young men of Kelantan, who had nothing better to do than visit prostitutes in Thailand and return infected with HIV or sign up with Jemaah Islamiyah: the traditional ceremonies offered imaginative spaces in which to work out one’s anxiety or despair. Eddin’s devotion to Kali (who was, not coincidentally, the patron goddess of Kelantan) served a similar purpose.
In the temple, Pauline Fan, his helpmate and partner (another providential figure in his life, he said), took the flowers that he had bought from a street vendor and suggested he change into his ceremonial attire. She is a delicate Eurasian woman, a translator of Paul Celan and the manager of Pusaka, the calm eye in the storm that is Eddin Khoo. She laid the flowers on the altar, while he put on a white wrap, cinching it below the tattoo of a king cobra on his chest. The assistant to the priestess tolled the bell twice—the signal for Eddin to pour a canister of dye over the statues of Kali, Ganesha, and the snake goddess—and then the priestess held a candle made of camphor before him and Pauline. This ritual was repeated several times until the floor was covered with dye, and when Eddin went outside to wash off the priestess cleared the altar, wiped the tiles with a rag, mopped up the dye. Then she stopped to look at me, and after a moment she asked Pauline to translate for her. She said that although I was inclined to be a priest I need not worry about the external trappings of religion since I carried the spirit of faith in my heart; that I had two daughters; that there were tensions in my marriage; that I should resolve differences in my life quietly; that I should devote myself to my writing, having lost precious time in the last years because of other obligations; that my back and chest hurt; that I should not trust others too much; that whatever I put my mind to in the next five years would likely be successful, though for my own happiness I should spend my time writing; that I should drink more water. The priestess said that Kali was speaking through her, and that she had no choice but to tell me what Amma, the Mother, was reading in my soul.
She went into her house and returned with wedges of watermelon, which we ate at a table outside the temple, and then it was time for us to drive through heavy traffic to the weekly night market near Pauline’s apartment, where hordes of shoppers looked over the goods on display in the stalls—fruits and vegetables and spices, clothes and utensils, balloons, toys. One man offered back scratchers for sale. A leper begged for money. A man in a white skullcap asked for donations for the construction of a mosque. We drifted along in the crowd, eating pancakes made of flour, sugar, and crushed peanuts, and washed them down with coconut milk. Eddin recalled his visit to an astrologer in India.
“You’re three million years old,” she told him, “and sometimes you feel it, don’t you?”
“This will take fifty years for the United States to live down,” said the Western official.
We were having drinks by the pool at the Hotel Intercontinental, in Kuala Lumpur, and as the sun sank through the haze of fires set by farmers clearing jungles in Sumatra the diplomat was considering the repercussions of the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Americans, he said, might forget the horrific crimes committed in their name, 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
