yarpp | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

October 31, 2011

Glenn Greenwald: who will rescue the rule of law?

Glenn Greenwald is warming up here and whetting my taste for conversation in the Open Source style, in the next couple of weeks. Listen, please, and point directions for our own give-and-take soon. Greenwald and Noam Chomsky were the hottest ticket anywhere near Boston this past weekend, together at the Brattle Theater event, excerpted here, that was sold out (at $5 per) weeks in advance — which was an automatic in the People’s Republic of Cambridge. But these are not marginal men, and their points are not to be marginalized either.

Glenn Greenwald is addressing the erosion — the radical “degradation,” he calls it — of the rule of law: in the high-tech military assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, for example; and more broadly in President Obama’s deliberate choice to “turn the page” on the illegalities of George W. Bush’s war on Iraq. The drone attack on Awlaki, an American citizen, blew away our revered presumption of innocent-till-proven-guilty that was accorded even to the most vicious surviving monsters of the Third Reich at Nuremberg. Our inability to hold our own war record to a universal standard violates another American promise at Nuremberg, that “we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

These were the immortal cadences of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, opening the American case at Nuremberg in November, 1945, first on the presumption of innocence: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.” And further, on the accuser’s vulnerability to judgment ever after: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well…”

Glenn Greenwald was rushing from the theater to an airplane on Saturday afternoon, but he’s committed to extending the conversation soon. Will you help us “brief” this one?

October 25, 2011

Pakistan Aslant: the two-hour version

Here’s the short form, as we say: nearly a month of strong conversation in Pakistan this past summer, distilled to two radio hours. The first hour explores the living history and dynamic present of “the ...

Here’s the short form, as we say: nearly a month of strong conversation in Pakistan this past summer, distilled to two radio hours.

The first hour explores the living history and dynamic present of “the country that could kill the world …”:

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In hour two, we’re probing the “Roots of Resilience”:

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Both hours are illuminating the judgment that (1) Pakistan is not about to destroy itself, much less go away and (2) that Pakistan’s mutually-abusive marriage with the United States is not about to end, either. When our Pentagon accuses the Pakistan’s army intelligence of targeting American troops, and when Secretary of State Clinton says we’re not going to take it anymore, count on it that the Pakistan story is with us for a while. But what’s the history unfolding here? How did it come to this? What do Pakistanis say?

What I didn’t know, going in, was the deep old under-layer of tribulation in Pakistan. I wasn’t prepared for the edgy energy of Pakistan either, the confidence of tough people, and much beauty, too. Among the contradictory truths that we Americans barely know about Pakistan are (1) that it’s a cultural powerhouse (in poetry, fiction, and especially music) in South Asia and beyond; (2) it’s been a resentful and prickly junior partner in our US-sponsored proxy wars for thirty-plus years — first (embracing terrorism) against the Soviets and later against the terrorist groups and ideologies we promoted; (3) the troubles of Pakistan can be (and in conversation often are) traced back before the Cold War and the Islamic revolution to the moment of birth in 1947, the Partition of British India that created two unequal sibling rivals in 1947; and (4) that thoughtful Pakistanis talk not only of the rising trend of estrangement from the US but also of a convergent trend toward inequality and the over-reach of elites in both countries.

Program directors: access broadcast-ready versions of these hours for no charge at PRX.
Email: info (at) radioopensource (dot) com with any production questions, or to request CDs in the mail.

Podcast • August 31, 2011

Nadeem ul Haque: “the country that can kill the world”

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Nadeem ul Haque (15 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Nadeem ul Haque giving a talk at TedxLahore Nadeem ul Haque introduced himself with a bit of bluster as Pakistan’s ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Nadeem ul Haque (15 minutes, 8 mb mp3)

Nadeem ul Haque giving a talk at TedxLahore

Nadeem ul Haque introduced himself with a bit of bluster as Pakistan’s official “growth” strategist, then began blurting out his frustrations. There’s no growth to speak of in Pakistan, he said — less than inflation anyway, and nothing like India’s 8-percent boom. The government he came home to serve in Pakistan is going nowhere. And then the line that spun my head around: “This is the country that can kill the world,” he said. “And your country hasn’t the foggiest idea what you’re doing here. Find a way to educate youth in Pakistan — 90 million under 20 — or don’t sleep at night. You haven’t got enough bullets to kill them… We can do without the Beltway Bandits and even the billions of dollars in what they call aid. What America should be sending Pakistan is C-SPAN and National Public Radio, and then reopen the USIA libraries… What you send is Raymond Davis and Blackwater… Are you out of your …. minds?”

