The
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld crowd got drunk one night and decided to
play a mad joke on the world. The public had demanded, and the U.S.
Congress mumbled in assent, that a commission be selected to investigate
the whos, hows and whys of September 11, the secrets behind the
mad bombings.
So
they picked the Mad, Secret Bomber, himself: Dr. Henry Kissinger.
"I have bombed many times in my career," said the man
who inspired the book and movie, Dr. Strangelove, accepting chairmanship
of the 9-11 commission. "In all humility, I am a genius about
dees things. I believe dat der Fuhrer... urr, der President has
made a vize choice," said the old genocidist, looking and sounding
like a Budweiser frog in a suit. "I have bombed whole countries
in secret. I know the vayz of secret terror."
Among
his innumerable crimes, Kissinger was the German-accented Rasputin
behind President Nixon's illegal bombing of Cambodia, beginning
in 1969. For 14 months, vast stretches of the countryside were carpeted
with explosives. The National Security Advisor - later Secretary
of State - and his boss never informed or asked the permission of
the U.S Congress, although the B-52 missions were common knowledge
among the military and much of the pliant press.
Finally,
in the spring of 1970, U.S. infantry units were ordered across the
Vietnam-Cambodia border. The conspiracy of silence was over. At
campuses across the nation, hundreds of thousands of students protested
the invasion and secret bombing. On May 4, National Guardsmen killed
four demonstrators at Kent State University, Ohio, reinvigorating
an anti-war movement that had been losing steam as U.S. troop strength
in Vietnam declined.
As
organizers prepared to mount a new wave of demonstrations, local
and state police assaulted a dormitory at Jackson State University,
in Mississippi, killing two students and wounding 12. The May 14
- 15 siege of the Black campus was occasioned by unrest over rumors
that the Black mayor of Fayette, Mississippi and his wife had been
shot. But in the massive protests that rocked streets and campuses
across the width and breadth of the country that grim and furious
month, placards memorialized the martyrs of Kent and Jackson State,
and the three Black students killed by police in Orangeburg, South
Carolina, in February of 1968. The anti-war movement had been presented
with a multi-racial cast of martyrs, and for a time spoke with a
more truly American voice.
The
Southern Christian Leadership Conference roused itself from its
post-King assassination torpor to stage a hugely effective, 130-mile
march from Perry, Georgia to Atlanta, keyed to the killings at Jackson,
Orangeburg and Kent State. Kissinger's secret war and brazen invasion
had fired up the Black side of the movement, too.
Noam
Chomsky argues credibly that Kissinger's secret and public bombing
of Cambodia literally drove Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge peasant soldiers
insane, leading them to seek vengeance, first among the city dwellers
who had escaped the rain of death, and then to general slaughter.
The human impact of Kissinger's predations is unknowable. He emerges
as if from a bottomless pit.
Kissinger
set in motion the wars that killed millions in Angola and Mozambique.
An indictment the thickness of phone books would be required to
list the capital offenses committed by this, the Master Criminal
of recent times. As foreign policy guru to Presidents Nixon and
Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger has probably killed more people and
overthrown more governments, covertly and publicly, with bombs large
and small, weapons of all calibers and types, than any living human
being. By any measurement of evil, he overwhelms Osama bin Laden.
Readers
of a younger age may view our reaction to The Terminator's Return
as less than relevant to today's predicament. Consider, however,
that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and most of their clique are also baby-boomers,
that their political views were formed during those same
days of body bags, massacres and incipient revolt. These are the
men who still talk of putting to rest the so-called "post-Vietnam
War syndrome" - and yet they cannot resist giving the finger
to their old enemies of the Left. Like drunken frat boys, they flaunt
the symbolism of Henry the K, and inflict him upon us, once again.
Somewhere in Kissinger's appointment as 9-11 commission chairman,
they find Victory.
They
have lost their minds. Old bones that have not stirred in many years
will rise up at the specter of Dr. Strangelove, and march again.
Let George Bush savor his infantile prank. He has done the resistance
a favor.
