Kissinger A war criminal with a Nobel Peace Prize

12/02/23

US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, member of Hanoi's Politburo, speak outside a suburban house at Gif-sur-Yvette in Paris after negotiations on June 13, 1973 [File: Michel Lipchitz/AP]
US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, member of Hanoi's Politburo, speak outside a suburban house at Gif-sur-Yvette in Paris after negotiations on June 13, 1973 [File: Michel Lipchitz/AP]
© Provided by Al Jazeera
“No hay mal que dure 100 anos, ni cuerpo que lo resista”, a famous saying in Spanish goes. It translates to “There is no evil which lasts 100 years, nor a body that can bear it”. The former US national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, may have tried to prove it wrong, making it past his 100th birthday, before finally meeting his maker six months later, on November 29.


Power Saver Solution
Following his passing, there was a flood of obituaries and encomiums in media outlets around the world, some calling him “controversial”, others praising his legacy.

Amid these attempts to whitewash Kissinger’s atrocities, we must not lose track of who he really was.

This is a man, who, through his actions, was directly responsible for the murders of between three and four million people during his eight years in office between 1969 and 1977, according to Yale University historian Greg Grandin’s book Kissinger’s Shadow. The bloody policies he promoted paved the way for America’s never-ending wars in later years.
Kissinger was seen as the architect of the United States efforts to contain the Soviet Union and communist influence around the world. To achieve this, he introduced the “bombs over diplomacy” approach, pushing for some of the most brutal bombing campaigns in modern history.

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This approach was first applied during the Vietnam War when the US was trying to stop communists from taking power. Kissinger, who at that time served as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, pushed for carpet bombing not only Vietnam itself but also neighbouring Cambodia, where both Cambodian and Vietnamese guerrillas were operating.

In 1969, the military assault was approved secretly and proceeded without Congress being informed. In declassified Pentagon reports, it was stated that Kissinger personally approved 3,875 air raids which dropped some 540,000 tonnes of bombs in Cambodia within the first year of the campaign. To this day, innocent Vietnamese and Cambodians are being killed by remaining unexploded US ordnance.

Needless to say, the carpet bombing did not stop but rather facilitated the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists taking power. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge emerged victorious in the country’s civil war and went on to commit countless atrocities, including a genocide of between 1.5 and two million people. As TV chef, Anthony Bourdain, famously wrote, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands”.


For his role in the war in Southeast Asia, Kissinger was abhorrently awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. A war in which he secretly helped Nixon sabotage peace talks between the US administration and Hanoi. A war, in which only regret was that he had not applied more brutal force to secure US victory.

The peace prize was a slap in the face for the victims of Kissinger’s brutality and has been yet another affirmation that the West refuses to hold its own war criminals to account.

Kissinger’s crimes stretch beyond Vietnam and Cambodia. In South Asia, worried about a Soviet-leaning India causing the collapse of Pakistan, a US ally, Kissinger gave support to Islamabad as its forces were carrying out a genocide against the Bengali population of East Pakistan, today’s Bangladesh in the early 1970s. Despite receiving multiple warnings from US diplomats about atrocities being committed, Kissinger approved shipments of weapons that perpetuated them.

In 1975, Kissinger also gave the green light for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in order to topple the communist-leaning Fretilin government. In approving the unfolding genocide, which resulted in more than 200,000 slaughtered, Kissinger advised Suharto, “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.” It is estimated that up to a fifth of the Pacific island’s population perished in the Indonesian occupation which lasted until 1999.

Throughout Latin America, right-wing forces and coup plotters could also count on Kissinger’s support. In 1973, Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected president, was overthrown in a coup with full support from the US and its secretary of state. Three years later, after the army overthrew President Isabel Peron in Argentina and established military rule, Kissinger gave the green light for the horrific human rights abuses it perpetrated.

In 2016, then-US President Barack Obama expressed his regret over the US’s role in the “dirty war” in Argentina. But within two months of this shallow apology, his administration gave the chief architect of these policies a “Distinguished Public Service” award.

Kissinger also proved to be a spoiler for peace in the Middle East. He not only sabotaged proposals for a settlement between Israel and Arab states that came from Moscow, but undermined even those that came from within Washington.

While being a staunch supporter of Israel, Kissinger showed shocking disregard for Jewish life. In a conversation with Nixon, he was recorded as saying: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy … And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

After he left office as secretary of state, Kissinger did not stop pushing for death and destruction across the world in books, interviews, articles and advice to US officials.

As an Iraqi, I find the criminal role he played in the Bush administration’s decision-making in the war on Iraq, particularly disturbing. Bush leaned on him as he rolled out his “shock and awe” strategy, deciding to carpet bomb Iraqi civilians, despite the bombing campaigns failing spectacularly in Cambodia and Vietnam.

Kissinger’s advice to the president in 2006 was simple, “Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.” So Bush resorted to a US troop surge which led to a sharp spike in the number of civilian deaths. My own family in Baghdad had their homes raided by US troops in Baghdad and many of them had to flee to neighbouring Jordan and elsewhere.