The conversation we recorded a few days later is a slightly tempered version of that first burst at a farewell party in Islamabad for an American aid official. We’re getting Nadeem ul Haque’s heartfelt version of the Post-Colonial Blues. First, fond memories of the British and American cultural centers and mentors in the 1950s and 60s who propelled him to the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago and a career at the World Bank. Second comes the the appalled realization that a new native elite had slipped into the palaces, polo grounds and clubs of the old colonialists with, if anything, less interest in the mass of the population. And third, a rough critique of a distant and disdainful American connection with Pakistan: bullet proof cars for aid workers when they get out of the office at all; “they don’t use our toilet paper,” he says; and nobody, but nobody, knows where the other-than-military money goes.

Podcast • March 18, 2010

Whose Words These Are (24): Eli Marienthal’s Spoken-Word Haiti

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Eli Marienthal (15 min, 7 mb mp3) Eli Marienthal’s Haiti story is about a little-boy obsession with his Haitian twin, met on the first of many trips to ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Eli Marienthal (15 min, 7 mb mp3)

Eli Marienthal’s Haiti story is about a little-boy obsession with his Haitian twin, met on the first of many trips to Haiti to visit his father. The earthquake this winter seems to have jolted loose his fixation, toward insight and action.

Eli is the very picture of millennial possibility. He was a teen idol movie star growing up in California. He’s got a Brown degree now, in international development and comparative literature, and the zeal to apply it:

There is a practical aspect to the work I would like to be doing in Haiti that has everything to do with growing food. The Haitian landscape has been devastated by any number of natural and unnatural phenomena. I think that everywhere in the world, one of the most successful strategies for healing the planet is permaculture, which mimics natural systems in such a way that humans at an appropriate scale are able to reap what they need to sustain themselves — and the ecosystem of which they are a part. As Wendell Berry says, all creative work is a strategy of healing. My Haiti story — click and listen above — is itself a strategy of healing. Growing food is another strategy of healing. They aren’t separate to me.

This is the fourth in a group of conversations with poets, word-artists, about a catastrophe beyond words: the earthquake in Haiti this January. Tomorrow: Haitian-American High School Senior and poet Fabienne Casseus.

Podcast • March 5, 2010

This "Year of India" (4): The NY Times’ Man in Bombay

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anand Giridharadas (45 min, 27 mb mp3) We’re getting a personal take on the New India that we haven’t heard before from New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas. ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anand Giridharadas (45 min, 27 mb mp3)

We’re getting a personal take on the New India that we haven’t heard before from New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas. When he went “home” after college, from Cleveland to the land of his ancestors, the feeling he confronted was, in effect, hey, your party in America is over, and you may be too late for the party underway in Bombay.

Born in Ohio and educated in Michigan, Anand is a child of that wave of immigration that brought India’s best and brightest out of a bad time back home in the 1970s to the land of milk, honey, high tech and opportunity in America. When Anand returned to do his bit for the mother country, as a McKinsey consultant in the mid-90s, he found not his parent’s stifled old India but rather a swarming entrepreneurial frontier more modern, more gung-ho in many ways than the American Mid-West he grew up in, but also a nation growing less “westernized” and more indigenous on a surging wave of growth.

He carried with him the story of India that his parents had given him, an image of a great civilization trapped in a box; a place where, in his words “No one questioned. No one dreamed. Nothing moved.” He begins this account of that quarter-century transformation through the eyes of his father:

AG: One of the reasons my father left — none of us leaves countries for massive geopolitical reasons, we ultimate leave for personal reasons. His personal situation was working in the 1970s for a company called Tata Motors, selling their trucks and buses in Africa. All he could do to make a judgment about whether he wanted to be in India long term was look around him at work. I will never forget the simple way in which describes why he decided to leave. He said he looked at his bosses twenty years ahead of him in line and concluded he didn’t want to spend his life becoming them.

