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World Cup quarterfinals, Ghana vs. Uruguay, Soccer City Stadium, Johannesburg. (Steve Evans / CC)

I was eating traditional African cuisine with a group of South Africans at a Melrose Arch, Jozi restaurant during the Ghana-Uruguay quarterfinals. The South Africans were pulling hard for Ghana’s Black Stars to advance to the semifinals since that would be a first for an African team. A week ago, Ghana had handily knocked out Team USA at Rustenburg’s Royal Bafokeng Stadium to make it to the quarters, so I decided to support “Baghana Baghana,” too.

After the match began, we waved our miniature Ghanan flags in between rich little bites of springbok, caramelized biltong and mielie-meal pap. “Ghana, make Africa proud!” one fan shouted at a table next to us. During additional time at the end of the first half, Ghana did just that. Its 25-year-old midfielder, Sulley Muntari, caught Uruguay’s keeper on the wrong foot and curled the ball into the right side of the net. “Beautiful goal,” mused an attractive woman with dreadlocks down to her waist. “Unstoppable,” our table agreed, as Muntari’s goal was replayed again and again on TV.

Then, at the beginning of the second half, Uruguay scored, making it 1-1. We took the goal in stride, and gulped our drinks while the opposing team’s blue-and-white striped fans chanted “olé olé olé!” at the stadium. Before we knew it, the match had moved into an extra half hour of time. Suddenly, Ghana’s striker, Dominic Adiyiah, headed a ball towards the goal just moments before overtime was up. Uruguay’s striker, Luis Suárez, who was standing on the goal line, countered by blocking Adiyiah’s header with his arm. The ref gave Suárez a red card for the handball and tossed him out of the match. “Boo!” someone shouted. The restaurant came alive as Ghana’s #3, Asamoah Gyan, prepared to take the free kick. The stakes were high; if the team’s top scorer made the goal, the Black Stars could advance to the semifinals. If not, the teams would have to settle the tie in a dangerous penalty shoot-out. Much to our dismay, Gyan’s shot missed, bouncing off the bar at the top of the goal. Uruguay subsequently proved better than Ghana in the penalty kicks that followed, and won the shoot-off, 4-2. The West African team—and Africa—was out of the World Cup.

Our table was devastated at the match’s outcome. “One scotch on the rocks,” called out a crushed fan. “Shame that Ghana lost. This was for Africa!” a Jozi filmmaker at the table added. “But Ghana is the better team though, isn’t it?” another insisted. The next day, we tried to come up with reasons why the Black Stars had missed not one, but three penalty kicks during the match. Nerves? Inexperience? A lack of resources at the professional level?

The whole thing got me thinking about a conversation I had in Cape Town earlier that week with Coaching for Hope, an NGO building Africa’s soccer squad from the ground up.

“We train coaches from marginalized communities. . .who can’t afford to access South African training,” one of the group’s coordinators, Norman Brook, told me.

Charlotte United Under 16 Football Club, at the end of a game against a local football team at the Chris Carter Soccer Field in Khayelitsha. The North Carolina team was on a tour organized by AMsportstours.

Coaching for Hope, which was created by UK charity Skillshare International, sends football pros like David Beckham, the famous English footballer married to Victoria “Posh Spice” Adams, to townships to teach basic coaching skills to ordinary players. Then the NGO helps the new coaches set up their own youth soccer teams in West and Southern Africa. Roma Traaore, a native of Burkina Faso, says he has benefited from the program. “I will teach them [children] to love the game, to play with joy and to learn fair play,” reads one of Traaore’s quotes on Coaching for Hope’s website. “My passion is to help children in my country play football.”

But even though it’s investing big in Africa’s soccer players, Coaching for Hope says it’s not focused on making the continent’s national teams the best in the world. “No doubt talent will amount from that, but we don’t view that as our job. We’re enabling them to coach and empowering them to address social issues like HIV/AIDS.” Brook says they’re doing that by combining lessons about substance abuse, women’s empowerment and HIV/AIDS prevention with soccer practice on the field. There are more than 22 million people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s two thirds of the total HIV/AIDS population worldwide.

Although Coaching for Hope says there’s still plenty of work to do, it reports it has been able to get 700 coaches and 30,000 African children trained and playing football on the pitch. That’s something to watch out for at the 2014 World Cup.

Temple Cone, an associate professor of English at the United States Naval Academy, has published a book of poems and five chapbooks. He is now finishing a book of ghazals, from which five poems appear in our summer issue. His poetry has appeared in publications such as the Christian Science Monitor, storySouth, and the Beloit Poetry Journal. Here, he meditates on music, haiku, scholarship, and the natural world.

1. Your poems in this issue are full of classical musicians and references to music. How does music interact with your writing?
Well, music and poetic form are rather close: in both cases, you’re dealing with abstractions that nevertheless have sensuous effects. So it doesn’t surprise me that Dante and Olivier Messiaen appear together in one of my poems; they both create complex yet utterly efficient structures that are themselves expressive and meaningful. Perhaps the surprise is that more musicians don’t show up! I happen to have been interested in classical music from an early age, but I’m fairly ecumenical in my taste; Vic Chesnutt and Henry Purcell share equal time on my iPod.

Or were you wondering about the practical matter of writing to music? I can say that I find it difficult to write with much noise at all, let alone music. That’s not the case when I’m revising, though the music usually can’t be vocal (unless it’s a language I don’t understand). Counterpoint and complex structures really draw me, so Bach is all over my iPod, but I also like the rhythms of 20th century composers like Peter Warlock, Messiaen, John Tavener, Meredith Monk, and Arvo Part. One of my favorite recent pieces is Eleni Karaindrou’s Ulysses’ Gaze, which is very somber and haunting, but reassuring, too.

