Arms and influence

Casual Fridays: Buy this album now

The new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, is one of the best albums I've heard in a long, long time. You've heard the phrase, "If this music doesn't make you get up and dance, you must be dead." Along the same lines, if this album's lyrics and music don't grab you by the lapels and slap you around, you must be deaf or soulless.

It helps that Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is one of Cave's most approachable albums. The songs are just as good as "Red Right Hand," "Tupelo," "The Mercy Seat," or other, earlier tunes. It's just that this album starts with  songs that aren't quite as musically off-beat as some of Cave's earlier work.

Cave knows how to write lyrics and music that both demand your attention. The first song on the album, "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!" sounds a little like the Velvet Underground, and the words have the punch of a dark Biblical parable. (Click here for an interview in which Cave explains his fascination and frustration with Bible stories.) Cave's sardonic humor reaches full force with "We Call Upon The Author To Explain," with  Steppenwolf-like bass and guitar lines. And you can't get more carnal than "Lie Down Here (& Be My Girl)", probably the randiest song since Springsteen's "I'm On Fire" or "The Fever." The lyrics from "Jesus of the Moon" are both beautiful and disturbing in the fashion of Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat."

I feel that I'm being a bit unfair to Cave by comparing this album to the work of other people. I'm definitely not saying that Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is a series of pastiches of other people's work. Quite the opposite: this album has the distinct sound and words that have made Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds one of the most interesting (and under-appreciated) groups around.

Maybe these lines from "More News From Nowhere" will show exactly how good a songwriter Cave can be:

Now Betty X is like Betty Y minus that fatal chromosome
Her hair is like the wine dark sea in which sailors come home
I say hey baby I say hey Betty X
I lean close up to her throat
This light you are carrying is like a lamp
Hanging from a distant boat

And if that doesn't convince you, here's the video for the title cut:

Bad trip

The excellent Washington Post series about the medical mistreatment of foreign prisoners continues. Today, we hear details about the regular injections of psychotropic drugs to keep prisoners sedated during transport.

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 -- the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

The Post first published a related story a couple of weeks ago. Rumors of these techniques have been around for a few years. Eventually, perhaps, we'll hear about the qualifications of the people who developed the "cocktail" and administered it.

Tourist intelligence

If you're ever in the DC area, I strongly recommend visiting the International Spy Museum. Don't worry about the hokey "You're a spy now" introduction. There's a lot of more substantive stuff to come.

Be sure to look through the book section of the gift shop. I dare you to walk away without buying a book you didn't know existed and now need to have.

If A then B then C

Patrick Radden Keefe's article in The New Yorker, "State Secrets," is a must-read. Even if the case of Pete Seda and the Al Haramein charity were not representative of federal prosecutions of people with "links" to terrorist groups, their story raises some important points:

• How many Americans are aware that the US government is claiming these powers? While I was at the Newseum this week, I enjoyed the displays that tested your knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The punchline, of course, was that the average American has a weak grasp of Constitutional protections and imperatives. How many Americans, therefore, know the Constitutional details that the executive branch may be violating through its counterterrorism policies, let alone the policies themselves?



• How much backlash are these policies creating? Even if you buy into the Cheneyesque "1% solution" approach to counterterrorism, anecdotes like the Al Haramein case may be raising the risk of terrorist attack beyond that 1%.

It's worth chewing on that second question a bit more. Federal prosecutors are pursuing the same maximalist strategy as other members of the executive branch. (And for many of the same reasons, which have as much to do with ass-covering as genuine fear of terrorist attack.) The natural result is the aggressive suspicion of "links":

In designating Al Haramain Oregon, Treasury Department officials cited “direct links” with Al Qaeda, but have never revealed the precise nature of those links. Stinebower, the former Treasury lawyer, said she was unaware of any internal definition of “direct links.” She wouldn’t discuss the particulars of the Al Haramain designation, but did say, “It wouldn’t have been sufficient that A picks up a phone and calls B, and B picks up a phone and talks to C, therefore A knows C. There would have to be more of a connection than that.”

There's another way of looking at these links: If federal prosecutors seize the assets and indefinitely imprisons A because B knows C, then there's a risk, however small, that A will actually look at C more sympathetically.

According to the Administration's own 1% logic, that's a risk that the nation should not bear.