Now fast forward a quarter century, Tata Motors is today, that same stagnant dead company that in some ways pushed my father out of the country as a whole, is today one of the most admired car companies in the world. Why? Because it no longer only sells rickety trucks and buses in Africa. It has now also made the world’s cheapest car, for about $2,000, in an engineering feat that has wowed every major auto maker.

CL: How did they do it?

AG: There are two ways to think about it. One is to say that they had consultants and advisors who had certainly come back form the West. But here’s another interpretation of what was different. the constraints were in some ways the same. They still had essentially 1 billion poor people around them; they still had engineering constraints; they still had a government that’s not particularly helpful to what business does. But in my father’s day most Indians would have interpreted that context as essentially hindering progress and being an excuse for producing sub optimal stuff. The new language is “we have unique hardships which gives us a unique opportunity to create globally competitive products that are better than anyone else’s products. Because our roads are bumpier, our suspension systems have to be even better than the Americans’ suspension systems. Because people are poor in this country, we have to work twice as hard to bring the price point of a car down to $2000.” It’s the same context, just a different way of looking at it.

Anand Giridharadas in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, March 4, 2010.

Podcast • October 16, 2009

Whose Words These Are (12): Teresa Cader

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Teresa Cader. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Teresa ...

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going?

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Teresa Cader. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3)

Teresa Cader used to think of herself as a child of Europe. Walt Whitman made her a poet and an American. Her father was an immigrant from Poland. Her mother’s side is Irish: “my great aunt looks like Seamus Heaney in a black funeral dress,” she has said. Growing up in Trenton, she read Latin and translated Beowulf, and then found in Leaves of Grass a way into her American consciousness. She lives now in Lexington, Massachusetts — a block from the first skirmish in the American Revolution. Her last published collection of poems, History of Hurricanes makes a link at one point between the civil rights movement in the States and the Solidarity movement in Poland, prompted by her visit to a club in Krakow playing James Brown, and by hearing her Polish friends sing all the verses of “We Shall Overcome.” So she is an American poet now of history and the world, and a teacher of young poets at Leslie University in Cambridge.

Q: What do you learn in the schools?

A: Students are hungry for a kind of emotional truth that they’re not getting; they’re hungry to integrate their feelings and their learning— they are hungry to have someone speak truth about life. They are hungry for poetry.

Q: Who does your work in another medium?

A: I really like sculpture. I get a visceral reaction to sculpture, everything going back to the Greeks, and Romans, the Italians: Donatello, Brancusi, Giacometti. I like the whimsy of Calder, and of people like Henry Moore. If I could have another life in a different medium, it would be sculpture.

Q: What is the keynote of your poetry?

A: I like to inhabit the mystery and the unknown. I like to push beyond what’s comfortable to a place where I don’t know where I am.

Q: What is the talent you’d most love to have that you don’t, yet?

A: I want to close the gap between my voice and the page.

Q: What quality do you love in a poem?

A: I need to be emotionally moved by a poem, though it should not set out to do so. I have a metaphysical sensibility. I look for the marriage between intellect and emotions. That is why I love [John] Donne and [Robert] Pinsky.

Q: What is your motto?

A: “Push beyond what you know. The process is where the discoveries happen. Trust it”

Podcast • November 25, 2008

The Indispensable Musician: Barenboim Backstage

Daniel Barenboim‘s conversation starts high as a kite on the fumes of the Wagner he’s been rehearsing, then lands with both feet on the Middle East. “The situation in the Middle East has never been so bad,” he began. Barak Obama will be a huge relief after the Bush “disaster,” but “what is wrong in America — a unilateral way of thinking” has its own destructive inertia, in America and in Israel. “Which party in Israel is willing and able to give back the territories?” Barenboim inquired rhetorically. “None,” he answered. He did not sound impressed with the lame-duck Ehud Olmert’s speculation about sharing Jerusalem with Palestinian officialdom. “Until there is a Prime Minister in Israel who understands that there is an element of artificiality and injustice” in the making of Israel today… “until an Israeli Prime Minister can speak of injustice,” there will be no moving forward. Time is working for the Palestinians, he says, not for the Israelis or the Jewish people in general. American hegemony, even before the economic crisis, was coming to be a memory. There is much to be done.