2. All five of the poems have the same form—a special three-line ghazal. The poems also share an easy familiarity with the range of Western artistic tradition, from Mozart to Messiaen, King Proteus to Kierkegaard. Did the form and content of these poems appear organically in the first draft, or did they come about in later revisions?
The form was there from the beginning, but something about it gave me permission to deal with the content. I’ve always been attracted to the classical ghazal’s incantatory and phantasmagoric properties (they appeal to my inner Coleridge, I suppose), but the form seemed unnecessarily tidy and tight, even prissy. These modified ghazals lengthen the traditional couplets to tercets and fix the number of stanzas at six, sometimes with, sometimes without, the refrain word at the end of each stanza that tethers the poem’s associative leaps of the imagination. They feel bigger and shaggier, with more room for wild associations than the classical ghazal, and as soon as I started writing them, I felt free to slip the lyric mode of my earlier poems, with their sense of a stable self and their attention to image and emotional experience. What’s ironic is that these poems ‘sound’ a lot more like what’s going on in my head much of the time. That may be the ‘easy familiarity with the range of Western artistic tradition’ you’re talking about, though your phrase is entirely too generous and makes me sound far savvier than I am. Hemingway had his “grace under pressure”; these poems may be “dabbling under pressure.”

I began writing these ghazals a few years ago, and have completed a book-length manuscript since, though I continue to write new poems in the form. They’re weird and wild to write; I won’t claim to be taking dictation from angels as Blake did, but sometimes they seem to arise quite of their accord. I think the way I write them speaks to the way they range and rove. I rise early—a little before 4 AM—and do as little as possible to rouse myself—no newspaper, no computer, no coffee (not always!). Sitting on the couch, I write whatever came to mind, be that an abstraction, an image, a mangled quotation, whatever, no matter how strange or disconnected from my waking thoughts. Usually I’m too tired to judge what I’ve written, and that makes it easier to start asking questions—about where the line is going; about what other images, phrases, or words could cohabit with it; how I might top it rhetorically; etc. The drafts are varied, copious, and always surprising, since I often can’t quite remember writing them. Sometimes I draft two or three poems in a couple of hours and revise them over the next couple of weeks; sometimes I end up with drafts of stanzas that develop into new poems a few days later; sometimes I write a poem with scarcely an edit.

3. These poems are very interested in the natural world, in mayflies and hummingbirds. At the same time, there is an implicit criticism of such naturalistic poetry, with the line “[t]here is no end to the rabble of poets who write about butterflies.” What do you consider to be your relationship with the natural world?
At home, and not at home. I know what it’s like to be inspired by the natural world, to want to capture that moment of awe or wonder in a poem, but I’m wary of all that happens between the initial encounter and the final revision. It’s too easy to make nature a proxy for the self. There’s an early poem by Robert Hass, “On the Coast Near Sausalito,” where he writes that “it’s strange to kill / for the sudden feel of life. / The danger is / to moralize / that strangeness.” That captures it for me: an experience of nature that is at once intuitive yet highly self-conscious and guarded about its intentions. I guess you could call it a scientific attitude, one that is appreciative, admiring, inquisitive, analytical, and skeptical all at once. I politely disagree with Wordsworth that “we murder to dissect”; I think scientific knowledge intensifies reverence and de-sentimentalizes our attitudes towards nature, which are really just attitudes about ourselves. My wife is a botanist, and several of our friends are ecologists, and simply by being in their company I have learned many things about the flora and fauna of the regions where I’ve lived. That education has made me intimate with my surroundings, and such intimacy has fostered greater reverence and respect than if I’d simply kept an Emersonian view of nature as a temple of the heart. Once you understand what deer overpopulation can do to woodland orchid populations, for instance, you stop being soft-hearted about hunting, especially in the absence of large predators.

I shouldn’t cast stones, though, for my own poems have often treated nature as a place of spiritual instruction and rejuvenation, and I don’t believe it’s inherently wrong to engage the world this way. Indeed, such poetry can move people learn to care about nature in the first place; here I agree with what Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude, that the things of this world “through the turnings intricate of verse, / Present themselves as objects recognized, / In flashes, and with glory not their own.” But I think a dangerous complacency sets in if we regard nature too long as a spiritual text, if we look out at woods, rivers, plains, and whatnot, and come to see only our own values manifest.

4. You write a column for Daily Haiku and refer to Kobayashi Issa in “The Rest of Silence.” How does haiku affect your style?
I’ve been reading haiku for years, ever since I found a copy of Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North at summer camp when I was thirteen (I still have it, along with my guilt about its theft). But I didn’t begin writing haiku seriously until a few years ago, and when I say seriously, I mean with a full commitment to the traditions of that mode. Too often, the haiku that I wrote early on were simply three-line versions of what I was already doing in my longer lyric poems. But haiku isn’t really a form into which you can squeeze any subject, emotion, or experience. It’s a stance, really, a bit like zazen, the Zen sitting meditation in which attention to form is, in a sense, the spiritual content of the practice. And when I started writing them in earnest, I realized that a lot of the poems I thought were haiku were in fact senryu, another three-line mode in which the subject isn’t nature but human nature. That discovery was a bit of egg on the face for the college English professor, let me tell you. But I’m grateful to haiku for making me a beginner again: for all the publications I might claim, I’m still the person I was when I started writing poems fifteen years ago, can still fail wretchedly, can still exhilarate at the least moment of grace. I think Issa would laugh at me, and then with me, on that count.

