The Once and Future Kissinger

As another failed war threatens to tarnish his legacy, Henry Kissinger attempts to clarify his record—by evading, skirting, stretching, hedging, and stonewalling like the diplomatic master he is.

f Kissinger wants a record, it’s because he wants to correct it. As he nears the end of his public life, yet another disastrous war threatens to taint his legacy. State of Denial, the latest White House exegesis by famed reporter Bob Woodward, depicts Kissinger as privately advising President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney on the war in Iraq, calling him a “powerful, largely invisible influence.” Woodward’s portrait of Kissinger as a surreptitious Rasputin, cooing in the presidential ear that “victory is the only exit strategy,” urging him to resist all entreaties to change course, has rankled the dour statesman.

Barbara Walters, who calls Kissinger “the most loyal friend,” was entertaining Kissinger and his wife at a dinner party for a D.C. politician when ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who died last year, suddenly piped up, “How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?”

The subject of Kissinger’s past sins was very much in the air at the time. Judges in both France and Spain were seeking Kissinger for questioning as the long-simmering debate over his connection to Chilean general Augusto Pinochet’s brutal killing of dissidents in the seventies returned with a vengeance, not least in Christopher Hitchens’s ringing indictment, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. These developments clearly rattled Kissinger, who had preemptively written a lengthy article for Foreign Affairs decrying the dangerous legal precedent of using universal jurisdiction to try state actors for past actions (the same precedent under which German courts hope to try Donald Rumsfeld).

Friends say Kissinger’s entire life since leaving public office has been an incessant justification of his time in power, a meticulous shaping and reshaping of his legacy. “He never stops paying attention to his own reputation and record,” says a New York colleague who has known him since the seventies. “Never.”

“He wants to control not just what he says,” observes Woodward, who first interviewed him for 1974’s All the President’s Men, “but people’s perceptions of what he says. And it’s kind of like one long book review where he is arguing with the reviewer of his book or his life or his policy.”

Seymour Hersh, who wrote the 1983 Kissinger takedown The Price of Power, is more damning: “He lies like most people breathe.”

But many people think Kissinger still has much to answer for, namely his actions during the Nixon and Ford years in Cambodia, Chile, East Timor, and Cyprus, not to mention Vietnam. For Kissinger, the details are always too complex to really hold him to account. Having watched Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War, an extended look at former secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s grappling with his failures in Vietnam, Kissinger says, “I thought he sold himself short. I thought he oversimplified and didn’t give himself enough credit.”

Kissinger himself is not one to make apologies. When I ask him if his thinking has evolved since Vietnam, he is quiet for a few moments. Finally, he says, “I mean, you can say there was a harshness to realism that was mitigated over the years; it’s a beautiful thing to say. It does not accord with what my intellectual record is.”

at some point, we have to consider the harm done in our name by the
war criminals who have been running this country - all the more so
since the US claims exemption from international law and the Geneva
Convention.

War criminals rob and kill us as well as our enemies. Here's how Dwight Eisenhower expressed it:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/chance.htm

When are we going to say:

No More War Crimes - Not In Our Name


                   ?

PNAC folks who signed that letter to Clinton urging military action
against Iraq in '98.

A good proportion are still paid by the American taxpayer.

>>>

'The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility
that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass
destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake
military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it
means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now
needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.'

"http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm"

Elliott Abrams - Special Assistant to the President and Senior
Director for Near East and North African Affairs.
Richard L. Armitage -  Directors at ConocoPhillips, an oil company.
William J. Bennett -  Radio DJ in Dallas.
Jeffrey Bergner - President and Financial Partner of Bergner Bockorny,
Inc., a lobbying firm.
John Bolton   -  US Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
Paula Dobriansky - Under Secretary of State for Democracy & Global
Affairs.
Francis Fukuyama - Member of the steering committee for the Scooter
Libby Legal Defense Trust.
Robert Kagan -  Married to Victoria Nuland, the current U.S.
ambassador to NATO.
Zalmay Khalilzad - U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, having been sworn in on
June 21, 2005.
William Kristol - A visiting professor at Harvard University.
Richard Perle  - Rat fleeing the ship.
Peter W. Rodman - United States Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs.
Donald Rumsfeld - United States Secretary of Defense until US senate
appoints successor.
William Schneider, Jr. - Chairman US Defense Science Board.
Vin Weber - Partner at Clark & Weinstock, a consulting firm.
Paul Wolfowitz - President of the World Bank.
R. James Woolsey  - Trustee at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies.
Robert B. Zoellick - Investment banker with Goldman Sachs.

Bolton is no longer representative to the UN.  On the news this
morning.

Good riddance.

Well that has made me like this Monday.

May he rot wherever he goes.

No regrets for the vitriol.