We sailed into this conversation after Michael Steinberg at Brown’s Cogut Center for the Humanities opened all the doors for about 50 students and faculty — first to the red plush opera house in mid-morning at Lincoln Center, and then to Maestro Barenboim’s easy, open, stream of thinking.

Barenboim conducts “Tristan und Isolde” without a score (“But I can read music,” he interposed with a laugh. “I remember the choreography of the piece”) and he declaims on the politics of Palestinians and Israelis without a licence. He long ago broke with the choreography of the official peace processes. The brilliant mixed ensemble of Arab and Israeli players that he organized with the late Edward Said, the West-East Divan Orchestra, says more about Barenboim’s fundamental convictions even than his words can: “I am a short-term pessimist about the Middle East,” he has said before, “but a long-term optimist. Either we will find a way to live with each other or we will kill each other. What gives me hope? Music-making. Because, before a Beethoven symphony, Mozart’s Don Giovanni or Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, all human beings are equal.”

It’s Barenboim’s way, with the Met players and with us, to spell out the finest points of sound — the consonants “ta” and “da” that come out of horns, for example, and the uniquely Wagnerian manipulations of vowel sounds in the German language. The word “auge” (eye), begins with a double vowel sound, with implications for pitch and rhythm… Serious ear training, Barenboim convinces us, could make a happier world. “The economic crisis would not have happened if the bankers knew from music that everything is connected. When you risk making a modulation in the music you immediately have to pay the price: when you make a rubato you have to give it back.” And then he was off:

Tell me another profession where you know more than yesterday but you have to start from scratch? This is the great privilege of being a musician. It’s exactly that: to combine more and more because you’ll never get to the bottom of it, but you always have the freshness of starting from scratch… There are some pieces I play on the piano that I played when I was 7 years old, you know, I was 66 last week–that is a long time… There are pieces I have played one hundred, two hundred times. Yet when I start, there is nothing there because sound is ephemeral, and therefore you start from scratch. And it is this combination, if you want, intellectually and humanly: knowing more and more, and at the same time, having the freshness to start from scratch. That’s the difference between being a musician and a carpenter, no?

CL: Is there a chance that diplomacy or international relations corresponds here, in terms of building on the past but starting from scratch… We will have a new government in Israel and a new government in the United States. I keep wanting to ask you if you’re available to be secretary of state if Mrs. Clinton doesn’t take it. Do you see a start-from-scratch possibility?

DB: I would take Secretary of State. Her Senate seat? No. I think that the situation in the Middle East has never been as bad as it is now. And I think that it’s a wonderful step forward that you Americans have chosen Barack Obama. But if I may be bold, and not very polite, I think that what is wrong and what was wrong in America and therefore the world–namely this unilateral way of thinking–is not Mr. Bush. Who was a disaster. But Mr. Bush was not a foreign element in American society. Don’t misunderstand me, had I been an American of course I would have voted for Obama. And I would have tried to cheat and go and put in two votes if I could. But I think that the expectations that he’ll put the world in order are false. What is he going to tell the Israelis? You tell me what political party in Israel is willing and able, both, to really give back the territories? Honestly. Which are a conditions for dialogue with the Palestinians. None. You can put Barack Obama ten times in the White House and this is not going to happen.

CL: Has Prime Minister Olmert opened a new conversation, even as he leaves?