As for how haiku affects my style: I could offer any number of familiar observations about the importance of image, compression, or diction in haiku, and they’d all be true, but the unexpected benefit is how haiku demands that one work with grammatical incompleteness. There’s just not a lot of room in three lines and seventeen or fewer syllables, so all sorts of grammatical connections have to be jettisoned. In a way, the associative leaps of the long-lined ghazals dispense with connections, too (logical, if not grammatical), by stretching the bonds between images, lines, or stanzas beyond easily explicable limits (how’d I get from Shakespeare to Wile E. Coyote?). I actually began writing these haiku at the same time that I started writing the long-lined ghazals, and it’s interesting to go back over my journals and see tiny haiku paired with sprawling, messy, eighteen-line poems that run from margin to margin. It’s a real Mutt and Jeff relationship.

5. As a holder of both an MFA in creative writing and PhD in English literature, how do you balance your scholarly work with your creative work? Does synergy occur?
Creative writing and scholarship have not always been cooperative practices for me. The kind of openness I need to create images, play with words, and make associative connections below or beyond my rational mind is often at odds with the logical analysis, rhetorical clarity, and balancing of others’ arguments that scholarship demands. Yet poetry and scholarship are both ways for me to engage with literature and with the world at large. Sometimes I feel like an ambidextrous pitcher who can change pitching hands between games but not between innings. I can say that poets I’ve written articles about—Robinson Jeffers, Ted Hughes, Les Murray, Denise Levertov, Ciaran Carson—engaged me first as a fellow poet, one drawn to image and rhythm and voice, so deeply, perhaps, that my research was simply an extension of my excitement about their work. Scholarship, in turn, exposes me to writers, moments of history, bodies of thought, and odd sorts of information I’m not sure I’d have encountered or sought out otherwise (like that bit about Hamlet’s O-moans that I mention in “The Rest of Silence”).

6. What projects are you planning for the future?
Well, I just learned that my second book, The Broken Meadow, received the 2010 Old Seventy Creek Poetry Prize, so I’ll be (enthusiastically!) involved with that for a while. Meanwhile, I’m trying to find a publisher for the book of ghazals, which is tentatively titled Tangofugue, though I’m also still writing poems in that mode. I’ve also been experimenting with formal(ish) poems that make use of this weird voice that sounds really familiar to me—downhome, educated, embittered, and enraptured. These new poems are all about eros, faith, dialect, and the rural landscape of the South. They ask what it means to be devoted: to a spouse, to a child, to an upbringing, to a locale, to a life of poetry, to the divine. I’ve written a bunch of them, and though I’ve got a sense of a broader sequence in which they fit together, I’m more interested in writing the next one, and the next one after that. It’s like what Creeley wrote: “drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going.”

7. What have you been reading lately?
Summer is the time to soak up all the books I don’t get to read during the year, when I’m more narrowly focused on the books I teach in class and on recent poetry. The books currently scattered around my house are themselves a bit scattered in content: Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; George Eliot’s Middlemarch; James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599; Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations; and Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. I’m also eagerly awaiting the release of Alan Furst’s new spy novel. As far as scholarship goes, I’m doing some research on a fine play by John Patrick Shanley, Defiance (so I’m reading a number of Vietnam Era histories) and finishing a reference book on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is so miserable (though beautiful) a book that I can only take solace in the lightest confections of all: P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels. As for recent poetry, I’ve really enjoyed Kevin McFadden’s Hardscrabble, Sandra Beasley’s Theories of Falling, and Jehanne Dubrow’s Stateside, and I’m rereading a beautiful, heartening, and savagely funny book by a friend and former classmate of mine, Deborah Slicer’s The White Calf Kicks.

A security guard outside the McDonald’s in Islamabad. (Copyright Hassan Sulehri)

Islamabad, January–February 2010

The Western diplomat cuts two lines of cocaine on his iPhone and snorts them with a 100 rupee bill.

“Pure Colombian,” he says. “Don’t be shy.”

I shake my head.

“A bit of jet lag I expect?” he says glancing about my room and inquiring about my fourteen-hour flight from the States.

“Some, yes,” I say.

We first met in Afghanistan in 2003. He was a source. We got to know each other and became friends in the way I become friends with people I use for information; constant contact bred familiarity. We remained in touch after he was assigned to Islamabad. I e-mailed him as I prepared for this trip and he agreed to meet me in my guesthouse.

“Tell me, how many bomb attacks in the last year?“ he says tapping the butt of a cigarette against the arm of his chair. “Basically every day somewhere here, somewhere there, two a day at least. They are well trained, they know where to hit. It’s different than Iraq but just as tragic.”

He licks the coke off his iPhone and drops it in his coat pocket.

“Bush was prepared to fight forever and send military in perpetuity. Symbolically, Obama wants this to end by 2012. The civilized world looks at its watches. These guys don’t have watches but they have a hell of a lot of time. Fighting is in their blood. They use a sweet name, Islam, to give their fighting a purpose and to portray the feelings of a society.”

