The Axis of Evil, Revised

November 8, 2005 – 6:27 am | by nerd's eye view

This might be ranting. You’ve been warned.

Yesterday, I was listening to Day to Day, the excellent NPR show that’s broadcast in collaboration with Slate, the excellent web site. And the moderator of Day to Day was asking about Dick Cheney. “Is he losing his hold?” If you haven’t been paying attention, Cheney is in the crosshairs lately for his refusal to legally commit to not using torture. My first thought was that they were asking the wrong question. They should have asked, “Is Cheney Satan?” Then I wondered what the hell is wrong with us?

Back in the golden light of 2004 when I had fewer lines in my forehead and still believed the nation could be saved from the evil Bush adminstration, I worked in the Patty Murray reelection headquarters. I say worked – I was a volunteer, but I was unemployed and I was there often.

At the volunteer kickoff meeting, hosted by hopped up Deaniacs who had moved to the Kerry Edwards campaign, I sat next to a Vietnam vet named Gary. We got to talking about why we were volunteering for the campaign. I told Gary that I volunteered because I spend so much time outside the US. I needed to be able to say that I worked hard to change the adminstration that was isolating us in the world. Gary told me that he had a kid in Iraq. He wanted his kid home, of course, but it was more than that. If his son ended up in the hands of the Iraqis, he wanted to know that his kid would be treated with the same respect that American soldiers afforded their prisoners.

All this denial of torture in front of the cameras makes me cringe. Gary’s kid, who I didn’t meet, sits in the front row of my imagination. I can’t help but think of some angry Iraqi saying “this is what you did in Gitmo, this is what you did in Abu Graib, now we will see how you like it.” It’s disgusting. It makes me feel sick.

And here’s the President, denying, denying, denying. If those flights to unspecified locations in Poland and Romania are so insignificant, why not put a Red Cross worker on one? If the prisoners in Abu Ghraib are treated according to the Geneva Convention, why refuse to honor it? If the US derides torture as a method of gathering information, why hold it as the ace in the hole in the increasingly vague War on Terror?

I’m a firm believer that diplomacy is the most powerful weapon we have at our disposal. The corrupt culture of the west is derided by extremists while Baywatch becomes the most popular show in the entire world. (Is that true anymore? I’ll bet it’s Friends now.) Hollywood and Disney get declared as evil while kids around the planet line up for the latest release of The Love Bug. I could be totally wrong about this, it’s been many years since I’ve traveled in an Islamic state, but in spite of politics, the youth of the world still seem to want to be American. They want the stuff we have, the clothes, the freedom. At least they did.

No matter how you feel about American culture – hey, I have an ambivilent relationship with it, it’s consumerist, it’s shallow, it’s transitory – you can’t deny its popularity. But I feel like we are poisoning the best tool we have at our disposal for building bridges between ourselves and our “enemies.” We’re sullying it with the ugliest of possible things: torture.

Saying that torture is “not acceptable” and then refusing admission to Red Cross workers to your facility does not provide crediblity. Saying “we don’t practice torture” when the whole world has seen the pictures doesn’t provide credibilty. Saying “we don’t condone the use of torture” while making sure your team can use it “just in case” doesn’t provide crediblity. This whole thing seems oddly the opposite of Saddam saying he had no weapons. Oh, look, no weapons. We’re saying we don’t use torture. Maybe we could, um, back that up?

Early this morning I heard a clip on the radio about the other nations we’re aligned with in our stance on torture. Get this: Iran, North Korea, and China. I have seen the new axis of evil and it is US. Gary must be spinning. I hope his kid has been mobilized home.