Even while living his last days (peacefully, unlike his many victims) at his home in Connecticut, Kissinger could not stop himself from promoting war. In an interview with Politico following the October 7 attack in Israel, Kissinger proclaimed full support for the brutal Israeli war on Gaza, saying: “You can’t make concessions to people who have declared and demonstrated by their actions that they cannot make peace.”

The legacy Kissinger leaves behind is truly horrific. He shaped American politics and policy-making to entrench the belief that bloody and violent imperial policies pay off, that it is OK to defend the “national interest” at the cost of millions of lives. Today – as we are witnessing in Gaza – US officials continue to be convinced that carpet bombing and mass killing of a civilian population can yield the desired political results.

If Kissinger never faced justice, can we expect Israeli officials to ever be held to account?

Indeed, the real tragedy of his life and death is that he proved the powerful can get away with killing millions and still be celebrated after peacefully passing.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Letters to the Editor: Henry Kissinger is dead. Mourn his millions of victims instead of him

To the editor: If former Times writer Norman Kempster had reviewed documents uncovered over the last few years and considered that Henry Kissinger was likely responsible for even more than the 3 million deaths attributed him by his biographer Greg Grandin, he might have written a more balanced and less hagiographic obituary of Kissinger. ("Henry Kissinger, one of the most influential and controversial foreign policy figures in U.S. history, dies," Nov. 29)

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But this would have been impossible, since Kempster himself passed away three years ago.

There is no evidence that Kissinger ever expressed any remorse for the deaths of millions of individuals around the world — overwhelmingly innocent civilians — who died as a result of his advice to American and foreign political leaders.
So I cannot mourn Kissinger’s death. Neither can I celebrate it, as I view with shocked horror the widespread bipartisan acclaim granted him by the vast majority of political leaders and media owners.

Better instead to mourn his victims and the countries whose governments he subverted, and then look inside our own souls to ask why, in a country with such high ideals and many very good people, we continue to tolerate the unceasing expansion of our war machine.

Douglas W. Clark, Los Angeles

..

To the editor: One of Kissinger's enduring but little-known legacies was his early involvement in transferring the Panama Canal to Panamanian control.

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In 1973, I was executive director of the Foreign Policy Assn. of Panama and asked to arrange a meeting between our president and Kissinger's principal Latin American specialists.

Kissinger's approval opened a back-channel discussion of how the U.S. could be freed of responsibility for a highly vulnerable, aging utility that needed massively expensive upgrading to remain relevant in world trade. He thought Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the canal — "We bought it, we paid for it, it's ours, and we’re gonna keep it" — was naive.

The way to formal negotiations between the U.S. and Panama had been opened, which led to ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty in 1978 and the eventual transfer in 1999.

Godfrey Harris, Los Angeles

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWVMTKeAwlA
Henry Kissinger - Secrets of a superpower | DW Documentary

For years, Henry Kissinger shaped US foreign policy like no other statesman. As National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under US President Richard Nixon, the German-born politician wielded America’s power with severity.

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My memories of Henry Kissinger
Story by David Owen  •

Henry Kissinger’s powers of persuasion are legendary. I first encountered them in 1977 when he rang me up to persuade me to stay over in America to attend Nelson Rockefeller’s funeral in New York’s magnificent cathedral overlooking the Hudson River.

The service had everything reminiscent of Rockefeller’s liberal Republicanism. Martin Luther King Jr, jazz bands, as well as every living president. Kissinger always believed that he owed a great deal to Rockefeller. Although he moved to the right of the Republican Party and will always be associated with Richard Nixon, he was fundamentally an intellectual. But an intellectual fascinated by power and rooted in history. Writing about an alliance in 1805 amongst countries, he analysed the personalities.

“Pitt now found himself in much the same position vis-;-vis Alexander as Churchill would find himself vis-;-vis Stalin nearly 150 years later. He desperately needed Russian support against Napoleon... On the other hand, Pitt had no more interest than Churchill would later have in replacing one dominant country with another, or endorsing Russia as the arbiter of Europe.”

His German heritage, of which he was deeply proud, so much so that he never tried to lose his accent, ensured throughout his 100 years that he was both an American and a European.

His greatest single diplomatic achievement was transforming President Nixon’s wish to reopen American relations with China into a strategic shift that even under present strains is certain to last well beyond present difficulties.

The fact that he never retired was a manifestation of a brain that never stopped thinking or taking the lessons of history and fashioning them to modern realities. In short, Kissinger was a great man and he made his errors of judgment and mistaken policies part of a legacy that had within it real personal triumphs based on long negotiations that would have taxed the patience of most politicians, let alone academics.

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Initially, he spent too much time trying to convert his critics. I disagreed with his policies towards Latin American dictatorships, the clandestine bombing of Laos and his attitude towards South Africa and Rhodesia, but we never spent time on these, agreeing to disagree.

In later life he focused much of his time and effort on keeping up relationships of importance with world leaders. Of course, vanity was an element in this, as was the fact that he had been a teacher of undergraduates, but he discovered a new skill. He became a good listener and his advice began to be treasured by many powerful leaders around the world.