The big game

This morning on CNN, Senator Joseph Lieberman asserted that, if the US were to withdraw from Iraq, "Iran and Al Qaeda win." Finally someone willing to stop hinting about dire consequences, and instead give voice to the real problem for the United States in Iraq: the willingness to admit defeat.

Lieberman, of course, expected that to be the final word on America's Iraq policy. It's not.

Losing here, winning there
For sake of argument, let's agree with Lieberman. We leave, and Iran and Al Qaeda "win." (That's not necessarily true, especially for Al Qaeda, but let's not get off track.) By implication, the United States loses. But what did we lose?

One of the reasons I started this blog is point out, whenever necessary, the importance of separating the different levels of strategy. Grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, and technical levels are very different.  Success at one level does not necessarily bring success at all the others.

Just as importantly for the iraq question, failure at one does not trigger failure at the others. If the United States were to lose one part of its theater strategy for the Middle East, it does not portend a cataclysm for the United States in that region, or for the most recently added priority in American grand strategy, counterterrorism.

The United states may have to contain the consequences of occupation and withdrawal, but there are several outcomes that may be eminently tolerable for the United States. The Iraqi factions are likely to remain focused on each other, not the United States. Iran may gain power and influence within Iraq, but exactly how does this automatically translate into a catastrophic loss for the United States? Freed from the Iraq trap, the United States might be able to do more in the Middle East overall, instead of pouring more blood and treasure into a single country. Americans might live in less danger of terrorist attack, if the American occupation no longer inspires outrage against the United states.

Don't look for a scoreboard
It's hard for Americans to avoid conflating Iraq with the Middle East, and with US national security overall, in part because Americans hate to lose. It's the reason, for example, why military recruitment rates are lower than desired, but reenlistment rates are higher than many expected. American soldiers who have served in Iraq have faced a tough challenge. They feel responsible for the Iraqis who live in mortal danger. Therefore, they don't want to leave a job undone.

While America's allergy to losing might be a good thing for the teams playing the Super Bowl, it's a bad thing for US foreign policy. For the United States to remain a superpower, Americans have to be mature enough to accept defeat at one level of strategy, if it does not endanger American successes at the other levels of strategy. There are no military equivalents of Hail Mary passes or on-side kicks. War and diplomacy are not games with simple ways to measure winning and losing--something for which we should all be grateful.

Tonight, on "The Adams Family"

What the hell happened during the production of the HBO series John Adams? The series started strong, with Adams' dramatic defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre. By the last episode, the show seemed to have lost interest in Adams the public man.

Charles, Adams' son, drinks himself to death. We all suffer through long, long scene of a doctor removing Nabby's breast, without anesthesia. Urk.

Screen time spent on these events is time subtracted from public affairs--including, startlingly, the collapse of the friendship between Adams and Jefferson. There's no mention of Jefferson's hiring of James Callender to execute a smear campaign against Adams in the 1800 election, which backfired horribly. Therefore, in the HBO series, their famous reconciliation through correspondence is mysterious: why did they need to be reconciled in the first place?

And what was up with all the tilted camera angles?  I felt as though I was in the Joker's hideout on the old Batman TV series.

Yes, I'm annoyed. The series hooked me in, then somewhere in the middle, took a disappointing turn.

"Dogs get better care"

The next President of the United States needs to earn some international goodwill fast. It's going to take a while to clean up the messes from the current Administration.

The latest example is the medical treatment--or lack thereof--of detainees in the custody of the Division of Internee Health Services (DIHS), a branch of the lobotomized giant, the Department of Homeland Security. According to today's Washington Post, prisoners jammed into a variety of prison facilities scattered across the United States are, surprise surprise, don't get adequate medical care. Some prisoners have died for want of simple, inexpensive treatment.

Secrecy can be just a veil disguising incompetence, corruption, and failure. (Immigrants from the former Soviet Union can tell you a thing or two about this topic.) In this case, the increased strictures for detainees--more limited access to lawyers, or anyone on the outside--has helped hide the lack of medical care for people we casually keep in indefinite custody. And, of course, we're not talking about people who are major threats to US national security:

But they are not terrorists. Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security: a Salvadoran who bought drugs in his 20th year of poverty in Los Angeles; a U.S. legal U.S. resident from Mexico who took $50 for driving two undocumented day laborers into a border city. Or they are waiting for political asylum from danger in their own countries: a Somalian without a valid visa trying to prove she would be killed had she remained in her village; a journalist who fled Congo out of fear for his life, worked as a limousine driver and fathered six American children, but never was able to get the asylum he sought.

