Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Kill, kill, kill: Presidential bloodlust
By Tom Engelhardt
Here's a memory for you. I was probably five or six and sitting with my father
in a movie house off New York's Times Square - one of the slightly seedy
theaters of that dawn of the 1950s moment that tended to show double or triple
feature B-Westerns or war movies.
We were catching some old oater which, as I recall, began with a stagecoach
careening dramatically down the main street of a cow town. A wounded man is
slumped in the driver's seat, the horses running wild. Suddenly - perhaps from
the town's newspaper office - a cowboy dressed in white and in a white Stetson
rushes out, leaps on the team of horses, stops the stagecoach, and says to the
driver: "Sam, Sam, who dun it to ya?" (or the equivalent). At
just that moment, the camera catches a man, dressed all in black in a black hat
- and undoubtedly mustachioed - skulking into the saloon.
My dad promptly turns to me and whispers: "He's the one. He did it."
Believe me, I'm awed. All I can say in wonder and protest is: "Dad, how can you
know? How can you know?"
But, of course, he did know and, within a year or two, I certainly had the same
simple code of good and evil, hero and villain, under my belt. It wasn't a
mistake I was likely to make twice.
Above all, of course, you couldn't mistake the bad guys of those old films.
They looked evil. If they were "natives," they also made no bones about what
they were going to do to the white hats, or, in the case of Gunga Din (1939),
the pith helmets. "Rise, our new-made brothers," the evil "guru" of that film
tells his followers. "Rise and kill. Kill, lest you be killed yourselves. Kill
for the love of killing. Kill for the love of Kali. Kill! Kill! Kill!"
"Wipe them out!"
Kill! Kill! Kill! That was just the sort of thing the native equivalent of the
black hat was likely to say. Such villains - for a modern reprise, see the
latest cartoon superhero blockbuster, Iron Man - were not only
fanatical, but usually at the very edge of madness as well. And their language
reflected that.
I was brought back with a start to just such evil-doers of my American screen
childhood last week by a memoir from a once-upon-a-time insider of the George W
Bush presidency. No, not former White House press secretary Scott McClellan,
who swept into the headlines by accusing the President of using "propaganda"
and the "complicit enablers" of the media to take the US to war in 2002-2003.
I'm thinking of another insider, former commander of US forces in Iraq,
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. He got next to no attention for a
presidential outburst he recorded in his memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's
Story, so bloodthirsty and cartoonish that it should have caught the
attention of the nation - and so eerily in character, given the last years of
presidential behavior, that you know it has to be on the money.
Let me briefly set the scene, as Sanchez tells it on pages 349-350 of Wiser in
Battle. It's April 6, 2004. L Paul Bremer III, head of the occupation's
Coalition Provisional Authority, as well as the president's colonial viceroy in
Baghdad, and Sanchez were in Iraq in video teleconference with the president,
then-secretary of state Colin Powell and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld.
(Assumedly, the event was recorded and so revisitable by a note-taking
Sanchez.) The first full-scale American offensive against the resistant Sunni
city of Fallujah was just being launched, while, in Iraq's Shi'ite south, the
US military was preparing for a campaign against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his
Mahdi Army militia.
According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: "We've got to smash
somebody's ass quickly," the general reports him saying. "There has to be a
total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power." (And
indeed, by the end of April, parts of Fallujah would be in ruins, as, by
August, would expanses of the oldest parts of the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf.
Muqtada himself would, however, escape to fight another day; and, in order to
declare Powell's "total victory", the US military would have to return to
Fallujah that November, after the US presidential election, and reduce
three-quarters of it to virtual rubble.) Bush then turned to the subject of
Muqtada: "At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone," he insisted to his
top advisors. "At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped
out."
Not long after that, the president "launched" what an evidently bewildered
Sanchez politely describes as "a kind of confused pep talk regarding both
Fallujah and our upcoming southern campaign [against the Mahdi Army]." Here
then is that "pep talk". While you read it, try to imagine anything like it
coming out of the mouth of any other American president, or anything not like
it coming out of the mouth of any evil enemy leader in the films of the
president's - and my own - childhood:
"Kick ass!" [Bush] said, echoing
Colin Powell's tough talk. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy,
we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam
stuff, this is not even close. It is a mindset. We can't send that message.
It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.
"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being
tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the
course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are
not blinking!"
Keep in mind that the bloodlusty rhetoric of
this "pep talk" wasn't meant to rev up US Marine Corps heading into battle.
These were the president's well-embunkered top advisors in a strategy session
on the eve of major military offensives in Iraq. Evidently, however, the
president was intent on imitating George C Scott playing General George Patton
- or perhaps even inadvertently channeling one of the evil villains of his
cinematic childhood.
American mad mullahs
Let's recall a little history here: In the 19th century, Third World leaders
who opposed Western imperial control were often not only demonized but imagined
to be, in some sense, mad simply for taking on Western might. Throughout the
latter part of that century, for instance, the British faced down various "mad
mullahs" in North Africa.
Later, such imagery migrated easily enough to imperial Hollywood and thence
into American movie houses. But here was the strange thing: In the Vietnam
years, that era of reversals, a president of the United States privately
expressed, for the first time, a desire to take on the mantle of madness
previous reserved for the enemy in American culture (and undoubtedly many other
cultures as well). It was not just that president Richard Nixon's domestic
critics were ready to label him a madman, but that, in his desire to end the
Vietnam War in a satisfyingly victorious fashion, he was ready to label himself
one.
"I call it the madman theory, Bob," Nixon aide H R Haldeman reported the
president saying. "I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the
point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to
them that, 'for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We
can't restrain him when he's angry - and he has his hand on the nuclear button'
- and [North Vietnamese leader] Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two
days begging for peace."
Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser, was equally fascinated with
the possible bargaining advantage of having the enemy imagine the president as
an evil, potentially world-obliterating madman. "Henry talked about it so
much," according to Lawrence Lynn, a Kissinger aide, " ... that the Russians
and North Vietnamese wouldn't run risks because of Nixon's character".
What made this fascination with the idea of a mad president more curious was
that it fused with fears held by White House aides and advisers that Nixon,
finger on the nuclear button, might indeed be impaired or nearing the edge of
derangement. "My drunken friend", "that drunken lunatic", "the meatball mind",
or "the basket case", was the way Kissinger referred to him after receiving his
share of slurred late night phone calls.
So, in a historic moment almost four decades ago, a desperate president
suddenly found it strategically advisable to present himself to his enemies as
a potential nation slaughterer, a world incinerator (and his aides were
privately ready to think of him as such); the leader of what was then commonly
termed "the Free World," that is, was considering revealing himself as a mad
emperor, a veritable Ming the Merciless.
Skip ahead these several decades and, presidentially, things have only gotten
stranger. After all, we now have a president who has openly, even eagerly,
faced the world as the commander-in-chief of enhanced interrogation techniques,
extraordinary rendition and offshore imprisonment; a vice president who
appeared openly on Capitol Hill to lobby against a bill banning torture; and
key cabinet members who, from a White House conference room, micromanaged
torture, down to specific techniques in specific cases. Talk about Ming the
Merciless.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, you had one president whose critics would call him
a "baby killer" - "that horrible song" was the way president Lyndon Baines
Johnson referred to the antiwar chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you
kill today?" - and another ready to take on the mantle of madness for purposes
of private diplomacy; and each was reportedly brought to the edge of private
madness while in office.
But both were also uncomfortable with imagery of themselves and exceedingly
awkward in the televisual world of politics that was
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