Since I was last here, he explains, the people have become very cautious. Not so long ago they would walk to a park and enjoy a day outside with their children. In the evening, houses filled with visiting family. Now, empty streets reveal a city on edge. Fear prevails. Afghan refugees have become targets of harassment for bringing “their” war to Pakistan. Overcrowded jails make ideal recruiting grounds as fundamentalist inmates mingle with common criminals.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Lluís Gerard / CC

For at least a decade now, meals at my dad’s house have begun with a short grace, of Buddhist origin: Thank you for this food, the work of many hands and the sharing of other forms of life. Neither my dad nor my step-mom are Buddhist, but they adhere strongly to the practice of saying this grace and I can understand why. Unlike other pre-meal offerings of thanks, this grace is quick, tangible, and profound. Mixing a reverence for life, labor, and the natural world, it could just as well be a slogan for the Slow Food movement. These words have been on my mind recently, after eating a particularly tasty roast chicken—rubbed with fresh herbs and butter—whose life, death, and afterlife I was able to observe from close range.

This chicken, a three-pound Red Ranger raised on fresh pasture and organic feed, grew up with a hundred and forty nine of its cousins at Dinner Bell Farm. Founded just a few months ago by my friends Cooper, Marina, Molly, and Paul, Dinner Bell Farm resides in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. Although I have for many years done my best to buy organic produce and sustainable meat, to shop at farmers’ markets and support local producers, this was the first time I knew the many hands whose work produced the meal, the first time I felt attached to those other forms of life I was sharing.

I’ve known Cooper since I was eight. While I don’t think he wanted to be a farmer back then, the dream of Dinner Bell Farm has been percolating for a long time. Imagining our future selves,  those strange people with careers and spouses and mortgages, Cooper was always a farmer, and I always a writer. He was drawn to his vocation, I think, by many of the same reasons I was drawn to mine: the noble simplicity of the work, the slow accumulation of knowledge, the many hours of hard, solitary labor, and an end product others can enjoy. There were other jobs along the way, but the dream farm was always there. And now the dream is real. After years of preparation and planning—including a year at UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and a range of apprenticeships—the four of them took the plunge, lit out into the country and founded Dinner Bell Farm.

Seeing the chickens as newborn balls of fuzz, watching them preening about their enclosure, and talking to Cooper about the details of their life cycle—their arrival one morning at the Chicago Park post office, the mobile slaughter unit, the construction of the silo, the constant fear of predators—all this contributed to the richness of the meal that was the chicken’s afterlife. Just as a bottle of wine or an antique chair is enhanced by knowledge of its production and provenance, food is enriched by knowledge of its past, by a sustained meditation on the life it once was and a reverence for all the work, the many hands, that brought it to the table.

I knew I had arrived at the World Cup when I heard the sound of a vuvuzela bounce off the walls of Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo International Airport. The noise of the long plastic soccer horn wasn’t widely recognized outside South Africa until this year’s World Cup. But now every soccer fan knows a vuvuzela’s call is like a foghorn or a donkey braying, or—when blown in unison—like a nest of loud angry hornets. To many fans, the vuvuzela’s call is an aural safety hazard and an annoyance. But it sets off pure, unadulterated excitement in me, especially when I heard it moments after landing in South Africa.

My first World Cup match was going down at a newly constructed stadium in Durban, a beach town in South Africa that’s about half the size of Jo’burg on the Indian Ocean. South Korea and Nigeria were the two contenders in the match. And I had company: my boyfriend, Mansoor, and two good friends who had flown in from Paris. After meeting up at the airport, we all piled into a rented red Toyota Corolla sedan at the airport and headed to Durban.

There were few signs of football fever on the dusty six-hour drive. The horizon was flat and broken up by an occasional rust-colored butte and herds of curly-horned cattle. Here and there, we saw hitchhikers and laborers ambling along the side of the road, carrying packs, axes, and agricultural tools. We got the first sign that South Africa was hosting 32 of the world’s best soccer teams at a rest stop diner called Maxi’s. Our toasties and coffees were dropped off by a server wearing a yellow “World Cup” T-shirt emblazoned with South Africa’s green, red, yellow, blue, black, and white flag.

As we got closer to Durban, we picked up a World Cup match on the radio. It was Portugal dominating North Korea, 7-nil. Our ears popped as the Toyota wended its way through curvy passes and plumes of smoke coming from farmers burning fields to rejuvenate grazing pastures. Soon, the N3 highway became congested, and we heard Punjabi music playing on the radio. Indian laborers first came to Durban to harvest sugar cane in the late 1800s; the city is now home to South Africa’s largest concentration of people of South Asian descent. We entered Durban’s city limits, and soon clapped eyes on the ocean, tropical palm trees, and Durban’s Moses Mabhida football stadium.

Moses Mabhida football stadium. Bruce Smee / CC

The newly built stadium sits on Isaiah Ntshangase Road next to King’s Park Soccer Stadium. It was barely finished in time for Durban’s first World Cup match in mid-June. As we walked to the stadium for our South Korea-Nigeria march, it looked like a clamshell, cracked open and aglow with fluorescent light. Our seats had cost $80, and as such, were in the nosebleed section of the stadium. Still, we were positioned at center pitch and could see the field below.

The people in our section were mostly Durbanite families, and at least initially, appeared to be casual fans. However, it soon became clear that the match was going to be a nail-biter. Kalu Uche, #12, scored Nigeria’s first goal thirteen minutes into the game, and celebrated by wagging his tongue and flapping his arms like a chicken. The locals in our row, like much of the stadium, were up on their feet after that. Some of them had Nigeria’s flag painted on one cheek and South Africa’s flag on the other, indicating that they were backing African teams since their own team had been knocked out of the second round earlier that day. “Since I’m an African, I’m rooting for Nigeria,” a female South African security officer told me at the gate.

