| Username |
Post |
| protean |
Posted
on 02-Dec-02 04:52 PM
On September 9, 2001, 60 Minutes aired a segment on the Schneider family's charges against Kissinger. The former secretary of state came across as partly responsible for what is the Chilean equivalent of the JFK assassination. It was a major blow to his public image: Kissinger cast as a supporter of terrorists. Two days later, Osama bin Laden struck. Immediately, Kissinger was again on television, but now as a much-in-demand expert on terrorism.
In another lawsuit, filed earlier this month, eleven Chilean human rights victims--including relatives of people murdered after Pinochet's coup--claimed Kissinger knowingly provided practical assistance and encouragement to the Pinochet regime. Kissinger's codefendant in the case is Michael Townley, an American-born Chilean agent who was a leading international terrorist in the mid-1970s. In his most notorious operation, Townley in 1976 planted a car-bomb that killed Orlando Letelier, Allende's ambassador to the United States, and Ronni Moffitt, Letelier's colleague, on Washington's embassy row.
Kissinger has more trouble than these lawsuits. The Chilean Supreme Court sent the State Department questions for Kissinger about the death of Charles Horman, an American journalist killed during the 1973 coup in Chile. (Horman's murder was the subject of the 1982 film Missing.) A criminal judge in Chile has said he might include Kissinger in his investigation of Operation Condor, a now infamous secret project, in which the security services of Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina worked together to kidnap and murder political opponents. (Letelier was killed in a Condor operation.) The Spanish judge who requested the 1998 arrest of Pinochet in Great Britain has declared he wants to question Kissinger as a witness in his inquiry into crimes against humanity committed by Pinochet and other Latin American military dictators. In France, a judge probing the disappearance of five French citizens in Chile during the Pinochet years wants to talk to Kissinger. Last May, he sent police to a Paris hotel, where Kissinger was staying, to serve him questions. In February, Kissinger canceled a trip to Brazil, where he was to be awarded a medal by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. His would-be hosts said he had pulled out to avoid protests by human rights groups.
A fellow who has coddled state-sponsored terrorism has been put in charge of this terrorism investigation. A proven liar has been assigned the task of finding the truth. By the way, in 1976, when Kissinger was secretary of state, he was informed by his chief aide for Latin America that South American military regimes were intending to use Operation Condor "to find and kill" political opponents. Kissinger quickly dispatched a cable instructing US ambassadors in the Condor countries to note Washington's "deep concern." But it seems no such warnings were actually conveyed. And a month later, this order was rescinded. The next day, Letelier and Moffit were murdered. (Peter Kornbluh and journalist John Dinges recently chronicled this sad Kissinger episode in The Washington Post.) Kissinger's State Department had not responded with the force needed to thwart the official terrorism of its friends in South America. Perhaps this provides Kissinger experience useful for examining the government's failure to prevent more recent acts of terrorism.
Other qualifications for the job, as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney might see it? A leaks-obsessed Kissinger, when he served as Nixon's national security adviser, wiretapped his own staff. (One of his targets, Morton Halperin, sued and eventually won an apology.) And when he left office, Kissinger took tens of thousands of pages of documents--created by government employees on government time--and treated them as his personal records, using them for his own memoirs and keeping the material for years from the prying eyes of historians and journalists. He and the Bush-Cheney White House agree on open government: the less the better.
Remember, the White House was never keen on setting up an independent commission that would answer to the public. Cheney at one point reportedly intervened to block a compromise that had been painstakingly worked out in Congress regarding the composition and rules of the commission. Finally, the White House said okay, as long as it could pick the chairman and subpoenas would only be issued with the support of at least six of the commission's ten members. With Kissinger in control, the secret-keepers of the White House--who already have succeeded in preventing the House and Senate intelligence committees' investigation of 9/ll from releasing embarrassing and uncomfortable information--will have little reason to fear.
The Bush-Cheney administration has been a rehab center for tainted Republicans. Retired Admiral John Poindexter, a leading Iran-contra player, was placed in charge of a sensitive, high-tech, Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation aimed at reviewing massive amounts of individual personal data in order to uncover possible terrorists. Elliott Abrams, who pled guilty to lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal, was warmly embraced and handed a staff position in Bush's National Security Council. But the Kissinger selection is the most outrageous of these acts of compassion and forgiveness. It is a move of defiance and hubris.