DB: It’s not having a conversation; it’s understanding the human needs of the Palestinians. The Israeli and Palestinian conflict is not a political conflict. It has been treated as a political conflict for sixty years, and this is why it has not been solved… A political conflict is a conflict between two nations… about water, about oil, gas, about borders. And that you solve diplomatically, and if that doesn’t work, militarily. But this not like that, this is a conflict between two people who are deeply convinced that they have the right to live on the same little piece of land. And until they have understood that this is so, that the other has the same conviction, it will not happen, it will only be nonsense… Because basically the Palestinians don’t see why there is a need for a Jewish state, for a state that is exclusively Jewish. They have been made to accept the fact that people from Ukraine, Argentina and New Zealand came there since the 1920s pretending to have the right to live there; they somehow swallowed that. It was never particularly pleasant experience but they did swallow that. But now they don’t understand why these Ukrainians and their descendents need to stay for only for themselves. And they say the Holocaust is dreadful, and what a terrible thing, but why do we have to pay for it? It is all actually very simple logic. And until there is a prime minister in Israel that is willing to understand that — I am not saying agree with it, but understand — that we have come, the Jewish people, that there is an element of artificiality, and that there is an element of injustice. And I’m not against the state of Israel, on the contrary, I believe in the right of the state of Israel to exist. But I know how many terrible mistakes that have been made, and I know that history has taught us that certain things you cannot change, but you have to recognize them. And therefore until there is a the prime minister of Israel that can stand up and say that there has been an injustice committed, and we really have to sort this out, it will not move forward.

More and more, time is working for the Palestinians and not for Israel nor for the Jewish people. Because of the demography and because of the fact that the argument of Jewish suffering, of course, gets a little bit paler with the passage of time. People felt about the cruelty–the unbelievable and unique cruelty towards the Jews with the Holocaust in Europe–in 1948, 1950 and 1960 much more strongly than in 2008. And therefore in 2015 or in 2020, more and more people will start saying why do the Jewish people need to have a country of their own? That they have a strong army [so] why can’t there be a one state solution? And this, of course, is what Israel is most afraid of, and this is what has brought the country to a point where neither the one state nor two state solution is feasible. I was saying the other day, if I was a Palestinian — I mean, I have a Palestinian passport as well as an Israel — but if I was an active Palestinian and I could get everybody to agree on this, I would say that we should tell the Israelis that we have learned a lesson. We accept the fact that you have conquered the land and we accept you as the landlords and everything. Okay, now you can annex the country and now we will fight for equal rights. And what would Israel say? First, they would say that it’s a trap. But when, if, the Palestinians were to give up the arms, it is not a trap.

And now we have to make amends and live together. And all the Jews that live outside of Israel and have a bad conscience about not having moved to Israel but support the government of Israel in all of its stupidity are actually responsible as well. Not only in America, but especially in America.

I ask myself, American hegemony is going down, we’ve seen that long before this crisis happened. And we’ve seen how China and India and Brazil are getting important economically and otherwise. And then I think: we’ve [Israel has] put all our eggs in the American basket. Where is the Jewish lobby in Beijing and New Delhi that will take care of Jewish interests twenty years from now? It’s very short-sighted.

My criticism is not about the injustice to the Palestinians or not, because one can argue this and that. But that basically it’s a diminishing understanding of what Jewish history is about. We … were, for centuries, concerned with morality and with all of that. And, when I went with my parents when I was 10 years old in the 1950’s, there was no talk about the Holocaust then because individually it was too painful, and because collectively, no one wanted to talk about it. My generation did not want to hear about the Warsaw ghetto, we wanted to create a new profile of a healthy Israeli… I would understand an Israeli patriot who would say we have done that and now it is our duty to see to it that we can all work together, and really get it all going; and we stand for justice and we have a strong army and let’s make a federation and get it all together. That is patriotic language. But what we’re doing is making monsters of youngsters of 18 and 19 at the checkpoints to harass Palestinians, and who basically have no understanding and no knowledge of why they are doing this. And with the help of artificially importing one million Jews from the Soviet Union in 1990. Well now 25% of Israeli army are ex-Soviet immigrants. This is terribly unhealthy — forget about the Palestinians — for Israel! It’s very unhealthy. Don’t get me started…

Daniel Barenboim in conversation at the Met with Chris Lydon and visitors from Brown University, November 21, 2008.

