he writes, “the man has greatness.” Finally, he’s saying, “the Hun must be taught through his hide!” Menzies is now speaking the language of Churchill. So obviously this man Churchill has an incredible power over other human beings.

Nicholson Baker, in conversation with Chris Lydon, April 16, 2008

Human Smoke is a departure for Nicholson Baker, the high-stylist of The Mezzanine and of Vox, the phone-sex novel that Monica Lewinsky gave to Bill Clinton. He says, “I’ve always liked writing about the things that I hope make life worth living — the reflections on the edge of moving objects, or the little theories you develop when you shoelace breaks… So I tried to use my same approach, my method, in writing about probably the worst 5-year period in human history.”

And yes, Iraq was at the root of it all. Baker conceived the project, he says, “in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the Second World War was repeatedly invoked as the one necessary war. I’ve never really understood the Second World War. It never made sense to me that we had to demolish cities in order to bring a regime down, but I always chalked it up to my own ignorance of history. But if this war is going to be invoked over and over again, then let’s actually look at it. How does it begin? What happened in what order?” And more pointedly: whence came the disastrous doctrines of exemplary war, strategic starvation, bombing and indiscriminate abuse of civilians, that persist in our own long war on Iraq? Baker’s format invites you to put Human Smoke down, annotate it, and keep picking it up. I for one cannot get its arguments out of my head.

We are asking the bravest reportorial hand on the ground in Iraq, Patrick Cockburn of The Independent from London, to make a coherent picture of the news of the war — starting with the flight of under-equipped and under-committed Iraqi Army units from their assigned war on Muqtada Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army… and, among other things, the assassination of Muqtada’s brother-in-law in Najaf and, of course, General David Petraeus’s plea in Congress for an extension of the American “surge.” Cockburn’s strongest theme is that the Bush team in Baghdad is in fact fomenting a civil war within the Shia majority — a war that the government troops don’t want to fight and cannot possibly win against Muqtada Al-Sadr’s militias in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Patrick Cockburn (40 minutes, 18 mb mp3)

Patrick Cockburn:The US forces in Iraq are beginning a new war against a new enemy in Iraq. For five years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the US was confronting (fighting) the Sunni Arab community — about 20 percent of Iraqis, or 5 to 6 million people. Now in the last few months it’s confronting a large part of the Shia community — those that are loyal to Muqtada Al-Sadr, his Sadrist movement and the Mahdi Army, which really represent the Shia poor. But, you know, one Iraqi official who’s not sympathetic to Muqtada was saying to me the other day that the Shia are a majority of Iraqis and Muqtada’s followers are a majority of the Shia. So this is probably 30 to 40 percent of the whole population. This is a massive new confrontation that the US is undertaking in Iraq.

CL: And why is the US undertaking it?

Patrick Cockburn: I think it’s a misjudgment. It think that rather as in 2003 they thought it would be easy to confront the Sunni — I remember going to endless press conferences in Baghdad where we used to have Jerry Bremer, the US viceroy, and various American generals all saying we were fighting the remnant of the old regime of Saddam Hussein. It was obviously untrue but they may well have believed it. This time around there seems to be the idea that if we eliminate Muqtada things will come right. But this won’t happen, because Muqtada’s supporters are too well integrated into Iraqi society. There are too many of them. They’re too committed. They’re not going to give up. This isn’t just a political party. It’s a religious movement.

Patrick Cockburn, Author of Muqtada

(Scribners, 2008), in conversation with Open Source, April 2008

Patrick Cockburn: The most convincing evidence that the surge isn’t working, in terms of restoring security to Baghdad and central Iraq, is that we have 3.2-million Iraqi refugees — that’s about one in nine Iraqis — who’ve fled to Jordan or Syria or within Iraq. Living in appalling conditions, money running out, poor health. I’ve been to refugee camps where there’s no fresh water, where cholera is beginning. And they don’t go home! These are the best judges of what the real security situation is in Iraq — not Senator McCain, not me. But these people who if they felt they could go back to their homes in some security, if they and their children could be safe, they’d do it tomorrow. But they’re not because they know it’s not true; they know it’s as dangerous as it ever was. And that’s really what everybody should remember when they’re asked: how is the surge doing, or for an optimistic moment they think things are getting better in Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn, Iraq correspondent of the London Independent, in conversation with Open Source, April 2008

Fernando Henrique Cardoso , the lively, worldly-wise ex-president of Brazil — “a genuine philosopher-king” in the estimate of Foreign Affairs magazine –invites you to a thought exercise. Suppose the world is in a “post-Napoleonic” moment, in need of a new “world order” (or “A World Restored,” as the young historian Henry Kissinger put it in his first book, in 1957).

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Fernando Henrique Cardoso (23 minutes, 10 mb mp3)

The “Waterloo” that precipitates the crisis of our order, in Cardoso’s outline, is not only the United States’ debacle in Iraq but includes also the fall of the Berlin Wall, “plus globalization, plus the transformational technologies, plus the emergence of China as one of the big powers.” The Napoleon that has collapsed in our time is not only George W. Bush but the very idea of a uni-polar hyperpower, the utter frustration of the regime-change fantasy of democracy imposed around the world by American missiles and bombers. “Who could envision,” Cardoso asks, “that the outcome of the end of bi-polarity would not be the Pax Americana but, rather, the end of the possibility for any Global Empire?”

Cardoso is speaking conversationally here about “a new global pact” to bring the problems of the world into some constructive alignment with the realities of power in a wised-up context where “it is no longer possible to have one hegemon, or to impose a new hierarchical order.” His thinking surely resonates with the impatient ambition of Parag Khanna’s “Second World,” most especially of Brazil, fifth-most populous nation in the world and woefully underrepresented at the table of power.

We have to remold the basic institutions [the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF] in the direction of more democracy, extented participation, more powerful institutions to deal with poverty…

Look at the G-8. China is not there. Brazil is not there. India is not there. South Africa is not there. The Arabic world is not there. What kind of association is that? What do the G-8 represent? They have not enough strength even to give rules or set directions for the world, because they are not representative of anything…

Look at the aspect of military power… The US is a superpower, but America has no more capacity to deal with another problem, if it exists in the world. Not maybe because of a lack of crazy ideas inside the White House. But even if the White House has the crazy idea, it would be another disaster because America has no more capacity to open up a new front. There is no one country capable of taking care of the world. In that sense it is necessary to have a new deal…

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in conversation with Chris Lydon for Open Source at the Watson Institute, Brown University, April 2008

Fernando Henrique Cardoso is among the preeminent social scientists of modern Brazil. His classic Dependency and Development in Latin America, written with Enzo Faletto, was published in 1969. Exiled through much of the 60s and 70s by the military dictatorship in Brazile, Cardoso returned to an “accidental” political career in the 1980s. He is credited as finance minister with the lancing of the hyperinflation crisis of the early 90s. His two terms as the elected president of Brazil, from 1995 to 2002, marked the stabilization of Brazil’s popular democracy. I found his autobiography, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir, a beguiling introduction to an immeasuraby valuable and wise fellow at Brown’s Watson Institute.