For many in the world, Kissinger is a symbol of US arrogance and the misuse of American might. In power, he cared more for US credibility and geostrategic advantage than for human rights and open government. His has been a career of covertly moving chips, not one of letting them fall. He is not a truth-seeker. In fact, he has prevaricated about his own actions and tried to limit access to government information. He should be subpoenaed, not handed the right to subpoena. He is a target, not an investigator.
With Kissinger's appointment, Bush has rendered the independent commission a sham. Democrats should have immediately announced they would refuse to fill their allotted five slots. But after Bush picked Kissinger, the Democrats tapped former Democratic Senator George Mitchell to be vice-chairman of the panel, signaling that Kissinger was fine by them. How unfortunate. The public would be better served and the victims of 9/11 better honored by no commission rather than one headed by Kissinger.
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| protean |
Posted
on 02-Dec-02 04:52 PM
This is after the appointment of Kissinger as 9/11 truthseeker. This is akin to Chand becoming appointed PM of Nepal by Mr. G --a person who has not really delivered effectively and is known to be deceptive, and a staunch royalist-- after dismissing an elected government.
[ The main take of the article is that for many in the world, Kissinger is a symbol of US arrogance, duplicity and aggression. The high priest of cynical realpolitik, in
power, his concern was US geostrategic advantage, frequently at the
expense of human rights and open government. He is not a
truth-seeker. In fact, he has prevaricated about his own actions and
repeatedly tried to limit access to government information.]
________________________________________
Read the details of the nation below:
http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=176
_________________________________________
Asking Henry Kissinger to investigate government malfeasance or nonfeasance is akin to asking Slobodan Milosevic to investigate war crimes. Pretty damn akin, since Kissinger has been accused, with cause, of engaging in war crimes of his own. Moreover, he has been a poster-child for the worst excesses of secret government and secret warfare. Yet George W. Bush has named him to head a supposedly independent commission to investigate the nightmarish attacks of September 11, 2001, a commission intended to tell the public what went wrong on and before that day. This is a sick, black-is-white, war-is-peace joke--a cruel insult to the memory of those killed on 9/11 and a screw-you affront to any American who believes the public deserves a full accounting of government actions or lack thereof. It's as if Bush instructed his advisers to come up with the name of the person who literally would be the absolute worst choice for the post and, once they had, said, "sign him up."
Hyperbole? Consider the record.
Vietnam. Kissinger participated in a GOP plot to undermine the 1968 Paris peace talks in order to assist Richard Nixon's presidential campaign. Once in office, Nixon named Kissinger his national security adviser, and later appointed him secretary of state. As co-architect of Nixon's war in Vietnam, Kissinger oversaw the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, an arguably illegal operation estimated to have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Bangladesh. In 1971, Pakistani General Yahya Khan, armed with US weaponry, overthrew a democratically-elected government in an action that led to a massive civilian bloodbath. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Kissinger blocked US condemnation of Khan. Instead, he noted Khan's "delicacy and tact."
Chile. In the early 1970s, Kissinger oversaw the CIA's extensive covert campaign that assisted coup-plotters, some of whom eventually overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende and installed the murderous military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. On June 8, 1976, at the height of Pinochet's repression, Kissinger had a meeting with Pinochet and behind closed doors told him that "we are sympathetic to what you are trying to do here," according to minutes of the session (which are quoted in Peter Kornbluh's forthcoming book, The Pinochet File.)
East Timor. In 1975, President Gerald Ford and Kissinger, still serving as secretary of state, offered advance approval of Indonesia's brutal invasion of East Timor, which took the lives of tens of thousands of East Timorese. For years afterward, Kissinger denied the subject ever came up during the December 6, 1975, meeting he and Ford held with General Suharto, Indonesia's military ruler, in Jarkata. But a classified US cable obtained by the National Security Archive shows otherwise. It notes that Suharto asked for "understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action" in East Timor. Ford said, "We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have." The next day, Suharto struck East Timor. Kissinger is an outright liar on this subject.
Argentina. In 1976, as a fascistic and anti-Semitic military junta was beginning its so-called "dirty war" against supposed subversives--between 9,000 and 30,000 people would be "disappeared" by the military over the next seven years--Argentina's foreign minister met with Kissinger and received what he believed was tacit encouragement for his government's violent efforts. According to a US cable released earlier this year, the foreign minister was convinced after his chat with Kissinger that the United States wanted the Argentine terror campaign to end soon--not that Washington was dead-set against it. The cable said that the minister had left his meeting with Kissinger "euphoric." Two years later, Kissinger, then a private citizen, traveled to Buenos Aires as the guest of dictator General Jorge Rafael Videla and praised the junta for having done, as one cable put it, "an outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces." As Raul Castro, the US ambassador to Argentina, noted at the time in a message to the State Department, "My only concern is that Kissinger's repeated high praise for Argentina's action in wiping out terrorism...may have gone to some considerable extent to his hosts' heads....There is some danger that Argentines may use Kissinger's laudatory statements as justification for hardening their human rights stance." That is, Kissinger was, in a way, enabling torture, kidnapping and murder.
