Animal House

by Chris Floyd

04 June 2004

Every now and then the mask slips, and we see the true face of the system that marshals the world. For an instant, the heavy paint of sober wisdom and moral purpose falls away, and there, suddenly, with jolting clarity, is the snarling rictus of an ape.

Last week gave us two such moments: a quantum collision, where past and present co-exist temporarily, their overlapping images phasing in and out of synch, now Nixon now Bush now Kissinger now Rumsfeld, mouths, eyes, snarls morphing and shifting, with only one image holding constant between the eras – the twisted, shivered bodies of dead innocents.

First was the release of long-secret phone transcripts from Henry Kissinger's heyday as Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor. Most stories about the release centered on the Nixon Gang's panicky efforts to deal with bad publicity from the rape-and-slaughter rampage by U.S. troops in My Lai, Vietnam. As in the current Iraqi prison scandal, the great statesmen were concerned wholly with "containing" the PR damage, not stopping the systematic atrocities – which were, after all, being carried out at their command. Then as now, rump-covering was the order of the day.

But virtually ignored in the pile of power-talk was an extraordinary historical snapshot of a war crime in the moment of conception. It's 1970. Nixon is angry: The Air Force is not killing enough people in Cambodia, the country he has just illegally invaded without the slightest pretence of Congressional approval. The flyboys are doing "milk runs," their intelligence-gathering is too by-the-book: There are "other methods" of getting intelligence, he tells Kissinger. "You understand what I mean?" "Yes, I do," pipes the loyal retainer.

Nixon then orders Kissinger to send every available plane into Cambodia – bombers, fighters, helicopters, prop planes – to "crack the hell out of them," smother the entire country with deadly fire: "I want them to hit everything." Kissinger tells his own top aide, General Alexander Haig, to try to implement the plan: "He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia," Kissinger says. "It's an order, it's to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves."

That's how the system works, beneath the mask. A blustering fool issues an order, and thousands upon thousands of innocent people die. An entire country is ripped to shreds, and into the smoking ruins steps a fanatical band of crazed extremists – the Khmer Rouge – who murder two million more.

Just hours after the transcripts' release, the image of Kissinger in 1970, calmly ordering mass death, morphed into the picture of Pentagon chief Don Rumsfeld addressing West Point graduates in 2004, exhorting the Army cadets to a life of moral purpose – without a single mention of the rape-and-torture gulag he's strung across the world at the order of his own hell-cracking master, George W. Bush. Rumsfeld also issued this warning: The illegal invasion of Iraq is just "the beginning" of what is no longer merely a "war on terror" but is now an all-out death-struggle with what Rumsfeld called "global insurgency," Reuters reports.

Note carefully the change in rhetoric – the change in target – from "terrorism" to "insurgency." An "insurgent" is someone who rises up to resist or overthrow a ruling power. George Washington was an insurgent; so was Pol Pot. But a perceived "global insurgency" can only be aimed at a global power. What Rumsfeld is clearly saying is that anyone anywhere who resists the world-spanning will of the American Empire will be subject to "the path of action." That's the blood-and-iron terminology that Bush himself used to describe his policies in the official "National Security Strategy" he issued – just months before killing more than 10,000 civilians in Iraq.

No doubt the definition of "global insurgent" will prove to be every bit as elastic as "terrorist," in a world where Iraqi prisoners – 70 percent to 90 percent of them completely innocent, according to the Red Cross – were "Gitmo-ized," treated just like the alleged terrorists in America's lawless Guantánamo concentration camp; a world where even U.S. citizens simply disappear into the maw of military custody, held without charges, indefinitely, on the president's express order. If America controls your country and you don't like it, you're an insurgent. If you're an American who doesn't like to control other countries, you too are an insurgent. And the war against you is "just beginning."

"Global insurgency. Crack the hell out of them. The path of action. Anything that flies on anything that moves." They should chisel these words on the White House walls, teach them in every classroom – for this is the system, the true constitution of the American Establishment, the great and the good, the best and brightest. This is what they do, what they've always done. From the Indians to the Iraqis, whatever gets in the way of their power and privilege – individuals, tribes, whole nations – gets trampled, broken, ruined, slaughtered.

Yet there's nothing uniquely "American" in these criminal policies, and the hypocrisy surrounding them. It's how elites have behaved from time immemorial, from the days of the apes: baring their teeth and pounding their chests, ruling through fear and violence, beating, biting, raping, whatever it takes to keep them at the top of the tree. They disguise their savagery – even from themselves – with masks of pomp and piety, but what moves them is the spirit of the beast, the blind gut-lust for dominance, the ape-remnants that live on in our brains. They're too weak, too stupefied with corruption to rise above this inherent bestiality.

What should you do with such dangerous creatures in a civilized society? Why, put them in a cage, of course.

Annotations

The Logic of Torture
New York Review of Books, May 27, 2004

The Kissinger Telcons
National Security Archives, May 26, 2004

Rumsfeld Says War is Just Beginning
Reuters, May 29, 2004

Rumsfeld Gives Commencement at West Point
Associated Press, May 30, 2004

Open Season in Iraq
Counterpunch, May 24, 2004

70-90 Percent of Iraqi Prisoners Arrested 'By Mistake,'
Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2004

Phoenix Project: It's How We Fought the War
Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2001

The Phoenix Program Revisited
CounterPunch, May 15, 2004

The Gentlemanly Planners of Assassinations
Slate.com, Nov. 1, 2002

National Security Strategy of the United States
The White House, September 2002

Remembering the Killing Fields
CBS News, April 15, 2004

This is the Way the Killing Fields End
Asia Times, Aug. 2, 2003

The Family That Preys Together
Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1992

The Hidden History of America's War on Iraq
Synthesis/Regeneration, Winter 2003

Declassified Files Confirm US Collaboration With Nazis
San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 7, 2001

The President and the Assassin
Boston Globe, Sept. 7, 2003

Regarding Henry Kissinger: A Panel on the Making of a War Criminal
Harpers, Feb. 22, 2001

Heir to the Holocaust: Prescott Bush, $1.5 Million and Auschwitz
Clamor Magazine, May/June 2002

Iraqgate: Confession and Coverup
Consortiumnews.com, May/June 1995

Gulf War Crimes
Salon.com, May 15, 2000

CIA Admits 'Tolerating' Contra Drug Trafficking
Consortiumnews.com, June 8, 2000