Why is Barenboim so fascinating and, I think, so important? Just because a musician with courage can say and do things that almost nobody else can. I’ve observed this about Barenboim before: Like Yo-Yo Ma of the Silk Road Project, or Dizzy Gillespie with his United Nations Orchestra, or Leonard Bernstein leaping Cold War boundaries and the musical divides between Broadway, Hollywood and the New York Philharmonic, Barenboim — born in Buenos Aires of Russian Jewish parents, and an Israeli since his early teens — has made himself an icon of musical implications for a world-wide audience that hungers for a great deal more than performances.

Podcast • January 29, 2008

A Moment for Oracles: Amber and Braunze

In the Obama rapture after South Carolina, what we wanted wasn’t experts (because there are none) or wiseguys (because Chris Matthews has them all). We wanted oracles. Then came an email from a listener in ...

In the Obama rapture after South Carolina, what we wanted wasn’t experts (because there are none) or wiseguys (because Chris Matthews has them all). We wanted oracles.

Then came an email from a listener in New York: “Give me Amber, or give me death…,” thirsting for that fabulous firehose of crystalline commentary from talk shows past.

And then Braunze himself called from Alabama — another heroic one-off thinker and talker whose call-in handle, like Amber’s, has the hue of an alloyed heart and mind. Braunze, too, wanted to grope out-loud through scenes from a dream unfolding since the South Carolina went to the polls on Saturday. Could it really be happening — this regeneration of a demoralized world-nation? This gathering momentum and spirit around an African-American candidacy in a campaign that refuses so far to be racialized?

And so we recorded these conversations which, if nothing else, memorialize the dim, dawning awareness of a great shift in all our perspectives on possibility.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Amber and Braunze here (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3)

Amber, if this voice is new to you, is a Barbadian orphan who has lived in proud poverty in Boston for more than a decade. She has no “papers,” as they say, but the spirit of a cranky super-patriot. In talk radio, we thrilled to hear “Amber is on the line.” And people still ask me: “How’s Amber?” about the ferociously articulate caller who tangled on the air with the best (including Gore Vidal, Camille Paglia, William Safire, William F. Buckley and Harold Bloom) and bested them all. “What is Amber thinking?” people want to know. “What is she thinking? Are you in touch?” Well, we are ever in touch, and she is ever her indomitable, industrious, provocative self. Here’s a touch of Amber this morning at the South Station stop on the Red Line subway through Boston:

Every day I’d go down to the edge of the water and stare way out at that horizon, and I was convinced at age 5 that America was just over that edge: terrifying, electrifying, important, deep, epic, beautiful, monstrous. That’s what America was to me, still is… So much of this campaign, this man, is wrapped up in that once again. I’m almost, almost — don’t get excited — almost a born-again American today. It’s not that I’m in love or in awe with Barack Obama. It’s what his moment on the American stage means… It’s a second chance for this place… This country is my religion. For someone who’s missed it… ached for it, I cannot begin to tell you how deliciously happy I am that this moment is here.

“Amber,” in conversation with Chris Lydon in the morning transit rush-hour, Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Braunze identifies himself as “an entrepreneur with insight.” He’s lived his life between Birmingham and Boston, a business consultant with tentacles deep in the information technologies, and also a singer, jazz lyricist and Miles Davis devotee.

I think that the dark cloud of just sadness and desperation — because you just can’t get there being a good guy — has been disproved by Barack Obama. He is a good guy and he is making it. His is kind of the Todd Clifton of America now — Todd Clifton from [Ralph Ellison’s] Invisible Man. Todd Clifton was a Harlem activist… eventually the symbol of hope in Ellison’s mythology. Barack is that person in real life come to be. It is almost as if Barack Obama was prophesied in Ellison’s famous line, “who knows but that on the lower frequencies I speak for you.” I think Obama is speaking for those on the lower frequencies, those who’ve not had the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do. I think that’s impacting white America, saying: hey, you know, we need to be a little bit more pro-active, those of us who believe, because if this guy can do it, we’re really, really underutilizing a lot of talent.