Just before the vote in the UK Referendum on whether to leave or remain in the European Union, I thought it important to talk through some of the problems in Canada and the US. My last visit was to Kissinger. He told me that on his desk was a letter that had to be signed that evening about joining the “great and the good” of American foreign policy experts in recommending to the British people that they vote to remain. We talked the problem through and it became clear that his mind was already made up. He would not sign the letter. His words to me were simple and quotable: “I do not want a world in which there is not an independent British voice.”


Forge Of Empires
Today, another American Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, follows the Kissinger model of shuttling between the Middle East capitals during Arab Israeli conflicts. There are advantages and disadvantages in this approach and many of Kissinger’s greatest attributes came together to provide initial peace settlements. I do not know what he would be manoeuvring to achieve at this moment but I think he would be trying to turn Gaza into an opportunity to move immediately from settling the hostage question to direct talks between the two crucial powers, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Kissinger never lost an overarching concern about the dangers posed by the possession of nuclear weapons. We have seen that knowledge and commitment surface over Ukraine. In his many meetings with Vladimir Putin and, more recently, with President Xi, there is no doubt, despite Kissinger’s discretion about what was actually said, that he has been an influence on both men. President Xi’s overt warning to Putin not to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine is one of the few rays of light on a very dark scene. It appears to have been accepted by Putin, despite frequent disagreeing public statements from the former President of Russia Medvedev.

Kissinger described tensions with China as “the biggest problem for America, the biggest problem for the world”. But to him, it was a resolvable problem.

Lord Owen served as UK Foreign Secretary from 1977 to 1979. He was a co-founder and later leader of the SDP

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Kissinger and his crimes
Opinion by ;;igo Dom;nguez
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5h
A news program where the death of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was followed live on November 30.
A news program where the death of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was followed live on November 30.
© PEDRO PARDO ( AFP )
Kissinger has died, and it will be left to the history books to decide who he really was, though the conclusion will be hard to draw. Already, the obituaries recognize the good and the bad he did, leaving the reader to make up their own mind about him. The journalist Christopher Hitchens, who wrote a whole book on Kissinger called The Trial of Henry Kissinger, concluded that he should have been arrested, tried and left to rot in prison. As with Netanyahu, you would have to pick up the phone and say there’s a possible war criminal at large and please go get him. But the world doesn’t work that way. Nobel Peace Prize winner Kissinger gave conferences until late in life, so let’s not rule out a Nobel Peace Prize for the Israeli prime minister yet.

Kissinger lived for 100 years and represents the anti-communism battle that marked a century, waged at a level where everything could be justified to combat the scourge of communism. On the other side of the fence, others were blinded by their pro-communism stance — Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, for example, wrote odes to Stalin. Within this framework of fanaticism, action entails a lack of scruples and degenerates into suicidal utopia. As Juan Gabriel V;squez writes in Volver la vista atr;s, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, conscientious young people decided that it was inadmissible that red, the color of the revolution, meant they had to stop at traffic lights. So they turned the rule on its head: red meant go and green meant stop. After a few days of traffic chaos, the authorities reestablished order. In the end, everything is a question of pragmatism, and communism basically failed because it did not produce the desired results. In politics, you judge by results, just like in sports.

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At a certain level of power, it seems inevitable to be party to a massacre, a bombing or a fascist coup d’;tat, or all of these things, as Kissinger was. Once you have killed more than a 100 people, you don’t care if you kill a thousand or a million, you enter the category of statesman. You do it in accordance with a strategy and a vision, and in the name of an idea and a country. You are working for history, beyond the boundaries of morality. And while these individuals are repugnant, over time they can morph into complex, interesting characters. They can even be the subject of a movie. Napoleon, for example, was responsible for massacres like the one in Jaffa, where he had thousands of Turkish prisoners stabbed to death in 1799. Then there was the slaughter during the retreat from the Berezina River, in 1812, where Napoleon blew up the bridge and left thousands of men on the other side to be murdered by Cossacks. His contemporaries were clear about who he was. But now we see films of him portrayed with a heart.


Then there’s the political chameleon, Napoleon’s chief diplomat, Talleyrand. In Ridley Scott’s 2023 film, Napoleon, Talleyrand hardly features, but this gentleman, who began as a bishop of the ancient r;gime, was to join the French Revolution and propose the nationalization of Church assets, before becoming a minister for Napoleon, only to conspire against him, and lead the Congress of Vienna before finally ending up at the court of Louis XVIII. He made the full tour of ideologies during the battle of his century.

After the execution of the Duke of Enghien, he said — although the phrase is also attributed to Fouch;, Chief of Police: “It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.” In other words, a crime well carried out is an achievement. These great cynics always make phenomenal politicians, if we understand politics as doing whatever it takes to serve whatever it is. But it is necessary to leave a written account of all their actions, so that posterity will see that they didn’t go unnoticed, and so that they get portrayed on screen as the twisted individuals they really were.

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