The Tree of the Doves. Christopher Merrill
but the evidence—the images circulating on the Internet—might inflame passions in the Islamic world for generations. On the day that US senators examined photographs and videotapes of American soldiers abusing, humiliating, and torturing inmates at Abu Ghraib, Iraqi insurgents retaliated in a gruesome manner, Webcasting the beheading of an American businessman, Nicholas Berg. This was the backdrop to our conversation about cultural diplomacy, the exchange of information and ideas to enhance mutual understanding, a subject that I was researching for a report to the State Department—an all but impossible task, argued the official, without regime change in Washington.
“People like to talk about a neoconservative cabal in the White House,” he said, referring to the chief architects of the Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. “But what you really have is an ineptocracy: these people can’t do anything right.”
Talleyrand, France’s prince of diplomats, observed that “The greatest danger in times of crisis comes from the zeal of those who are inexperienced.” He was describing the need to curb the zeal of a young man in his employ at the embassy in London. But there is even greater danger in the zeal of the experienced: when youthful ardor goes unchecked, when idealism is not tempered by pragmatism but instead acquires political savvy and knowledge of the inner workings of government, then the chances of disaster increase. This is when people may run amok, as the wise elders surrounding a callow president in the Bush administration made plain; for now their dark vision was there for all the world to see.
Exhibit A was Abu Ghraib, which for the diplomat pointed to the White House’s failure to prepare for the occupation of Iraq. The litany of decisions, which in the coming years would be recited to explain a foreign policy debacle unrivaled in American history (allowing Iraqis to loot their ministries—except oil—and museums, disbanding the Iraqi military, purging the government of Baath Party members, and so on), stemmed from the arrogant belief, said the diplomat, that we could remake the world with impunity. And if he thought that cultural diplomacy could mitigate some of the damage to our reputation he also feared that Bush’s refusal to heed what Thomas Jefferson called “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” or to consider the consequences of his actions might doom the republic. From the vantage point of KL, as locals refer to Kuala Lumpur, which means “big muddy” in Malay, it looked as though the images from Abu Ghraib had forever muddied our good name. And we had no one to blame but ourselves.
“Torture’s harvest,” writes the journalist Mark Danner, “whatever it may truly be, is very unlikely to have outweighed [the] costs”—legal and moral. For the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s prosecution of its war on terror—a system of military prisons at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, and Abu Ghraib, and secret prisons or “black sites” in Jordan, Thailand, and other countries, some with dubious human rights records, in which tens of thousands of men were interrogated, sometimes brutally—flouted the ideals of the American experiment in liberty. Details would eventually emerge about the depths to which the country had fallen. Indeed the CIA inspector general was about to issue a damning report on the agency’s interrogation practices, concluding that it had repeatedly violated the Convention Against Torture. What “truths” were gleaned in confessions elicited by force, beyond US legal jurisdiction, were nothing compared to the consequences of the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Indifference to criminality had corroded the soul, hollowed out the body politic, and diminished the country in the eyes of the world. I wondered how the president, a self-described born-again Christian, could sanction a policy that strayed so far from Christ’s message.
“When you act alone,” said the official, “you make mistakes.”
What came to mind was the story of a friend who had lost his job not long before 9/11. On that September morning he was leaving his brownstone in the West Village—a short cab ride from the World Trade Center—to go to his lawyer’s office and sign the paperwork for his severance package, when the first hijacked plane crashed into the Twin Towers. My friend, shaken by his professional setback, reacted to the national tragedy as if it was a personal affront: dust from the fallen buildings was hanging in the air thick with the stench of death when he fled with his family to their summer house on Long Island, convinced that more terrorist attacks were imminent. He resolved not to return; and as the days of his self-imposed exile turned into weeks he seized on rumors—of radiological bombs planted in Grand Central Station, of bridges and tunnels targeted by Islamic radicals, of smallpox released in Times Square—to justify his refusal to go back to the city that he had once loved with what I considered to be a humorous passion. That his wife and children missed their friends, their routines, seemed only to harden his attitude.
One night my friend’s wife called to ask me to persuade him to return to the city, and so I told him that he could not allow terror to govern his life, invoking the example set by countless individuals I had met in Sarajevo—writers and professors, engineers and civil servants, ordinary men and women—who during the terrible years of the siege did not surrender to their fear but discovered instead new reserves of courage. This was crucial not only to their own survival, I said, but to the survival of their city. My friend angrily replied that no analogy could be drawn to his unique circumstances.
“September 11th is something new,” he said. “Nothing can be compared to it.”
Our conversation ended soon after.
Which in time prompted me to reflect more systematically on terror—and on the power of art, literature, and ceremony to counter it, to bolster the spirit in the presence of fear. The argument that I developed, which started with identifying the body’s responses to fear (to flee, to lash out, to become paralyzed, to focus on the source of danger, to seek solutions, to rise to the occasion—reactions that for better or worse define individuals as well as societies), went something like this: poetry works by correspondence, linking one thing to another, past, present, and future, in order to enlarge the reader’s sensibility; fiction cultivates empathy, inspiring us to imaginatively inhabit other lives, other ways of being; and sacred ceremonies, which in many traditions are exercises in analogy, serve to mitigate various forms of terror, from individual existential anxieties to societal threats, such as what Americans experienced on 9/11, when a new paradigm took shape—a cultural framework whose parameters were still becoming clear the day that I sipped scotch by the pool in KL, catching occasional whiffs of smoke from the fires. The diplomat said that fear informed the American body politic, making it easier for my countrymen to think the worst of Muslims. For terror is the chief impediment of empathy and analogy, without which it is difficult to make sense of what seems foreign or strange; when terror blunts the mind’s ability to find analogies, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, it becomes easier to fall for justifications of appalling deeds, like torture—“enhanced interrogation,” in Bush administration parlance, a distortion of the language integral to preparing Americans to accept hitherto unimaginable excesses, like torture.
In the American response to 9/11 some Malaysians found sanction for their darker impulses. Thus a cartoon on the front page of the PAS party newspaper likened the scandal at Abu Ghraib to the treatment of Islamic militants locked up in the Kamunting Detention Center: “Ini bukan Iraq tetapi ISA”—“This is not Iraq but the ISA” (Malaysia’s internal security service). Inside the paper was another cartoon: from behind the bars of a prison cell a shrouded figure cries, Arrgh! Adoi! Two men walk by. Prisoners of the USA? one asks. No, says the other, ISA! Indeed Human Rights Watch was about to issue a report connecting Malaysian prison abuses to the war on terror. In August 2001, when Malaysia arrested several members of PAS, the White House condemned the government for its violations of human rights. After 9/11, though, Malaysia and other US allies were given a free hand to deal with Islamic militants as they wished. That some of the 9/11 hijackers had met in KL in January 2000 to discuss plans for the attack reinforced the argument that to secure information about terrorist plots quickly, the gloves had to come off. The ISA had videotaped the al-Qaeda summit, but without audio no one recognized the seriousness of the threat. More forceful action might have prevented 9/11, though the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib called into question the wisdom of the argument that there should be no limits in the