The war was only a week old, and a friend was already complaining about the protestors. Not the anti-war ones. The people on the other side of the street–the ones protesting the idea of protest. Men and women decked in red, white, and blue, angry and solemn and proud, waving their flags like weapons. Perhaps they didn’t reflect the majority of Americans who supported this war, but they were the faces he saw whenever he turned on the TV. The most patriotic of patriots.

My friend was against the war when it started, largely because he felt it would bring about more terrorism. But he did not march in any of the demonstrations. He isn’t an activist. He’s the son of Korean immigrants, who worked the counters of a convenience store for years so that their two children could go to college. My friend was born in the United States, and has never stepped foot outside of it.
  
And yet something turned him off about the pro-war protestors. They represented the America that has shunned him, he told me. Shunned him? He has a good job, a college education, a comfortable lifestyle. America has been good to him, he is the first to admit. But he watched the people wave their flags and say, I am an American. This is America.” And they were almost all white. And the things they were saying reminded him of the co-workers and acquaintances and strangers who have uttered ignorant, even racist, things in his presence–about African Americans or Arab Americans when they think he’s on their side, about “Orientals” when they forget. He does not feel a part of their America. And yet he is just like them: an American by birth.
  
Nothing brings out patriotism more than war. A public that was initially skeptical of war in Iraq rallied in support of it, once American soldiers were fighting, and dying, abroad. Significant dissent emerged, but it fought a holding action against the tide of patriotism that swept up everyone–journalists, union workers, soccer moms, and Wall Street bankers alike. Now that the fighting seems to be ending, and coalition forces have apparently succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, that sense of pride has only swelled. Even some longtime critics of the war have changed their tune. They watch TV images of Iraqis celebrating as U.S. soldiers tear down statues of the deposed tyrant, and they, too, love America and the freedom it has brought the world.
  
Is this surge in patriotism a good thing? Of course it is, friends tell me. I receive patriotic emails expressing support for America and its soldiers; as always, the flags are there, fluttering in a gentle HTML breeze. They may lack solemnity, but in the symbol itself they express the same sentiment as those gracing the steps of marble monuments, those draped over soldiers’ coffins: Liberty was won with the blood of Americans. Your freedom to speak, to criticize, to live as a minority amid a majority–was bought with that blood.
  
But patriotism has a darker side, one that has become quite clear in the last few weeks of war. Now might be the time to consider whether we Americans or Britons really should consider ourselves patriots, or whether defending our ideals and supporting our soldiers can be undertaken in the name of a higher cause.
  
It’s true that patriotism–love and devotion for one’s nation–gives people a shared identity. In the United States, for instance, settlers from all over Europe gradually came to see themselves as a single, distinct group of people. Though their nation was built, at first, on the exclusion and genocide of indigenous tribes and black slaves, today even many Native Americans and African Americans proudly declare their American-ness.

Patriotism may be necessary to build a nation, but sometimes it grows too quickly, becoming cancerous. The example always mentioned is Nazi Germany. Suffering amid a massive economic depression, hungry for their former glory, the German people turned to a charismatic leader who promised prosperity, power, and revenge–first against the Jews, and then against all of the nation’s “enemies.” Adolf Hitler brought his country to ruin, but he could not have emerged without the obsessive patriotism of ordinary Germans, whose love of country reached such a feverish pitch that they began to value German ways over all other ways, German life over all other life.

The United States has not reached that level of love-turned-hate, but it has come close. Today, things are looking grim once again. Patriotism of a rather pernicious kind is enshrined in the U.S. PATRIOT Act, legislation that has stripped away many of the protections that U.S. citizens once had from the power of big government. It also appears in the protect-America-at-all-costs policy of detaining foreign prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba–without charge, without trial, and far from any eyes who could judge whether they’re being treated fairly. At the root of these policies are two disturbing beliefs. One is that love of America demands giving up the very thing that America is supposed to be about–liberty. The other is that people elsewhere in the world do not deserve the rights or respect that Americans do. It’s the same sentiment that in the past allowed Americans in the majority to enslave African Americans, drive indigenous people from their lands, persecute union workers or put Japanese Americans in camps: They are not “American,” and so they are not worthy of the same treatment as we are.

Since the war in Iraq began, the uglier face of patriotism has been popping up on a daily basis. Consider the recent behavior of our fearless public watchdog, the mainstream news media. Throughout this war, public reaction–or just fear of public reaction–has prompted many news outlets to silence their own dissenting voices. This is obvious in American news channels like CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, where the coverage has been dramatically more partisan than what you find on the BBC–or even CNN International. Those who have tried to buck the trend have been punished outright: At MSNBC, liberal talk show host Phil Donahue was canned after news executives complained in an internal memo that his show could become “a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

Supporters of patriotism say that Americans must suffer the rollback of civil liberties and the censorship of dissenting voices now so that they can enjoy their freedom once the fighting is over. But it is not clear what freedom we will have left to enjoy, if the present course of government action continues.
  