“Braunze,” on the phone with Chris Lydon from Birmingham, Monday, January 28, 2008

April 26, 2007

Military POV

Turns out we’ve done quite a few Iraq shows from a military perspective. So we decided to assemble them into an informal series. Can you think of any we’ve missed? You can subscribe to a ...

Turns out we’ve done quite a few Iraq shows from a military perspective. So we decided to assemble them into an informal series. Can you think of any we’ve missed?

You can subscribe to a podcast of every Military POV show here.

The War in First Person, 06/30/05: The Things They Blogged. America’s enlisted men and women are blogging from Iraq and Afghanistan and giving us a real-time look at the front line. The ambushes and infantry patrols, the mess hall meals and desert heat. It’s war in the first person.
Soldiers and Families: Life in the 150th, 07/18/05: The 150th Combat Engineers Battalion in Iraq: a military family that includes spouses, parents, kids, and the friends back home… people who feel as much a part of the troop as the soldiers themselves. It’s an extended community stretching from Baghdad to Biloxi that lives in the open online.
Stuck in the Pottery Barn, 11/09/05: You broke it, you own it. Putting aside the reasons for going to war in Iraq in the first place, the reality today is a gathering Iraqi insurgency, an infrastructure in ruins, and a perilously fragile new democracy. Senator Feingold is calling for troop withdrawal, but does it make any sense to turn away now?
The Iraqi Police, 05/25/06: The Iraqi Police. Three years after the fall of Baghdad, the national police force — once projected as a pillar of US success in Iraq — seems now to be at the root of the country’s simmering civil war.
The War Tapes: Cinema Guerrit&#233, 06/06/06: Cinema Guerrité. The War Tapes is a documentary that redefines “lights, camera, action”. “Light” is the blazing, Iraq desert sun, “camera” is a mini video recorder and “action” is deadly and nonstop. Soldiers film war, while waging war.
Iraq: A Military Inquest, 12/12/06: A post-Rumsfeld, post-James Baker military inquest on What Went Wrong, asking: Does the fault lie with the Pentagon civilians or the military and the Joint Chiefs? Was it a problem of conception or execution? And what are the “lessons learned?”
The Classroom Lessons of Iraq, 12/13/06: In twenty years the Iraq War, like the Peloponnesian war, will be a case study of tactics and strategy. In the classroom, will it all still come down to Clausewitz and Machiavelli, or does Iraq offer something new to teach the West Point class of 2026?
What the Active-Duty Military Wants, 01/08/07: What the American soldiers are saying. Three and a half years into the war in Iraq a majority of our troops oppose the war. There’s that threshhold of 3000 American deaths, but what else has changed for our men and women in uniform?
The Future of the All-Volunteer Military, 01/23/07: The U.S. military at a breaking point. With 150,000 troops in Iraq and 200,000 more on duty overseas, the world’s second-largest standing army is stretched thin. Whoever said an all-volunteer force could police a global beat — and constant conflict?
Do Americans Need to Serve?, 01/30/07: Whatever happened to national service? The Army is at war, a recent guest told us, but America is still at Wal-Mart. From Americorps to the Peace Corps to the Marine Corps, is our all-volunteer country volunteering enough?
Coming Home: Iraq Veterans, 03/12/07: Veterans affairs. Half a million GIs have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, to the battles of life AFTER war. For some it’s a homecomings with prosthetic legs, or post-traumatic stress, or a homeless life on the street. For some the battle is re-learning how to talk.
Women in War, 03/26/07: One in ten American soldiers fighting in Iraq is a woman, and in a war that makes no distinction between combat and support, they’re patroling, driving, and dying — all the while fearing not just enemy IEDs but sometimes sexual assault from men on their own side.
Iraq: Military Self-Critique, 05/02/07: The US military’s report card on itself, in Iraq. Lt. Col. Paul Yingling has ignited a blogstorm with his Armed Forces Journal article blasting the military commanders of the Iraq War. Could an open, honest, public debate about the generalship of the war be next?
Deploying. Again., 05/31/07: The fourth deployment. What combination of patriotism and fatigue, eagerness and fear, arrives when Uncle Sam Fed Exes marching orders for your fourth tour in Iraq or Afghanistan?