South Korea’s #14, Lee Jung-Soo, scored the next goal 38 minutes into the game. “Yes! Yes! Good boy!” shouted a woman in a red jacket, South Korea’s color, sitting behind me. A teenager in a black and red South Korea shirt beside her blew his red vuvuzela, too. Opposite our section, a well-coordinated group of South Korea fans waved a giant red and white flag after the goal, and a brass band started to play its fight song.

Suddenly, half-time was upon us. The score was 1-1. Television screens above each goal showed Colombia’s favorite pop star, Shakira, belting out “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa),” which has become one of the World Cup’s anthems. As the players ran onto the field, tensions ran high. Nigeria had to beat South Korea to make it to the knockout stage, or the next round of 16.

Four minutes into the second half, South Korea’s #10 made Nigeria’s task more difficult. Park Chu-Young punched a free kick into the goal from outside the penalty box on the left wing. That made the score 2-1, South Korea. The mother behind me cackled and shouted her support, and the boy’s red vuvuzela wailed again. Seventeen minutes later, Nigeria’s forest green-clad players tied the match thanks to a penalty kick from #8 Yakubu Aiyegbeni that easily went past the South Korean keeper. The score was now 2-2. But Nigeria still needed to score another goal to win the match and advance—something they could not manage to do despite many missed opportunities. As the final whistle blew, the winning squad charged to the South Korean section of fans to celebrate while the Nigerian players fell to their knees, knowing their time at the World Cup had come to a premature end.

I played soccer up until I moved to New York at age twenty. But during the time I played, I never attended a professional soccer tournament and am still trying to wrap my head around the culture of football. America’s basketball, baseball, and football stadiums are souped up with massive scoreboards and jumbotrons, bombarding fans with player statistics and replays so that fans can judge the referees’ calls. The Durban Moses Mabhida stadium has two medium-sized screens that show the game, but there is no official game clock, or extra information about the team or its squads. The players get the game time from coaches on the sidelines, and fans just have to keep track of the clock, or use binoculars to read it on the television screen.

As we got sucked into a throng of ecstatic South Korean fans, I couldn’t wait for my next World Cup game. Not even the two-hour shuttle bus ride to our rental car dampened my mood. I went to bed thinking about who would make it to the round of 16 game we were going to the next week in Cape Town.

Well, the McChrystal Deathwatch is officially over and the good general did not survive. There’s little grace or meaning in watching a distinguished warrior like McChrystal go down, the victim of his own rogue mouth. In case you haven’t heard, a damning Rolling Stone profile written by freelancer Michael Hastings has appeared in which members of the general’s staff go on record describing the National Security Advisor as “a clown” and the President as “uncomfortable” and “intimidated” by military brass. At one point in the piece, McChrystal is shown being aggravated by an email from envoy Richard Holbrooke, groaning, “Oh not another e-mail from Holbrooke . . . I don’t even want to open it.”

As recently as last week, McChrystal, the commanding general in Afghanistan, was being portrayed in the press as a vision of soldierly virtue, Petraeus’s Protégé, the Man Who Never Sleeps, the Fittest General in American History, a pasha of pain who reportedly runs twelve miles every morning, seems to hold food in disdain, wolfing down a single meal a day. He was a man who lived everyday as if his old Ranger School instructors were still watching, making notes on their clipboards for the upcoming patrol debrief. If he had a weakness, it was his barrack-room soul, his penchant for rough humor, the sort of squad bay posturing that got Patton in hot water in World War II (he slapped a soldier and was relieved). The son of an army two-star, he and his three other brothers all went in. Even his lone female sibling signed on for a second tour, marrying an army officer. Like most of the people he grew up with, Stanley McChrystal seems to have been born a soldier, which was may have been the problem all along as he seemed to lack respect for civilians, particularly the ones elected to lead the country.

In the end it was a freelancer who didn’t give a damn about how many bridges got burned who brought the general down, a reporter who’d lost his fiancé in Baghdad in 2006 (she was a reporter, too) and who wrote an unloved memoir about it (the Times panned it) and who when I met him last year exuded the sort of undiluted hypervigilence that I have always associated with people who have untreated PTSD. (Full Disclosure: I ran into Hastings at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony last July and did two rounds with him at a local Provincetown bar, the name of which I predictably cannot recall.)

What Hastings wrote was a classic Rolling Stone burn piece—not unlike Evan Wright’s 2004 Ellie-winning series “Generation Kill” about the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, which shortened a few Marine careers—an article short on tactical context and understanding but long on color. What Hastings’s piece showed was not a warrior-priest at the height of his powers (as virtually every previous New York Times profile had) but an aging snake-eater with the mouth of a longshoreman and an axe to grind with the Beltway, trading obscenities with his entourage like it was happy hour at the Bragg O-club. It’s hard to imagine a more damaging profile than what appeared on Rolling Stone’s website on Tuesday and you have to wonder if the old man wasn’t secretly asking Hastings to take him out of his misery, and you can imagine him aching to give the civvies the finger, let the chips fall where they may. It’s no great mystery that seasoned warriors like McChrystal harbor a secret relationship with their self-destructive side, what Conrad called “the fascination of the abomination.” You don’t habitually parachute out of airplanes nor go to shuras in treacherous tribal areas without body armor if you don’t enjoy stepping up to the brink from time to time, both in word and deed. And with a samurai like McChrystal there was never, ever any doubt about his physical courage, except to wonder if he didn’t suffer from a surplus of it, if his valor didn’t in some way deafen him to the better angels of his nature or force him to rely too heavily on his physical vigor to the detriment of his compassion, prevent him from cultivating the killer empathic sense that both Lee and T.E. Lawrence possessed which allowed them to project themselves into the mind of their opposite, be it an enemy commander or a visiting journalist.