More importantly, it’s not clear that Americans will make themselves any safer by alienating the rest of the world with a belligerent self-love. I should be clear here: There were many good reasons for the United States and Britain to overthrow a murderous tyrant like Saddam Hussein. The problem with the present war is that the United States entered it in violation of international law, with the public support of only a single Arab government, and without the backing of the United Nations. This kind of arrogance has radicalized Muslims around the world, who see the war as a war against Islam, and will likely cause more grief for the United States in the years to come. Meanwhile, America continues to lose the real “war against terrorism”–the battle over the hearts and minds of people in other countries, especially Muslim countries.

To win that war, we will need more than tanks and cruise missiles. We will need a sustained effort to change how other people in the world see the United States. The first step is for people here to understand why people in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Indonesia think the way they do about America. Sadly, many otherwise decent and patriotic Americans cannot put themselves in the shoes of people who are enraged by the U.S. government’s policies. They insist that their country is the world’s savior, because only it has the will to fight tyranny abroad (as the case of Iraq proves). But elsewhere in the world, many people see George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein.
  
Some people look at this resentment abroad and conclude that foreigners are simply jealous of American power. Even if this has some truth to it, many Americans don’t realize how many good reasons people in other countries have to be suspicious of the U.S. government. We seem to be the only people in the world who do not appreciate the fact that the U.S. government’s rhetoric of “liberation” too often masks cold self-interest. Just look at the history of U.S. interventions in Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, South Vietnam, East Timor, and Laos, or the support that the U.S. government has given to authoritarian and brutal regimes in the Middle East (Saddam’s included, up until his invasion of Kuwait).
  
Americans are rightfully proud when their soldiers step in to end atrocities in war-ravaged places like Bosnia, but we don’t realize that the United States is the only one fighting wars these days because it is the only one allowed to do so (the U.S. government has explicitly stated that it will allow no country to rival it militarily). Likewise, many Americans talk about how their military defends the rights of people elsewhere in the world, but we don’t appreciate the animosity our armies and military bases create in places like South Korean and Saudi Arabia, where many people despise the presence of foreign soldiers on their land.
  
What makes people in other countries so upset is the assumption behind these policies: America knows what is best for the rest of the world. Some say that this assumption is at the heart of all patriotism. “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate,” said Emma Goldman. “Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.”
  
Some liberals argue that, properly understood, patriotism encourages dissent. In their view, patriotism is not about doing whatever the government tells you to do, but using your free speech to uphold the ideals of liberty and equality that America was founded upon. Clearly many anti-war protestors believe in this approach. It is surely better than patriotism-as-unquestioning-loyalty, but it is still flawed, Robert Jensen tells us. “Why are human characteristics being labeled as American,” he asks, “if there is nothing distinctly American about them? … At its worst, patriotism can lead easily to support for barbarism. At its best, it is self-indulgent and arrogant in its assumptions about the uniqueness of U.S. culture.”
  
Patriotism has served the United States well in making it a global power, and clearly it was necessary in the beginnings of the republic, to create unity out of a hodgepodge of former British subjects. But nowadays patriotism is past its prime. The United States is no longer a small republic on the shores of the Atlantic; it is the most multinational of nations. It is linked to the rest of the world economically (by the flow of import and export goods) and culturally (by the flow of immigrants, students, and workers). Today, to an ever-increasing extent, whatever helps the rest of the world helps the United States.
  
For this reason, world leaders like the Dalai Lama have called for an end to our old notions of nation vs. nation, “us” vs. “them.” In the past, when countries were independent of one another, “there was a relevance to violence and war,” the Dalai Lama writes. But today, “one-sided victory is no longer relevant. We must work to resolve conflicts in a spirit of reconciliation and always keep in mind the interests of others. We cannot destroy our neighbors! We cannot ignore their interests! Doing so would ultimately cause us to suffer.”
  
Perhaps it is time, then, to move beyond patriotism. Without losing our love for the people, places, and ideals of our unique country, we can begin to see ourselves as citizens of something larger than this. In places around the world, people are already making this journey: as Italians, Spaniards, and Germans increasingly see themselves as part of a unified Europe; as the number of individuals with multiple citizenships multiplies; as more people realize that in a world where everyone’s fates are tied together, love and loyalties can be shared.
  
Becoming a “citizen of the world” does not lessen the sacrifice of the men and women who have fought on behalf of the American flag, to defend American liberties. It extends the blessings of that liberty to new lands; it honors America’s heroes by honoring all of humanity, without prejudice or pettiness. And it preserves the nation, by preserving the world. “We must say goodbye to patriotism,” Jensen writes, “because the world cannot survive indefinitely the patriotism of Americans.”
  