Appropriately, Kissinger is a man on the run for his past misdeeds. He is the target of two lawsuits, and judges overseas have sought him for questioning in war-crimes-related legal actions. In the United States, the family of Chilean General Rene Schneider sued Kissinger last year. Schneider was shot on October 22, 1970, by would-be coup-makers working with CIA operatives. These CIA assets were part of a secret plan authorized by Nixon--and supervised by Kissinger--to foment a coup before Allende, a Socialist, could be inaugurated as president. Schneider, a constitutionalist who opposed a coup, died three days later. This secret CIA program in Chile--dubbed "Track Two"--gave $35,000 to Schneider's assassins after the slaying. Michael Tigar, an attorney for the Schneider family, claims, "Our case shows, document by document, that [Kissinger] was involved in great detail in supporting the people who killed General Schneider, and then paid them off."
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| Garibjanata |
Posted
on 02-Dec-02 07:08 PM
But Henry Kissinger is also a symbol of wisdom.He has written so many remarkable books.So please don't compare him with this pygmy called chand.Comparisions are ODIOUS and this one is more odious than odious. How can comparisions be made between a savant and a moron?
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| protean |
Posted
on 02-Dec-02 07:26 PM
Where I'm doing the analogy is the irony of their appointments , and not in the knowldege level of these two personalities.
I agree that Henry Kissinger is a shrewd personality and his a sharp one.
I don't think he is wise. If he was so wise, he would not be involved in the decisions to have so many civilians killed. When one uses their intellect not for erudtion, but to gain one's power and fame while causing suffering to the thousands at the behest of their decisions, then shame on those ,individuals no matter, how bright they may be.
A very smart and wise leader, wouldn't have done this--would have opted for some other alternative.
If someone who has been involved in lying, is in charge of this commission, then what truth are you to seek? For Kissinger, I'm trying to point the other side of the story of where he actually messed up--although this would never be pointed in the mainstream media,where he would be honored.
Similarly, what I am trying to purport is that, when Chand who had never been effective WHEN IN POWER and was deceitful, gets appointed again by the leader of a failed system--after having dismissed an elected PM by calling him inept--, how ironic can it get?
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| suva chintak |
Posted
on 02-Dec-02 07:37 PM
Dear Garibjanata, no offense intended, but I must post my differences with you comment!
Just just because Kissinger penned a couple of books (who cares if they are dozens), does it absolve him of his complicity in getting millions of people killed in Latin America and Indo-china and Indonesia, not to talk about Africa? By that logic, Hitler and Saddam should also be praised as Saints, they also have many books to their credit!
Talking of Chand, now he is also an accomplished writer, has many poems and story books to his collection. Or would you discount his writing just because he wrote in pakhe Nepali language?
Now about comparing the two personalities: if Chand was as evil as you claim he is, he just ruined a small country. Dr. Kissinger, on the other hand, literally messed up the whole world! Let us not lose our sense of proportion if we want to be comparative.
In Peace!
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| dirk |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 07:55 AM
Touche! I'm with Protean and Suva Chintak all the way. Garibjanata, just because you don't approve of Chand's appointment doesn't mean that he is stupid and evil and your Kissinger is a maha biduwan and an angel. I think you should also take a good look at this book by Christopher Hithcens.
http://www.versobooks.com/books/ghij/h-titles/hitchens_kissinger.shtml
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Trial_Kissinger_Hitchins.html
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| Bitchpatroll |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 09:51 AM
I think about a year ago he was about to be indicted in Chile for war crimes and this now. This is what happens when you have republicans in power, if democrats were in power this would have never happened. If you look at it carefully you will see a lot of Nixon era people holding key positions in the govt. from Rumsfeild to Dick to now Kissenger. Its like paying your dues...Same century old political system if not moetery payback then political payback. This was definately payback time for Dick and Rumsfeild for putting in a good word for them back in the days.