Well, his career, whatever it was exactly, is over now. There is no glory in his demise, McChrystal was a stiff but he was no villain, no glad-handing Westmoreland. Still, looking back, it is easy to see that he was the wrong man for the job. The great counterinsurgents in history have nearly always been scholar/artists in military costume, men who led more with their minds and their humanity than with their bodies. Men like T.E. Lawrence, Robert Thompson, H.R. McMaster and, it must be said, David Petraeus. Leaders of this sort tend to cultivate geeky public personas, coming across as dweebs, brainy dudes bent on out-thinking the enemy. Typical of this is Mark Bowden’s recent Vanity Fair profile of Petraeus, “The Professor of War.” Compare this with the New York Times profile of McChrystal that ran shortly before his ascension to the Afghanistan command in September 2009. The final beat of the article ran with a quote from Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, “If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal, I think of no body fat.”

McChrystal’s previous military record doesn’t paint a picture of an officer with a background for the murky logic of tribal diplomacy or insurgent reconciliation, both of which played a central role in Iraq. From September 2003 to August 2008, he led the Joint Special Operations Command, the most secretive force in the US military that operated on the most old-fashioned principles about how to win a guerilla war: find the bad guys and kill them. One of the units under McChrystal’s command, Task Force 6-26 was credited with killing the Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and while there can be little doubt as to the brutal efficiency of these sorts of operations, it remains unclear how relevant they are and it was exactly this sort of mentality that Petraeus seemed to be railing against in Iraq when he said “you can’t kill your way to victory.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Task Force 6-26 was later implicated in a post-Abu Ghraib interrogation investigation and 34 members of the unit were formally disciplined. Even more troubling is McChrystal’s role in the Pat Tillman friendly fire cover-up which happened under his command, where he signed off on Tillman’s Silver Star award citation which omitted any mention that it was friendly fire that killed the former NFL star.

It is still a little difficult to believe that an accomplished fifty-five-year-old officer would say and allow his staff to say the outrageous things in the Rolling Stone article. You can just hear the chorus in Washington: “What was he thinking?” But then, I think McChrystal and his buddies didn’t expect that Hastings would actually write down everything they said and put it into print. It’s an unfortunate staple of Beltway journalism that has bled over into war reporting that most reporters are loathe to burn their sources by writing derogatory things about them. To be blunt, most reporters are as career-obsessed as the officers they’re interviewing and they don’t want to poison the well. This is doubly true if the officer being interviewed is a four-star general. There is a simple reciprocity involved: if you want to be invited back to ride on The Boss’s helicopter, if you want continued access, you’d better not write about his soft spot for strippers and gin. That said, it’s a naturally antagonistic relationship and most officers hate reporters because they represent a threat to their reputations. There are no medals awarded for conspicuous gallantry in a press conference. As one unusually shrewd captain explained to me at a remote outpost in Iraq one evening: “Listen Dave, I know you’re gonna screw me. I understand that that’s how this works. I just want to know how you’re gonna screw me.” It is for this reason that written into the embed agreement that all reporters must sign is a clause that states in capital letters, “ALL CONVERSATIONS WITH MILITARY PERSONNEL ARE ON THE RECORD.”

Enter into this mix Michael Hastings, a reporter who apparently had made a decision at some point to not play by the normal rules; who can be friendly, interested, and reasonably non-threatening in-person; whose brother is an army officer; and who was writing for what is primarily a pop culture magazine. McChrystal and his staff, jangled and beat-down after literally years of being in and out of various combat zones, probably thought they were coming across as hip and irreverent in front of the Rolling Stone guy, knowing that there was a far better chance their teenage daughters were going to read about them there than in the back pages of the National Review. Of course, many of those staff officers are now dealing with what amounts to the final mistake of their careers within an organization that doesn’t forgive much in the way of media fiascos.

In retrospect, I see two problems in Hastings’s kind of merciless, sacred-cow-tipping approach to war reporting, the most obvious of which is that he will probably never be allowed to embed with an American military unit ever again. The other, trickier problem has to do with his clear, unqualified contempt for the official US counterinsurgency strategy. In his article, Hastings derides the Pentagon’s counterinsurgent priesthood as the “COINdinistas.” Fair enough. But what does he offer as an alternative? Not much as it turns out. And this is something that has always frustrated me about Rolling Stone’s coverage of America’s recent wars: they take great pains to penetrate the military subculture but give us only caricatures and thinly veiled mockery with little time given to an adult discussion of the issues. Totally absent is any cold-blooded assessment of the challenges facing our troops. And there is something distasteful about a well-educated reporter who would never, ever join the military himself, dropping into a war zone for a month and doing a drive-by on a guy who’s dedicated his every waking hour for the last thirty years to the study of war.

Also missing in action from Hastings’s oeuvre is any discussion of the tactical alternatives in Afghanistan, namely the approach championed by Joe Biden and noted historian Andrew Bacevich, a retired colonel who lost a son in Iraq. Their school of thought, which I happen to support, strikes a balance between the current Surge 2.0 strategy and outright disengagement, re-focusing the American mission on the problem that got us into Afghanistan in the first place: preventing a major terrorist attack on the US homeland. The priority of the Biden-Bacevich approach is on destroying Al Qaeda, not the Taliban and its affiliated insurgent groups. It is a counterterrorism approach that would require at most 30,000 troops, not the current nation-building strategy which necessitates six times that many. To my way of thinking, this is common sense, yet here we are, ignoring the maxim bolted above the entryway to every war college in America that says: Don’t Re-fight the Last War. And this is my parting challenge to readers: how do you explain to a Marine on his fourth combat tour why he is fighting in Helmand province while all available intelligence indicates that the bulk of the Al Qaeda leadership is hundreds of miles away in the northwest tribal areas of Pakistan?