My friend was tortured by his dislike of the pro-war protestors, because he truly wanted to do what was best for his country, the only country he has known. But there are many ways to serve one’s country, and in the end, what might save America is something other than patriotism–something more than patriotism.

Oddly enough, acting in ways that aren’t seen as patriotic may be the best way to help America out of its current international crisis. After all, part of the reason that terrorists are so willing to kill civilians is that they see them as representatives of their hated governments. Dissent reminds the rest of the world that not all Americans agree with the U.S. government’s foreign policy. It says that dislike of America should be directed at specific government policies, not at Americans themselves. It also improves the way that the American people are perceived elsewhere in the world, providing evidence that, yes, Americans are capable of critical thought and concern for the lives of people in other countries.
  
Ultimately, dissent may lead to something even more valuable: a new vision of American power. As the world’s only remaining superpower, America has the privilege to be a leader upon the global stage. Good leaders are not blinded by self-love, nor driven by self-interest. They identify with the group they lead. They see any loss on the part of the group as a loss to their own self. They lead with courage and strength, but also understanding and humility.
  
America’s future–and its future security–is tied to its ability to be that kind of leader. It will have to do a better job of showing other countries that it seeks what is best for the world, even at its own expense. It will need a new kind of patriotism–yes, a love for the people, land, and ideals of America, but an equally deep love and respect for other countries, too. Those who love America and want what is best for it will accept the great task, and the great responsibility, laid before it. Until Americans can accept criticism of their country’s actions abroad, until they can value the lives of Iraqis and Afghans as much as they do Americans, then there will be little hope of a more peaceful and just world.
“

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

I awakened to death one morning in my life as an intern. I awoke and found myself standing next to my call bed in the hospital: an A code was called over the intercom and I reacted like reflex.  Where was it? I ran to the room and two residents had already arrived. The intern was giving chest compressions to a dying patient. The man was so brittle with his illness that his ribs broke with the first compression. I took over for the tiring intern, and as I pushed rhythmically, the patient passively vomited blood from his ruptured esophagus. The blood spilled from his mouth, onto the pillow, bed sheets, and floor. I noticed these details as though in a dream: what was real was my counting of the compressions, keeping the rhythm. Soon he was pronounced dead by the senior resident. I stopped pushing the broken chest, took off my gloves, and saw it was time to start rounds on the living patients. He was not one of mine, and in the rush of events, I did not catch his name. I put on my white coat over my scrubs to go and face the living.

Little did I understand, when I first received this physician’s costume, how it would usher me down to the underworld, onto a stage where sickness and death are main actors in the play. What I found within me during the descent was my mother-guilt. With the white coat comes an influence that presses you to provide good care to your patients. I call it mother-guilt,” for it is innate like one’s “mother-wit,” or common sense. It feels inherited, passed on through many generations, like the remembrance of my father in the features of my face.

I became a physician one day in May when, with all my classmates, I recited an ancient Greek oath by Hippocrates “to first do no harm” to my patients. On that sunny day, I did not feel the weight of the mother-guilt that grew heavier when in June I put on the long white coat at Yale-New Haven Hospital. The mother-guilt fears the harm done to patients in your care, even if not done by your hand. The death or decline of my patients began to feel my fault until proven otherwise–no American justice system at work here, but something akin to an ancient indictment for a crime long-forgotten.

My fellow interns have confessed to me this guilt in corners of hallways, when a patient under their care suffers complications. Sometimes it hits you first thing in the morning when you walk onto the floors. The nurse tells you that the patient was transferred to the intensive care unit overnight.  I have to remind myself that it was not due to my care, but because their body is failing them. I have to reason with myself, try talking away the guilt, but it lingers, whispers from hallway corners that you don’t know what you are doing, and are to blame.

The making of a medicine man

The pressure of guilt makes me as aggressive about my patients’ welfare as I’d be if my conscience, my livelihood were in the balance. In such a manner, the professional caregiver is driven to care. The days begin to merge and blur as I work the eighth hour, which becomes the fourteenth hour, which becomes the twenty-sixth hour, which becomes the thirty-fourth. Solace is found in the restroom for a few minutes, or writing patient notes, speaking with a fellow worn intern, or in an empty cafeteria. The distinction between this ancient guilt and the care of my patients–a haze of sleepless work, immersion in the infinity of details, the endless checking of doses and vital signs, and the constant moving of hands over the body–this distinction blurs into a near identification of their body with mine.

From one perspective, this approach is good medicine, for I am not only intellectually processing that the intravenous potassium I order for Mr. Baxter will burn his veins if given too quickly; I also feel my veins burning, and tell the nurse to administer the potassium slowly. Perhaps that is an empathy provoked by guilt and fear, but not sustained by it. It must be sustained by a greater motivation, otherwise short is my stay in medicine.