As with all longer news articles, you have to read far beyond the first paragraph to find the important details. For example, it's worth doing a quick calculation of how much per capita this part of DHS is spending on these prisoners' medical care, and then compare it to how much US prisons spend on their prisoners:

• For people who are not guilty of any crime other than being in the United States illegally: about $286 per prisoner. (That's the size of expenditures cited in the article, divided by 311,000 prisoners.)
  
• For prisoners in US state facilities, guilty of everything from petty theft to murder: between $1,000 and  $4,000 per prisoner, depending on the state. (Those numbers come from a 2001 Department of Justice report.)

Unfortunately for American prestige, people in other countries can do the math, too.

And, of course, there's the tragically familiar story of an under-qualified person in charge of a government agency with life-and-death responsibilities. 

The new boss is LaMont W. Flanagan, who brought with him the credential of having been fired in 2003 by the state of Maryland for bad management and spending practices supervising detention and pretrial services. An audit found that Flanagan had signed off on payments of $145,000 for employee entertainment and other ill-advised expenditures. His reputation was such that the District of Columbia would not hire him for a juvenile-justice position.

If those details don't worry you, click here for an article critical of Flanagan's handling of Baltimore prisons.

It won't be easy to fix the DIHS. The US government could save a lot of money, simply by releasing prisoners...But, of course, there are the inevitable political repercussions. The federal officials might try to bring up the level of funding and staffing for the DIHS, but where will they find the money? And where will they find a better-qualified person willing to take on the thankless job of heading the DIHS?

Mister or Madame President-To-Come, godspeed to you.

Our American relative

Being in Washington, DC has certainly helped me get blogging again. New York may be grand; San Francisco, vibrant; Savannah, welcoming; or Chicago, muscular. No city in the United States can match Washington for its power to inspire.

Visiting the Newseum, the new museum of journalism, was an unexpected pleasure. I was braced for a lot of superficial, self-congratulatory pap. Sure, that did appear in the occasional nook or cranny (or multi-screen, Jumbotron-delivered montage), but by and large, the real theme of the Newseum is the Bill of Rights.

You get to see every point on the continuum of liberty, from old copies of the Catholic Index to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, the extremely helpful guides suggest that you start at the bottom of the multi-story Newseum, which includes sections of the Berlin Wall and, more disturbingly, one of the guard towers that used to keep East Berliners from escaping to West Berlin.

Of course, the entire landscape of Washington, DC, is its own memorial to liberty. Not just the monuments, but the office buildings themselves, suggest important moments in American history, and the daily work to keep the American republic going. Here is the place where Martin Luther King gave his most famous (but not necessarily his best) speech. Here is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

As difficult as the last several years have been, it's moments like these that remind me how much I love America. At its best moments, the United States has encouraged the conviction that everyone in this country is part of the same family, and that people abroad are just our distant cousins. All of them deserve the best treatment we can give.

Love of America is tricky. You can't govern the American family by imposing sentiment, as if our public moments were like an uncomfortable holiday gathering. Everyone must say the right things. Everyone must sit in their proper place. Don't mention any uncomfortable truths, for fear that these moments of manufactured amity will shatter.

Loving America is more like embracing a difficult relative. At times, it will do and say stupid things. The misbehavior might grow to such alarming proportions that you begin to question whether redemption is possible. Still, you persevere, in the hopes that things will get better. The brother who is skipping from one dead end job to another has an epiphany about how much better his life might be. The alcoholic aunt, at long last, checks into the rehab center. The United States decides that fear is not the best guide to domestic or foreign policy.

Love demands faith. In fact, love is faith. Not the type of faith that demands you believe in the unprovable, or the ridiculous, in the fashion of credo quia absurdum. Faith, in this sense, means the compulsion to do good, to persevere even in the face of your own incredulity.

This is the kind of faith shown, in the New Testament, by a Roman soldier who asks Jesus to cure his sick servant, even though he does not believe that Jesus has supernatural powers. Still, he must try any way he can to help his servant, which leads Jesus to comment, "Assuredly, I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel!"

Even for the unchurched, such as myself, you can see the secular equivalent of this story.