McChrystal’s time is over and so is another phase in the longest war in US history. Let’s hope he has enough good sense to do what Douglas MacArthur said all old soldiers should do and then didn’t do himself: just fade away.

We have word from Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour’s family within Iran that he is alive but again being held in solitary confinement at Evin Prison in Tehran. He was allowed to make a brief phone call his mother to confirm his health. His mother reports that Mohammad Reza’s voice was calm.

We ask the Iranian government to release Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour. To repeatedly arrest, detain, and torture members of the opposition only serves to further undermine the legitimacy of last year’s elections and to lessen the authority of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If the Iranian government wishes to show their strength, they should release Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour and others like him held at Evin Prison.

We present below a video produced by some of Jalaeipour’s friends, provided here with English subtitles:

The death of Portuguese novelist and Nobel prize winner José Saramago is a great loss to the world of literature. In his towering, comma-strewn paragraphs, Saramago created a singular voice, combining the craftsmanship of an old world storyteller and the craftiness of a post-modern trickster. A magical fabulist working in the medium of history, Saramago deserves a much wider readership, in this country and beyond. Instead of singing his praises, perhaps it is best to let his words sing for themselves.

As an entrance point, this quote does well: “The truth is that history could have been written in many different ways and this idea of infinitude and variation are the essence of my writing. The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.”

Blindness, page 265:

There being no witnesses, and if there were there is no evidence that they were summoned to the post-mortems to tell us what happened, it is understandable that someone should ask how it was possible to know that these things happened so and not in some other manner, the reply to be given is that all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed what happened.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon, page 20:

The historian, who only speaks of minaret and muezzin, is probably unaware that nearly all muezzins, at the time and for some time to come, were blind. And if he is aware of this fact, perhaps he imagines that the chanting of prayers is the special vocation of the disables, or that the Moorish communities so decided, partly, as has always been and always will be the practice, to solve the problem of giving work to people without the precious organ of sight. An error on his part, this time, which invariably affects everyone. The historical truth, take note, is that the muezzins were chosen from amongst the blind, not because of any humanitarian policy of providing work or professional training they could cope with physically, but to prevent them from infringing upon the privacy of the courtyards and roof terraces from the dominant position at the top of the minaret. The proof-reader no longer remembers how he came by this information, he almost certainly must have read it in some book he trusted, and since nothing has changed, he can now insist that, yes, Sir, muezzins were blind. Almost all of them.

The Stone Raft, page 1:

When Joana Carda scratched the ground with the elm branch all the dogs of Cerbere began to bark, throwing the inhabitants into panic and terror, because from time immemorial it was believed that, when these canine creatures that had always been silent started to bark, the entire universe was nearing its end. No one remembers any longer the origin of this deep-rooted superstition, or firm conviction, in many cases these are simply alternative ways of expressing the same thing, but as so often happens, having heard the story and now passing it on with fresh distortions, French grandmothers used to amuse their grandchildren with the fable that in the times of the ancient Greek myths, here, in the district of Cerbere in the Eastern Pyrenees, a dog with three heads and the above-mentioned named of Cerberus had barked when summoned by its master, the ferryman Charon. We are equally unclear about the organic change this legendary howling canine must have undergone to acquire the historically proven muteness of its degenerate one-headed offspring. Nevertheless, and this is a point of doctrine known to almost everyone, especially to those of the older generation, the dog Cerberus, as written and pronounced in English, guarded with ferocity the gates of hell, so that no soul would dare try to escape, and then, perhaps as one final act of mercy on the part of the moribund gods, all the dogs fell silent for the rest of eternity, perhaps hoping that their silence might erase the memory of the infernal regions. But since the everlasting does not last forever, as the modern age has clearly shown us, it sufficed that a few days ago and hundreds of kilometers from Cerbere, somewhere in Portugal, in a place whose name we shall record anon, a woman named Joana Carda scratched the ground with an elm branch whereupon all the dogs came onto the streets howling, dogs, let me remind you, that had never barked before. Were someone to ask Joana Carda what had possessed her to scratch the ground with an elm branch, more the gesture of a moonstruck adolescent than that of a mature woman, if she had not thought of the possible consequences of an act that seemed meaningless, and these are the most dangerous acts of all, perhaps she might reply, I don’t know what came over me, the branch was lying on the ground, I picked it up and drew a line. She had no idea that it might be a magic wand.

[Editor’s Note: One year ago today, Iason Athanasiadis became the only foreign journalist to be detained during Iran’s post-election unrest. He writes here, in the first installment of this account, about the weeks he spent inside and outside Evin Prison before and after the crackdown.]

TEHRAN—June 12, 2009

Iran was at history’s doorstep, and my entry visa was delayed.

The sharp antagonisms simmering beneath the surface of Iranian society for three decades had burst to the surface when the Islamic Republic decided to emulate the electrifying American campaign that Barrack Obama had just won and treat its citizens to live televised debates between the presidential candidates. For a secretive regime that always closes ranks to protect its own, Ahmadinejad’s accusation of corruption against two-time former president Hashemi Rafsanjani live on television—an accusation every Iranian knows is true—breached an invisible psychological barrier. Crowds had surged onto the streets, dancing night after night, a weeklong street party.