Certainly I am not alone in this guilt-induced empathy. I’ve had colleagues come to me in nausea, almost in tears, at the decline of their patients, or due to some small oversight.  They do not know how to contain their feelings; meanwhile the needs of other patients call to them.  Once during morning rounds, a patient passed by on a stretcher. A fellow resident clutched her throat. “I feel like my body mimics what my patients have,” she said. “You better not go into oncology,” I replied.

This guilt-empathy, like a fear of perdition, motivates you to get things done for the drug users, the alcoholics, the obstinate, the gluttonous, and the lascivious whose desires have brought on hepatitis, HIV, poorly managed diabetes, morbid obesity, and other consequences of bodily neglect.  That does not matter when they are your patients. You stay the extra hour, draw the blood, and check the chest X-ray before you sign their care over to another resident and leave the floors, satiating the flames that keep you in the hospital.

A story from within and release

Catherine was a heroine addict, prostitute, and a regular on the HIV wards. Rumor was, she’d told a fellow patient that she would milk this admission for all the time that she could. As the weeks passed, she lay in bed in a dark room save for when she would go outside for a smoke. I noticed her growing thinner in the early morning light when I examined her each day. We searched for the cause of her diffuse pains but found none.  Her T-cell count was low enough that something could be brewing, but during her second week we became convinced that she was using her hospital stay to evade the police. Then one morning I looked into her mouth and saw thick white yeast coating her throat. “It hurts to swallow so much I want to jump out of the window,” she whispered to me. In addition to the yeast infection, endoscopic examination diagnosed a herpes flare extending down her throat. We gave her medicated lollipops to suck on as she shambled along the hallway. The next time I took blood from her veins, my attitude was not of doubt or double- guessing. My intent was to get her better, her past be damned.

I emerge from the hospital and squint at the setting sun, and it seems foreign, this sunlight, for I have become accustomed to fluorescence. The last I saw the sun, it was rising on a Thursday, and now Friday is coming to an end. I walk out to my car, and on some days I am at peace. On others, I am swallowing all the small terrors and frustrations of the past ten or fourteen or thirty hours.  I want to sleep, but I also want to release the distillation of black bile collected under my rib cage; otherwise it comes up my throat and tastes metallic, like acid. I have smelled the iodine and the vomit, the shit and the latex gloves, the scent of the sick and the putrescence of infection. I feel deprived of the regeneration found in sitting at Rudy’s, my hole-in-a-wall second home, with a glass of Guinness and much talk around me.

Headed north, I pass East Rock, that traprock rise overlooking the city, and I spy its red heights, green crown, and the memorial tower. I breathe: my ribcage expands, loosening its anxious hold on the black bile in me. The seagulls circle near the sublime East Rock, and in that circling comes a gratefulness and freedom from this mother-guilt for a while–a rest, a simplicity in returning to a quiet home.”

In The Fray Contributor

I was standing with microphone in hand, staring into a camera on a brisk evening in Modesto, California awaiting my cue for a live-shot, when in my earpiece I heard the anchor read bits of a story that began with five Arab men” and “FBI.” Twenty seconds later, the anchor stated that the nationalities of these men were unconfirmed, their whereabouts within the United States were uncertain, the names attached could be false, and that they werecnot wanted in connection to any terrorist activities. I assumed that I must have missed out on other elements of the story and went back to focusing on my piece. When I watched the same story in its entirety during the late newscast that night (the most-watched 10 p.m. newscast in the country), I was a bit shocked to find that there was no more information.
  
Though it has been almost a year and a half since the attacks on the United States, hyper-patriotic tendencies still flutter through flag-waving newsrooms. On December 29, 2002, the FBI released an incredibly ambiguous plea for public assistance as it sought the whereabouts of five men for whom it had neither certain names, dates of birth, or countries of origin. The government alleged that these five men–whose pictures they had obtained through an illegal passport trafficker–were in the United States. Not only did the media cooperate by trumpeting such scant facts on the government’s behalf (and sometimes mangling them along the way), it also fell silent in sharing responsibility for the dissemination of an errant message.

As a media person in the “age of terror,” I knew the arguments. It was television performing its obligations to public safety, right? We the media, were helping get the bad guys off the streets, right? We had the ability to post pictures of wanted men on the screen, to awake a citizenry that otherwise might not be “vigilant” enough in these times of extra caution.

Driving to the newsroom the next day, I kept hearing the same story on the largest news radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area, again, with little to no facts. Without pictures, I couldn’t fathom the utility of carrying a radio broadcast stating that there were “five Arab men … suspects …” at large, countries of origin/birth dates/names unconfirmed.

When I compared the wire copy on which the previous night’s script had been based with the source (the FBI’s press release, along with a phone call to the FBI press office in Washington, D.C.), I was dismayed. The FBI had made sure to specify that these individuals were not “suspects,” nor was there any mention of their nations of origin, while the media carrying the message had so casually inserted “Arab” and “suspect” into its copy. All it would have taken was a phone call or a click of the mouse.

Racial bias in the media

The wire story took a costly liberty. The need for speed led the wire copy I saw to read, “FBI searching for 5 illegal Arab immigrants.” Similar or identical headlines ran in the Anchorage Daily News, the Houston Chronicle, and the Bergen Record. As the story spread, the language intensified, culminating with this from Fox News: “FBI Searching for Five Suspected Arab Terrorists.”
  
They report, I decide? Isn’t that the Fox slogan? More generally, was the media being “fair and balanced”? It wasn’t just about one television network or one small paper in Alaska. The blame lies with all of us in the media. We were caught up in what I can only surmise was a patriotic zeal that allowed us to justify the injection of inaccurate and potentially dangerous adjectives, and further, to veil a lack of facts.

I began asking everyone I could find about the rationale of putting loaded information out there without a single confirmed fact behind it, other than the five mug shots. What if we had to run just the pictures of the FBI’s ten most wanted domestic suspects–without any information on their whereabouts, any evidence of criminal activity, no confidence in their names, ages, or places of origin. Would we? Most responded with a resounding “No.” Why then, had everyone been so quick to broadcast this information?

I wrote to the wire service, FOX News, and the local news radio station in San Francisco asking how they could glean such a different news story from the FBI press release. Only a gentleman from the radio station wrote back, saying “[The reporter] did not write this story from an FBI news release. It came from AP.” I didn’t know whether to be comforted or alarmed.

Within two days, news reports surfaced from Lahore, Pakistan, that one of the five men was a jeweler, who recognized himself while reading an article with the FBI pictures. Though he admitted to having used fabricated travel documents before, he claimed never to have been in the United States. Meanwhile, the FBI, the American media, and public continued to search for him on U.S. soil. Eleven days after the initial press release, the FBI withdrew the pictures from their site and announced their decision not to publish fourteen more pictures of men wanted for questioning. The primary reason for their about face, besides the egg on that face, was that the credibility of the informant–the same one who turned over the original five–was less than they had initially suspected, They had, in essence, been lied to.

It wasn’t just the FBI that had fallen for a lie. The town clarions had blown loudly and proudly only days before, running pictures just below the fold, or in the first block of newscasts. As always, the retractions/corrections pages in the aftermath haven’t taken responsibility for poor judgment or made any admission of guilt. Instead, consumers are treated to news stories on the layers of complexity in vetting information at an agency as large and powerful as the FBI. There aren’t diminishing marginal return studies that can pinpoint when the joke got old and when the townspeople stopped running to check on the boy who cried wolf, but we might as well start counting.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTORS >

Written by
Hari Sreenivasan, Inthefray.com Contributor

TOPICS > FBI SEARCH >

FBI press release
URL: http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel02/122902press.htm
The original December 29, 2002 press release

“FBI searching for 5 illegal Arab immigrants”
URL: http://www.adn.com/24hour/front/story/695165p-5148190c.html
By John Solomon | Associated Press | Anchorage Daily News | December 30, 2002

“FBI Searching for Five Suspected Arab Terrorists”
URL: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,74118,00.html
Fox News | December 30, 2002

“

In The Fray Contributor

The soldiers set fire to the grounds three times, hoping to obliterate every trace of their crimes. The trees, though, they could not entirely kill. Some left seeds. In the years that followed, the trees reappeared, sprouting around the charred craters of their old selves.

And so the memory of Chile’s greatest cruelty lingers. Not in ruined buildings or unearthed bodies, or abandoned implements of torture and execution, but in a curious hole at the heart of a tree. Even those who suffered and died here never knew where they were taken. But decades later, the earth still brandishes the scars, as if it refuses to be forgotten, because what was done here was too hateful to forget.

Thirty years ago, this was Villa Grimaldi, an elegant estate built by an Italian family on the outskirts of Santiago. After the bloody September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew an elected government and put General Augusto Pinochet in power, Villa Grimaldi was taken over and transformed into a detention center, where the enemies of the new regime were shipped, in secret, and silenced. Between 1974 and 1978, about 4,000 people were tortured there. At least eighteen were killed, and another 200 disappeared, likely executed as well. Those responsible for the atrocities at Villa Grimaldi were blinded by hatred for their political opponents. Their work became something more than rooting out information, or intimidating people into submission. It became the realization of a sadist’s fantasy: “la destrucci n de la persona.” The enemy must be made to suffer until he is broken, until she is destroyed. And so the torturers showed no mercy. They poured scalding water over prisoner’s bodies, and dunked them in vats of dirty water, urine, or feces. They hung prisoners up by ropes and thrust sticks into their anuses or burnt their genitalia with lighters. Women prisoners were routinely raped by packs of men, even by packs of dogs.

Today, survivors of Villa Grimaldi return regularly to their former prison. They are working to turn the place where many of them were beaten, maimed, and raped into a peace park and museum. Over the years since the camp closed down, in 1978, they have collected evidence of the torture and execution that occurred at Villa Grimaldi–painstakingly, because there are many in Chile even today who argue that the atrocities never happened.

Some of the government’s torturers have confessed. Pinochet has not. He still insists that he did not know of the activities of the DINA, his government’s secret police, which ran Villa Grimaldi and other torture and detention centers throughout the country, and was allegedly responsible for the killings and disappearances of at least 3,000 people, including hundreds of foreigners. His supporters admit that some “mistakes” were made, at Villa Grimaldi and elsewhere, but that the objective–freeing the country of the socialist rule of Chilean President Salvador Allende–required extreme measures. The ends, they insist, justified the means. As the spokeswoman for the Pinochet Foundation put it to me: “We had to clean house.”

I visited the Villa Grimaldi peace park last  August. When I returned to the United States, government officials had already started making the case for war in Iraq. From time to time, they brought up the human rights abuses perpetrated by Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. It was another dictator, but the same crimes. In Chile, Pinochet’s soldiers rounded up the country’s undesirables–leftists, intellectuals, union members, students, their families–and trucked them to camps like Villa Grimaldi, where many vanished. In Iraq, Saddam waged a campaign of genocide against Kurdish civilians in 1988, gassing or executing tens of thousands; three years later, he crushed a revolt in southern Iraq, arresting, torturing, and “disappearing” thousands of Shi’a Muslims.

Villa Grimaldi’s torturers liked to tie couples to bunk beds of wire mesh, so that one partner could watch the other writhe in pain; Saddam occasionally brought in a prisoner’s wife or mother and had her raped in front of her loved one’s eyes. The Chileans experimented with the use of poison gas and injections of rabies on their victims; the Iraqis pierced hands with electric drills, ripped out fingernails, gouged eyes, cut out tongues. Other techniques were regularly used in both countries: hanging prisoners by their arms for hours, beating them with sticks or cables, ramming objects up their anuses, applying voltage to their genitalia.

Even when they weren’t being tortured, prisoners would be kept awake by the screams of other victims. In Iraq, some prisoners were forced to sleep facedown, their hands tied behind their backs; in Villa Grimaldi they were housed in closet-sized cells so cramped they could not sit down. Their eyes were taped over and black hoods placed over their heads. Only in the torture room would the hood be taken off, so that the torturer could read the prisoner’s face for signs of a premature death.

“If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning,” President George W. Bush said last month of Iraqi human rights violations. He could easily have been speaking about the atrocities committed in Chile under Pinochet’s dictatorship. And yet, there is a key difference. This time, the United States stands ready–eager, in fact–to do something to root out the evil.

Before we sign up for another crusade in the Middle East, however, we must consider some troubling facts. First, the truth is that liberating the Iraqi people is merely a sideshow, if even that much; the chief purpose of this war, the Bush administration has repeatedly said, is to remove a threat to U.S. national security. Second, even if the chief goal of this war were humanitarian intervention, it is not clear that the United States would have grounds to invade Iraq at this time, given that Saddam’s known acts of genocide occurred more than a decade ago. Third, the United States at the present moment has a shallow reservoir of credibility upon which to wage a war–even a war with as noble an aim as bringing the Butcher of Baghdad to justice.

I raise these concerns as someone with ambivalent feelings about military intervention in Iraq. When I left the Villa Grimaldi peace park last summer, I remember thinking how I wished the United States or some other country had made an effort back then to liberate Villa Grimaldi and Chile’s other detention centers before so many suffered and died. But since then I have come to recognize that–as much as I wish it to be otherwise–there are never easy solutions to the human catastrophes in places like Iraq or Chile. Sending in the Marines may seem like the quickest and best way to free a country’s people from violent repression, and yet it should never be forgotten that war by its very nature causes suffering–the most intense suffering human beings can know.

I still think that the case can be made for the use of armed force in Iraq. But this will require a different kind of leadership than we have seen so far, in America or Europe or the Middle East. It will require leaders who are willing to take the long and difficult path to attain legitimacy for their actions–a legitimacy backed not just by bold moral arguments, but also by the decisive weight of world opinion. Fortunately, recent developments in the area of human rights law (among them, the 1998 attempt to extradite Pinochet for crimes against humanity) have established a common language and common institutions for thinking and acting upon these concerns. Slowly but surely, we have been moving toward a world where the rule of states–whether Iraq or the United States–goes only so far, and where heads of state are held accountable for their actions, at home and abroad. What the United States does in the next few weeks, however, will make all the difference: Will the institutions that can legitimately deal with these crimes against humanity grow stronger, or
will they be torn apart by a superpower that thinks it can go it alone in the world?

Regardless of whether human rights is a genuine concern of the Bush administration, it clearly is not the driving motivation for the present Iraq policy. The administration’s argument-in-a-nutshell is that (a) Saddam is a menace to the world, and specifically the United States, and (b) he must be disarmed via invasion, because inspections aren’t working. That premise, as I have argued previously in this space, is a tough sell–or, at least tough to sell to anyone who properly respects the might of the world’s sole superpower. If by chance Iraq gives a slap to America’s cheek, America would swiftly return the cradle of civilization to its pre-civilization state. What kind of threat, then, does Iraq actually pose? (It seems that the only real threat to the United States nowadays is al-Qaeda, a shadowy network of terrorists who can’t be so easily bombed into oblivion.) And while we are discussing the merits of retaliation, we should also consider that a doctrine of self-defense that allows pre-emptive strikes–that is, the use of armed force not in response to any direct attempt to harm the United States–could also have been used to justify the bombing of U.S. naval vessels at Pearl Harbor (which apparently presented a menace far too close to imperial Japan’s own shores). In other words, striking first is rather hard to justify as moral behavior, as any schoolchild who’s gotten into a fight can tell you.

This notion of threat aside, let’s consider more carefully the administration’s use of humanitarian arguments in favor of war. Virtually every one of Bush’s speeches makes note of the rapacious evil of “the world’s most brutal dictator.” If the atrocities are true (and groups like Amnesty International–clearly no fans of Bush–have carefully documented them), why shouldn’t the United States liberate Iraq from its tyrant? The world rightly lamented its failure to stop the ongoing genocide in Rwanda; it reacted much too slowly to the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Why not act now in Iraq, when the political winds are blowing at the president’s back, and the opportunity might never come again?

Oddly, human rights advocacy groups have been less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a humanitarian war. London-based Amnesty International worries that military action in Iraq will worsen the famine there, uproot “massive” numbers of people from their homes, and ultimately lead to a “human rights and humanitarian catastrophe,” in Iraq as well as neighboring countries. While it supported military action to stop Serbian massacres in Bosnia, Washington-based Human Rights Watch says the situation of ongoing genocide that existed in that country does not exist today in Iraq. As the organization said recently in a statement: “We have advocated military intervention in limited circumstances when the people of a country are facing genocide or comparable mass slaughter. Horrific as Saddam Hussein’s human rights record is, it does not today appear to meet this high threshold–in contrast, for example, with his behavior during the 1988 Anfal genocide against the Iraqi Kurds,” when Iraqi troops rounded up more than 100,000 Kurds in northern Iraq and executed them.

The problem, too, is that raining bombs upon Baghdad will also leave the liberators with blood on their hands. The “precision” bombs that the United States and its allies are using in Iraq will likely kill tens of thousands of civilians, not to mention tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. Furthermore, it is quite possible that in Iraq, a country riven by age-old ethnic and religious differences and held together by the iron hand of its tyrant, the leader who replaces Saddam Hussein will be, or will have to be, just as brutal. With such concerns in mind, many human rights activists say they cannot advocate war in Iraq–even a just war that would presumably end the torturing and killing taking place in Iraq’s own Villas Grimaldi.

We could call the reluctance of human rights advocates to wage war in Iraq a sign of hypocrisy. Many hawks do. But we should remember, too, that there are many good reasons to be skeptical about the U.S. government’s present-day zeal for human rights. Take Iraq. Even after Saddam’s gas attacks and mass executions of Kurds were documented in the late 1980s, Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. said nothing, and continued to provide Iraq with credits to buy American grain and manufactured goods. In Chile, the Central Intelligence Agency aggressively supported the coup that brought Pinochet to power–even providing tear gas and submachine guns to a group of coup plotters who ended up killing Army Commander Rene Schneider, an Allende supporter, in a botched kidnapping attempt. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger happened to oversee this and other covert operations in Chile around the time of the coup, and he was well-informed about Pinochet’s bloody crackdown on dissidents. In June 1976, when Villa Grimaldi was running at full throttle, Kissinger encouraged the dictator behind closed doors: “We are sympathetic to what you are trying to do here,” he told Pinochet.

This brings me to my final point: the United States’ lack of credibility to wage a humanitarian war. Some may argue that the United States had no choice but to support dictators like Pinochet, fighting as it was then a global war against communism. But that also is a simplification of reality. The United States may have had to defend its national interests abroad, but human rights clearly could have played a much more prominent role in the decision-making of its leaders. Had U.S. presidents shown any moral backbone, values of democracy and liberty could have shaped foreign policy for the better not only in Iraq or Chile, but also in countries like Nicaragua (where the United States trained and funded a mercenary army that terrorized the civilian population) and Cambodia (where the United States conducted a secret bombing campaign that killed hundreds of thousands of innocents).