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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 11:01 AM
the trial of henry kissinger is a good read. hitchen's sure has dug up kissinger's "dark" past.
also, i agree with all you huys who say, writing a dozen or so books on international relations does not make him a wise leader just as writing some anta-santa artciles and katha-kabita for madhupark does not make chand a wise leader. of all the kissinger's books, i liked "diplomacy" for the fisrt 15 chapters, after that its his standard "america-the great" theory. i think brezinzski was much wiser (but less shrewd) than kissinger.
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| Biruwa |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 01:41 PM
Garibjanata, you poor soul.
I too have to disagree with you. Lok B. Chand is also a prolific writer albeit only in Nepali. Does it make him any less than Kissinger in Bidwata ? Writing in English may be more difficult for you and me but for the kissinger fellow it's his mum's lang.
Janga bahadur le jasto kura ali nagarau ki :-)
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| protean |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 02:18 PM
More on Kissinger by Hitchens.
Here, he also points to a book by Ralph Wetterhahn, The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War (while talking about his own book)
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010430&s=hitchens
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| protean |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 02:21 PM
I found anoither report by Hitchens in Feb 2002 [in The Nation] on Kissinger and Suharto.
___________________________________________________________
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020218&s=hitchens
MINORITY REPORT by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Kissinger's Green Light to Suharto
In a few weeks, East Timor will be able to celebrate both its independence as a country and its status as a democracy. Elections will have produced a government able to seek and receive international recognition. An undetermined number of Timorese, herded by the Indonesian Army into the western part of the island during the last spasms of cruelty before Jakarta formally abandoned its claim to the territory, will not be able to celebrate. And the entire process is gruesomely overshadowed by the murder of at least a quarter of a million Timorese during the illegal Indonesian occupation. The new nation will need friends, and help of all kinds, and everybody should consider contributing something (send checks to Global Exchange/East Timor Relief, PO Box 420832, San Francisco, CA 94142).
The elections and the independence ceremony were supposed to take place twenty-seven years ago, when the Portuguese colonial power surrendered its authority. But the Indonesian military dictatorship had another idea, which was to engulf its tiny neighbor by force. General Suharto and his deputies made it fairly obvious that they wanted the territory but not the people. They came horribly close to succeeding in this foul design. Ever since, there has been an argument over the precise extent of US complicity with the 1975 aggression. It was known that President Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, were in Jakarta on December 6 of that year, the day before Indonesian air, land and naval forces launched the assault. Scholars and journalists have solemnly debated whether there was a "green light" from Washington.
Kissinger, who does not find room to mention East Timor even in the index of his three-volume memoir, has more than once stated that the invasion came to him as a surprise, and that he barely knew of the existence of the Timorese question. He was obviously lying. But the breathtaking extent of his mendacity has only just become fully apparent, with the declassification of a secret State Department telegram. The document, which has been made public by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, contains a verbatim record of the conversation among Suharto, Ford and Kissinger. "We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action," Suharto opened bluntly. "We will understand and will not press you on the issue," Ford responded. "We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have." Kissinger was even more emphatic, but had an awareness of the possible "spin" problems back home. "It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly," he instructed the despot. "We would be able to influence the reaction if whatever happens, happens after we return.... If you have made plans, we will do our best to keep everyone quiet until the President returns home." Micromanaging things for Suharto, he added: "The President will be back on Monday at 2 pm Jakarta time. We understand your problem and the need to move quickly but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned." As ever, deniability supersedes accountability.
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| protean |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 02:21 PM
There came then the awkward question of weaponry. Indonesia's armed forces, which had never yet lost a battle against civilians, were equipped with US-supplied matériel. But the Foreign Assistance Act forbade the use of such armaments except in self-defense. "It depends on how we construe it; whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation," Kissinger mused. (At a later meeting back at the State Department on December 18, the minutes of which have also been declassified, he was blunt about knowingly violating the statute. For a transcript of the minutes, see Mark Hertsgaard, "The Secret Life of Henry Kissinger," October 29, 1990.)
An even more sinister note was struck later in the conversation, when Kissinger asked Suharto if he expected "a long guerrilla war." The dictator replied that there "will probably be a small guerrilla war," while making no promise about its duration. Bear in mind that Kissinger has already urged speed and dispatch upon Suharto. Adam Malik, Indonesia's foreign minister at the time, later conceded in public that between 50,000 and 80,000 Timorese civilians were killed in the first eighteen months of the occupation. These civilians were killed with American weapons, which Kissinger contrived to supply over Congressional protests, and their murders were covered up by American diplomacy, and the rapid rate of their murder was something that had been urged in so many words by an American Secretary of State. How is one to live with the shame of this? How is one to tolerate the continued easy and profiteering existence of such a man, who had no sooner left office than he went into business partnership with the same genocidal dictatorship he had helped arm and encourage? Read with any care, this State Department telegram shows a knowing conspiracy--there isn't another legal term for it--to break international law, US law and (it could well be argued) the Genocide Convention. Ford may have been an abject moron, but Kissinger was a professional: He knew perfectly well that a colony of a NATO country could not be invaded and occupied except in flat defiance of every international covenant and principle. He also knew that US law explicitly forbade the use of US weapons for such a purpose.
The disclosure of the new and unarguable documents merited a few inches in the Washington Post and got me a whole minute on the BBC World Service. So there you have it. Henry Kissinger the mass murderer (and pal of Ted Koppel). Henry Kissinger the errand boy for dictatorship (and confidant of Charlie Rose). Henry Kissinger the profiteer from genocide (and orator at Kay Graham's funeral). Henry Kissinger the man who told Suharto to hurry up and get on with it (and chum of Harold Evans and Tina Brown). Henry Kissinger, the man who has hired Bill Clinton's disgraced Chief of Staff, Mack McLarty, to be a partner in the firm of Kissinger Associates. What can one say about countries and cultures so corrupt and depraved that they will give succor, and even acclaim, to those who murder without conscience?
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| dirk |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 02:45 PM
Biruwa,
Kissinger's mother tongue is German.... born in Fuerth, Germany to a Jewish family....moved to the US when he was 15.
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=14147
Want a cover-up expert? Kissinger's your man
History puts credibility at zero in the 9/11 probe..by Robert Scheer
The president clearly does not want to know the truth about Sept. 11. Otherwise he would not have appointed Henry Kissinger to head an inquiry into the origins of arguably the most successful terrorist attack in history. Long an unabashed advocate of concealing and distorting the truth in the name of national security, he is the last guy who has the right to ask someone in government, "What did you know and when did you know it?"
Kissinger, after all, was the member of the Nixon White House most bent on destroying Daniel Ellsberg for giving a copy of the Pentagon Papers, the government's secret history of the Vietnam War, to the New York Times. His obsession with preventing all government leaks, except those of his creation, is well documented in the Nixon tapes. And this is the man who publicly lied about everything from the bombing of Cambodia to the cover-up of the Watergate break-in of Democratic Party headquarters to the overthrow and death of the democratically elected leader of Chile.
But even if truth serum could be slipped into his morning espresso, Kissinger still would be an appalling choice to lead what should be the fearless, unbiased fact-finding investigation necessary to prevent future tragedies like the destruction of the World Trade Center towers.
He has been much too personally embroiled in the gamesmanship, greed and opportunism underlying politics in the Mideast; neither is he willing to disclose his long list of lucrative government and business contracts that pose potential conflicts of interest.
For example, Kissinger Associates, the former secretary of State's ultra-connected consulting firm, has had dealings in the past with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait -- the two nations most closely linked with the 9/11 hijackers -- and was the subject of a congressional investigation for its role in the $4-billion bankrolling of Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s by the Atlanta office of Italy's BNL bank. Kissinger Associates then included Brent Scowcroft, who became national security advisor for President George H.W. Bush, and Lawrence Eagleburger, secretary of State in that administration.
That those ties crisscross with other suspicious activities of close Bush family advisors -- including Poppy Bush's consulting role with the Carlyle Group that took him to Saudi Arabia to drum up business -- makes Kissinger's selection as understandable as it is dishonest.
The truth is, the administration doesn't want a commission looking into what went wrong on Sept. 11 because its focus might turn too close to home. The incoming Bush administration in 2001 ignored dire warnings from Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger that Al Qaeda was the major security threat facing the U.S. Instead, the new administration focused on the war on drugs and even funneled "humanitarian" aid to Taliban-run Afghanistan as a reward for the fundamentalists' eradication of an opium crop.
The truth about Sept. 11 might dampen Bush's exploitation of tragedy to draw attention from a sagging economy, a down stock market and stunning financial scandals that began with the downfall of Bush's close buddies at Enron. How convenient to divert the public's attention from other problems with the notion that the whole world must be turned upside down to combat terrorism, when marginal and avoidable mistakes by our government allowed the dreams of madmen to be fulfilled in blood.
Would the monstrous new homeland security bureaucracy really have protected us from a few box-cutter-wielding nuts? How difficult, after all, is it to prevent people already on a terrorist wanted list from entering the country to attend U.S. flight schools? How hard is it for the president of the United States to get the FBI and the CIA to talk to each other? And why are we apparently going to war with Iraq, which had nothing to do with Sept. 11, instead of with Saudi Arabia, which did?
The Bush administration was floundering before Sept. 11, and it still seems to have difficulty dealing with the nation's domestic problems. Instead of facing that harsh reality, Bush wants us to welcome the shredding of constitutional protections, allegedly for our own protection, and be excited at the prospect of a sideshow war with Hussein.
Best to not look too hard at any of this. The Bush administration resisted convening a 9/11 commission for more than a year and, when forced by overwhelming public pressure to do so, picked an infamous man with the legendary chops to quash any search for truth.
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| SIWALIK |
Posted
on 04-Dec-02 12:48 PM
Kissinger was a hard core realist scholar turned politician. He is a perfect choice for Bush to hush up any implication his (Bush) administration might have regarding 9-11. There was an interesting column I read about the book "Bin Laden, the Frobidden Truth" published in Paris, which claims that administration of Prez. Bush obstructed the investigation of Islamic terrorism by the FBI prior to 9-11.
Maybe the fight against terrorism should also look into US sponsored terrorism in the past. Bush might see a different picture of terrorism if he looks at US actions during the Cold War.
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| ? |
Posted
on 04-Dec-02 04:49 PM
I agree with Mark Shields when he says neither Kissinger is not the man suited for the job nor is his appointment any good news for those families of the victim sof the WTC bombing looking for the real deal that created this whole mess on that fateful day: September the eleventh.
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| protean |
Posted
on 04-Dec-02 06:21 PM
Here' more on Kissinger in the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,850148,00.html
_________________________________________
Henry's revenge
This man is regarded by many outside the US as a war criminal. There are countries he can't travel to for fear of arrest. Why has George Bush just given him a major job?
Julian Borger on the Phoenix-like rise of Henry Kissinger
Friday November 29, 2002
The Guardian
The vastly different reactions on each side of the Atlantic to Henry Kissinger's return to the political centre stage says a lot about the constantly widening gap in political perceptions between the US and Europe. Those Europeans who were aware that the old cold warrior was still alive could be forgiven for assuming he was in a cell somewhere awaiting war crimes charges, or living the life of a fugitive, never sleeping in the same bed twice lest human rights investigators track him down.
In the US, the overwhelming response to Kissinger's appointment, at the age of 79, to head the investigation into the catastrophic intelligence failure that led to September 11 has been one of relief mixed with nostalgic affection. For many Americans, he is the avuncular wise man with the funny accent, secretary of state under presidents Nixon and Ford, the only man ever to serve as secretary of state and national security adviser, and a Nobel Peace Price winner to boot, who is now coming to the rescue bringing half a century of international experience to bear on fixing the holes in national security.
From the point of view of the average citizen who has taken even a passing interest in international affairs, Kissinger has never really been away. Since September 11, he has been a regular on television talk shows and in the opinion pages of the major newspapers, holding forth on the "war on terror". His views are held in such high esteem that a row broke out during the summer over the correct interpretation of a commentary he had written on policy towards Iraq. He gave overwhelming approval to the decision to confront Saddam Hussein over weapons of mass destruction, but advised the Bush administration to seek as broad an international consensus as possible before going to war. The New York Times interpreted this note of caution as opposition, and was roundly lambasted on the right for doing so.
While Kissinger's place in the Washington mainstream has never seriously been challenged, his principal detractor, the Washington-based British journalist Christopher Hitchens, who chronicled the legal case against him in his book, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, is generally treated here as an oddball curiosity. His arguments have scant media attention, certainly in comparison with their reception in Europe.
Kissinger has been canny in maintaining his celebrity status, appearing in a string of advertisements, alongside the likes of Woody Allen, intended to bring tourism back to New York. In Kissinger's ad, he is seen running around the bases in an empty New York Yankees baseball stadium, clearly imagining himself to be scoring a home run. The message was that the Big Apple was somewhere to live out your dreams.
The prophet of realpolitik, who once famously claimed that power was the ultimate aphrodisiac, now has a chance to live out his dreams again - a man of ideas whose time has come once more in the harsh light of post-September 11 politics.
In that light, the secret bombing of Cambodia, which he orchestrated with Richard Nixon, could be argued to be the ultimate act of preemption, a concept on which the Bush administration's new national security doctrine is based. The same goes for his role in helping oust Salvador Allende from power in Chile, and his replacement by General Augusto Pinochet. The prevailing climate in national security circles in the age of terrorism favours early action against potential threats, before they pose direct danger.
It is a climate that makes it politically risky to criticise even such a controversial personality, and the chronically risk-averse Democrats have mostly stood to attention behind Kissinger's nomination. "He brings a stature to it, which is important," Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton's national security adviser, told the New York Times. "He brings historical perspective, which I think is equally important. And I think that he has a wide-ranging experience, which is relevant... It is a very good choice."
Privately, the Democrats are consoling themselves that their own elder statesman, former senator George Mitchell, will be at Kissinger's side in an attempt to ensure that the inquiry is not a total whitewash.
They realise that Kissinger is such an old hand at national security policy that he knows it is ultimately subordinate to domestic politics. There is convincing evidence that he played a role in convincing the South Vietnamese to reject a peace deal being negotiated by Lyndon Johnson in the dying months of his administration, which might have saved the Democrats in the 1968 elections. Instead, the collapse of the talks helped elect Kissinger's man, Nixon.
Kissinger now has another chance to be a player in the great game of international strategy, a game in which truth will inevitably be traded off against perceived national interest, a barter at which the American Machiavelli is a master. At the heart of his deliberations will be the role of Saudi Arabia, and the mysterious relationship between the kingdom's royal family, its intelligence services and the 9/11 hijackers, 15 out of 19 of whom were Saudi nationals.
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| protean |
Posted
on 04-Dec-02 06:21 PM
On the other hand, the Saudi government is a long-term strategic ally, which has facilities near-essential to a war against Iraq, provides a major source of oil, and is a friend of the Bush family. It is a dilemma few would enjoy as much as Kissinger.
The German-born statesman is also well placed to appreciate the interplay of big money and politics, an alchemy that is at the heart of the Bush administration. At the head of Kissinger Associates since 1982, he has sold his expertise in the workings of the Washington policy machine and his international contacts to corporate clients, most of whom choose to remain anonymous, but who are thought to include Exxon Mobil, Arco and American Express.
Kissinger is also on the "European Strategy Board" of a Dallas investment company called Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, one of the biggest financial contributors to George Bush's political career. Tom Hicks, one of its partners, was instrumental in Bush's rise: his purchase of the Texas Rangers baseball team, in which the president had a stake, helped make him a millionaire.
All of the above may help explain why Kissinger is not a surprising choice for the Bush administration. However, it does not explain the popular acceptance, and even acclaim, his nomination has so far received.
This almost certainly has something to do with the national mood since September 11, which has been defensive for obvious reasons, and particularly ill-disposed to introspection and self-doubt. There is no longer an appetite for the sort of harsh reassessment of the US role in the world that was so prevalent in the 80s and early 90s in the form of books and films about Vietnam and Latin America, Kissinger's old stomping ground. In Hollywood's most recent Vietnam movie, the US is the hero once more. Meanwhile, the CIA's adventures in Chile, El Salvador and Nicaragua are largely forgotten.
It is worth remembering that Kissinger is not the sole beneficiary of this particular form of national amnesia. Earlier this month, Admiral John Poindexter, one of the central figures in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 80s, was appointed the head of a new Pentagon intelligence service, with Big Brother-style access to the personal information of ordinary Americans. Poindexter was formerly better known for destroying data than collecting it, having admitted to Congress that he destroyed a document bearing Ronald Reagan's signature authorising the sale of arms to Iran in return for the release of American hostages. The revenue was used to fund Contra guerrillas fighting the Nicaraguan government without the knowledge of Congress. Poindexter was convicted for his role but later won an appeal on a legal technicality. The motto of his new office is scientia est potentia - knowledge is power.
Meanwhile, his celebrated subordinate, Colonel Oliver North, who carried out much of the shredding of embarrassing documents and who took the legal rap for the scandal, is also back on the Washington A list, as a television talk-show host and pundit. Another Iran-Contra veteran, Elliott Abrams, who as assistant secretary of state under Reagan was convicted of misleading Congress, is now back in the national security council. Otto Reich, who masterminded pro-Contra propaganda, has also risen again, as an assistant secretary of state.
Consider, too, the strange career of G Gordon Liddy, the Watergate burglar who went to jail for breaking into the Democratic Party offices at the behest of Kissinger's boss, Nixon. He emerged from prison a born-again Christian and is now a radio talk-show host with a faithful following. His book of conservative rants again gun control and other liberal infringements on liberty, entitled When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country, was treated with reverence on CNN. The financial news anchor, Lou Dobbs, recommended it to his viewers "as a celebration of sorts of a time when boys could go hunting with a pal, make their own fireworks and just burn leaves on an autumn afternoon."
When he famously remarked that "there are no second acts in American lives", F Scott Fitzgerald could not have conceived of the modern American right, which - unlike its liberal adversaries - does not leave its wounded on the political battlefield.
Like Liddy, Poindexter and North, Kissinger has been helped back from eternal obscurity by a deep desire on the part of the nation's conservatives to avenge past humiliations, when men they saw as heroes were forced to answer to the law, and sometimes go to jail.
Kissinger's second act is sweeter than most - his murky past has not only gone unpunished, it now looks like the unsettling prologue for US policy in years to come.
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| sc |
Posted
on 06-Dec-02 12:20 PM
Inspite of all this controversy, how come Kissenger is appointed to public office once again.I heard in one of the NPR programs about Kissenger's attitue "what is good for america is good for everybody else". Is this in some way connected to why he was appointed by the US government.
Just a thought.
.s.c.
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| suva chintak |
Posted
on 06-Dec-02 09:31 PM
One other bit on the Great Kissinger reincarnation!
After Kissinger and the Chilean military sidekicks had killed the democratically elected Salvadore Allende and a military junta had been set up, some journalist asked Kissinger why US did what it did there which is assassinating a foreign head of state and puttting a military junta in power.
"We can't be expected to suffer when others make bad democratic choices."
What he is saying that the Chilean people elected the president, but that is not our choice, so we are entitled to change it as we see fit.
It just boggles my mind, how imperialist can you get?
In peace!
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| sally |
Posted
on 07-Dec-02 08:50 PM
How utterly ironic that, just as we may be embarking on a divisive war, Bush resuscitates a man who is one of the main symbols of the LAST divisive war era.
Whether or not Kissinger did a good job back in those long-ago days is, of course, arguable. The Nation would say one thing; I suppose the Economist (and definitely the National Review) would say another thing. But what's NOT arguable is that perception is half of politics, and that the choice of Kissinger is likely to be viewed, by large parts of the world, in precisely the way that the Nation characterized it: a joke.
This choice does seem utterly oblivious to--how did the Declaration of Independence put it?--"a decent respect for the opinions of mankind."
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| suva chintak |
Posted
on 07-Dec-02 09:25 PM
Sallyji,
Great point, the one about "decent respect for the opinion of mankind." Now this opinion was not only supposed to be that of White male WASPS, not even only of all of American citizens. It was a true attempt to measure the destiny and role of the new republic in the eyes of the whole world. It set the spirit of universal standard in the operation of any nation-state. I truly respect that forethought in the founding father of this country.
But look what Mr. Bush has done, just the opposite. He seems to be purposely sticking a finger at the world and saying "The hell with what you think, I will show you what I can do and you can do nothing about it. Kissinger is a criminal? Tough shit, you will have to endure him, again!"
The way this administration is going, I would not be suprised if they reinstate Colonel Oliver North types to some big position. There is no stopping the conservative tidal wave this time...
In peace
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| sally |
Posted
on 07-Dec-02 10:57 PM
Suva-ji, Historically speaking, I'd have to disagree on the Founding Fathers. It hadn't occurred to me until you wrote that, but come to think of it, I suppose Jefferson et al really WERE only thinking about Europeans. And maybe only about WASP Europeans at that. I doubt they expected the Chinese to read the Declaration; I suppose they were indifferent about the Russians and Greeks; northern European males would have been their "mankind."
Not their fault; they lived in 1776. It doesn't change the spirit of the thing. They were universalistic as they perceived it. Our time is different, so of course our universalism is different. But wise people DO have a "decent concern for the "opinions of mankind" which would include, say, how the Kissinger appointment plays in Paris, Cairo, and Istanbul ...
Which brings us back to the point--I think it was Protean's--about the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Kissinger, and for that matter the people who appointed him, are undoubtedly intelligent. Lots of people are intelligent. It's not a quantity in short supply in this world. But Kissinger isn't just a real bright guy whose opinions a lot of folks disagree with. He's a lightning rod for criticism, a reason to talk again about all the scandals of the 70s, and, in short, comes with serious negative baggage.
Hence: was it wise to appoint him to this position?
Frankly, given this example of White House thinking, it makes me even more leery of the planning on Iraq right now ...
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