Unprecedented demonstrations surged merrily past every limit and restriction on public meetings laid down by the Islamic Republic. Suddenly, anything seemed possible—and I was waiting for my visa.

I had lived in Iran from 2004 to 2007, and I was eager to be back in Tehran to witness their “Obama moment.” The friends I made there were, for the most part, creative, open-minded, secular internationalists open to the West but, unlike many of their compatriots, not enchanted by it. Far from being elites, most were solidly middle class and did not speak a foreign language Because they did not hew to either extreme in the simplistic narrative promoted by the Western media about Iran—neither working class traditionalist fanatics or upper-class Westernized party animals—their voices struggled to emerge. As far as the world was concerned, they did not exist.

But they were a fascinating barometer of Iranian society. By the summer of 2009, this generation—which I had described as “the unruly children and grandchildren of the same revolutionaries who riotously brought the Islamic Revolution into being in 1978”—seemed poised to make its stand on the streets. The entire world was suddenly captivated by their resistance and verve. “Today, this generation makes Iran one of the youngest societies on earth,” I wrote in 2007. “Far more than the prospect of nuclear energy, they constitute the most extraordinary transformational force invisibly working away within the country’s fabric.”

But until my visa was approved, I had to content myself by flying London to deliver a paper at a conference marking the Islamic Republic’s thirtieth anniversary. Facing an audience of experts on Iran that included several gentlemen from the Iranian embassy, I lightheartedly began by describing myself as having exactly the kind of characteristics attributed by the Islamic Republic to Western spies—an Oxford education, fluent Persian and Arabic, three years of living in Iran without holding a fixed job, and a British passport. The audience tittered; the Iranians diplomats regarded me stonily.

The next day, I was informed that my visa had finally been approved. The Iranian ambassador in Athens kindly issued it for me in London and within twenty-four hours I was streaking across the Mediterranean. The night flight from London touched down in Doha’s stifling summer darkness, and I transferred onto an Iran Airways flight for the hop over the Persian Gulf to Tehran. By the time I cleared customs and engaged an airport cab to take me into the city, the sun had risen. Everywhere on the streets were remnants of the previous nights’ festivities—green ribbons, posters of the candidates, and trampled confetti. Pockets of diehard revelers remained at street corners, facing off with rival slogans.

I collected my press accreditation at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, then sought out a source whose tips had in the past been reliable. Mousavi’s last-minute surge had turned the tables on Ahmadinejad. But my friend’s prediction stretched credulity: not only would Ahmadinejad win, he said, but he would do it in the first round and by a landslide too.

I scoffed at the tip, thinking that my source—a deeply intellectual current affairs watcher and Marxist who despised the Islamic Republic—had finally gone over the brink of his despair into delusional nihilism.

But I then remembered a conversation I had following Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005 with a close childhood friend of his. At a time when 2009 appeared an impossibly distant date, he had warned me that there are more than 12 million bassijis (a nationwide religious militia that in peacetime enforces public morality, supports Ahmadinejad, and tries to re-Islamize public life) and the Sepah (Revolutionary Guard) had a goal to eventually have 20 million with the intention of controlling a presidential election through the bassij votes.

“The Sepah people privately say that in the next elections we’ll have 15 million bassij which is a threshold number that will allow them to elect the president decisively.”

I had no access to definitive statistics on the size of the bassij but in the streets of Tehran it was an open secret that Ahmadinejad was encouraging their rebirth. It seemed that they were about to flex their muscles. What we did not know at the time was that Mousavi’s supporters would indulge in some muscle-flexing of their own. And that confrontation would prompt the largest wave of arrests since the Revolution. Including my own.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fatemeh Shams and Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour.

As our Summer issue is on its way to subscribers and newsstands comes troubling news that the husband of one of our contributors has been arrested again by Iranian security forces.

Oxford PhD student Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour, who campaigned for opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi in 2009, was arrested on Monday afternoon, June 14, according to his wife, Fatemeh Shams.

Jalaeipour was first arrested on June 17, 2009. After attending a family wedding in Iran, Jalaeipour was prevented from boarding a flight to Dubai. He and his wife had been returning to the UK to continue their studies. The couple were members of the Third Wave campaign, a reformist youth movement that eventually backed Moussavi in the Iranian presidential election last year. Jalaeipour told the Wall Street Journal that, inspired by the Obama campaign, he had created pages on Facebook to reach young Iranian voters. After his 2009 arrest, Jalaeipour endured eighty days of imprisonment including more than fifty days in solitary confinement at the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. After his release, Jalaeipour remained in Iran with his parents, as his passport had been confiscated. His wife currently lives in the UK where she also attends Oxford.

According to Shams, Jalaeipour was told by authorities on Monday that he should go to a local mosque to finally receive his passport. Instead, Jalaeipour came home from the mosque with five plainclothes agents and then was taken away to Evin Prison. Shams says the reasons for her husband’s rearrest have not been made clear. Before Monday’s events, Iran’s judiciary had reportedly declared his case closed.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Jalaeipour’s original arrest. Jalaeipour and his wife have now been separated for a year. VQR’s Summer issue features a special symposium on Iranian writers, including letters written by Shams to her husband while he was first held in prison. These letters are a heartbreaking portrait to the human side of the struggle in Iran. One year after the Iranian election and the birth of the Green Movement, Jalaeipour’s latest arrest makes it clear that the struggle is far from over.

CNN video of an interview of Shams last June: