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Don’t believe the hype


During my cab ride home from the airport yesterday, the cab driver asked if I preferred to listen to music or the news. When I chose the middle ground, telling him that either one was fine with me, he selected something about as far from the center as possible: Rush Limbaugh.

After a while, I think I probably just tuned Rush out since I don’t remember much of what he said after a certain point. But for the first three minutes of so that I was graced with his radio show, I was reminded that everything coming out of the mouths of political commentators is just that: political.

During this particular episode of bashing-of-all-who-lean-further-left-than-the-talk-show-host, Limbaugh was ranting about the hoopla over the photos of Iraqis being tortured by Western solidiers. According to Limbaugh, everyone is overreacting and the Iraqis are “getting what they deserve.” That is, American soldiers have had to die and suffer in Iraq, so it’s only fitting that Iraqis have to pay their dues for this suffering.

Am I the only one that finds this logic perplexing? Yes, American soldiers have died and suffered in Iraq. Not all — or even most — of those deaths are the result of being tortured by the Iraqi people. Much of the blame could arguably be attributed to the U.S. and British governments that sent them to Iraq in the first place to wage a war and find those elusive weapons of mass destruction.

This isn’t to say that no Western soldiers have died at the hands of Iraqi militants, but Limbaugh’s “they got what they deserved” ignores a crucial difference. U.S. and British soldiers have been torturing Iraqis indiscriminately, stripping them of their humanity, when in fact these soldiers went over to Iraq in the name of “securing freedom” — for the Iraqi people. But by Limbaugh’s double-standard, freedom need only be secured for American soldiers to do whatever is necessary to to ensure Western dominance over the Arab world — even if that means torturing (rather than killing them with one shot) them in the most grotesque and inhumane of ways. It’s a bit frightening to say the least.

But I digress … Limbaugh continued on to say that this is clearly an isolated incident (though he never cites any evidence to support that claim) that has been concocted by so-called liberals to defeat Bush at the polls. That is, Limbaugh says that the circulation of these images and accounts of torture in Iraq is nothing more than a political ploy, that images of Iraqis are being used by Bush’s political opponents for their own ends. One can’t deny that there may be some political fallout from this scandal. But to dismiss these accounts of torture as nothing more than an election year scheme enables Limbaugh to dismiss his own culpability in fueling the politicization of this human rights scandal. (He does after all reduce the scandal to politics by dismissing the scandal as a means to villify so-called liberals).

Such politicization also ignores a crucial component of this debate: the Iraqis who have allegedly been tortured. Whether this is actually an isolated incident is unclear — despite Limbaugh’s claims to the contrary. Even if these incidents are isolated, that doesn’t make them any less distressing.

Contrary to Limbaugh’s assertion that we should stop overreacting to this “isolated” incident, we should use this as an opportunity to raise questions — not just as to whether this incident is in fact isolated, but also about how we position ourselves in relation to both the tortured and torturers.

It’s easy to dismiss the images of torture and to say that these people “got what they deserved” when you live comfortably, thousands of miles away. Limbaugh and many other conservative demagogues would likely dismiss this criticism of their privilege and objectification of Iraqi suffering as par for the course — or what Madeline Albright once termed “collateral damage.” But with the exception of Joseph Stalin, who ordered the death of his own son in the gulags, I can’t imagine that Limbaugh or anyone else who considered him- or herself human would say that the Iraqis “got what they deserved,” that this was mere “collateral damage” and chalk it all up to election year politics if they lived in Iraq, or if they or someone they loved or knew was subjected to such torture.

This doesn’t mean that the circulation of these images isn’t political or that politics don’t have any relevance to international relations and conflicts. But the reduction of this scandal to wins and losses for individual candidates and parties dismisses the possibility that the political can and should be something much larger and much more universal than the “personal” politics of Washington’s politicians implies. It dismisses a politics of compassion, which is something much more fundamental than the polling booth and congressional action.

With this in mind, perhaps it is time for political commentators of all political persuasions to refuse to understand humanity, suffering, and the events that deeply impact people’s lives to political capital, elections, win, lose, or draw. After all, winning and losing isn’t just a matter of who resides in the White House; it’s also a matter of life and death. Just ask the people of Iraq.

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