Instead, there were clear and tragic excesses. Even if the policies undertaken in these countries were not intended to cause harm to civilians, America’s utter disregard for the life-and-death consequences of its actions has stoked hatred and resentment of the United States around the world. For this reason, former South African president Nelson Mandela could say to a United Nations forum last month–to applause–“if there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.”

The United States can salvage its reputation, but only if it makes human rights a higher priority in its foreign policy. Iraq will be the test. If the Bush administration believes its rhetoric about Saddam’s evil, then it must pursue a legitimate campaign to oust him from power and bring him to justice. But the United States cannot hope to win that legitimacy through unilateral action. It cannot hope to win it flanked by the usual suspects–the leaders of countries like Britain, Spain, Australia, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, who are inexplicably defying the will of their own people in order to stand with Washington. (It should be noted that roughly half the world is not in favor of military action in Iraq “under any circumstances,” according to a Gallup International poll; throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, support for a war waged unilaterally by the United States and its allies against Iraq is in the teens or single digits.) To win legitimacy for its proposed military action, the United States must make a point of convincing ordinary people as well as elite decision-makers–in China, France, Germany, and Russia, but, more importantly, in Arab and Muslim countries. The outcome of this lobbying is not trivial. Having the weight of world opinion on the side of intervention will mean the difference between universal justice and vigilante justice. But so far, the United States hasn’t made much of a case for war to the people who really matter, and its superpowered arrogance has angered and offended the very allies it needs in its “war on terror.”

Fortunately, the example of Chile provides some hope that the world–when approached respectfully–can be convinced to side against tyranny. When Pinochet finally stepped down as head of state in 1990, he escaped any legal retribution for the crimes he had commited in Chile, thanks to various amnesty laws that he had made a point of enacting during the dictatorship. But in 1998, when Pinochet was visiting London, a Spanish judge asked for his extradition. Judge Baltazar Garzon insisted that the eighty-three-year-old ex-dictator be tried for crimes committed during his rule–namely, the genocide, terrorism, and torture of Spaniards in Chile and Chileans who now lived in Spain. Rallying to the Spanish judge’s cause, prosecutors argued before Britain’s House of Lords that international law should in this case supersede state law, and that there was no immunity for crimes against immunity. The court ruled in their favor.

What does the case of Pinochet say about the possibilities for bringing Saddam to justice? While Pinochet eventually went free, the fact that principles of international human rights finally had their day in court–and were found to have a legitimacy above and beyond the law of a single nation–has breathed life into other movements for justice. These same principles have lately found a home in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic is at last being judged for his role in Balkan genocide. In spite of the objections of Yugoslav authorities, Milosevic was handed over to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in June 2001, and he very well may face punishment for orchestrating the slaughter of Bosnians, Croatians, and Kosovars.

Saddam will not likely see a courtroom anytime soon–unless, of course, the United States attacks, or he flees the country in advance of an invasion. But thanks to the last decade of progress in international human rights law, the stage is set for that much-anticipated denouement. The tales of Saddam’s atrocities are enough to inspire humanitarians around the world to action, if the U.S. government would drop its doom-and-gloom scenarios and focus on the moral case for intervention. The United States has the international legal framework it needs to try Saddam, if the U.S. government would think to use it. What is needed now is an American leader patient enough to move the world down the path of justice for Iraq–to a just war if need be, and to the just peace that should be.

If Iraq is lucky, it will one day know the peace that Chile has finally won–decades after the killings, years after the downfall of its murderous dictator. It is a peace that Chile attained not through war, but through patience, perseverance, and, yes, forgiveness. You can see it in Villa Grimaldi, the very heart of the darkness. The work that survivors of the camp do today to bring past atrocities to light is not motivated by vengeance against Pinochet or the soldiers who worked under him, says Luis Santibanez, the architect who designed the peace park. “We are fighting for them, too. We want to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again, to anyone, regardless of their beliefs,” he says.

Ultimately, there is hope in the story of Villa Grimaldi, Santibanez says. Even under the most brutal conditions, there were those who found the strength to resist: the men and women who hid the names of other prisoners in slips of paper on their bodies, keeping their memories alive; the cellmates who wetted the lips of friends dying from electrocution with their saliva-moistened fingers; the lone man who, though crippled and able only to crawl, remained defiant to the end, shouting “Hope!” to other prisoners as they walked into the torture chambers.

As he walks among the somber monuments of his park, Santibanez reminds his visitors of the beauty this place of torture once possessed. Villa Grimaldi was a shrine to Old World beauty–a sanctuary of lush gardens adorned by statues, fountains, flowers. “In architecture school we were taught that beautiful things happen in beautiful places,” Santibanez says, his voice almost wistful. “But this place is a contradiction of that.””

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen