Rolling Stone: Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies
The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him.
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Jan Oberg
In a devastating analysis in Rolling Stone on November 29, 2023, Spencer Ackerman writes that:
- “Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger.
We will never know what might have been, the question Kissinger’s apologists, and those in the U.S. foreign policy elite who imagine themselves standing in Kissinger’s shoes, insist upon when explaining away his crimes. We can only know what actually happened.
What actually happened was that Kissinger materially sabotaged the only chance for an end to the war in 1968 as a hedged bet to ensure he would achieve power in Nixon’s administration or Humphrey’s. A true tally will probably never be known of everyone who died so Kissinger could be national security adviser.”
Furthermore:
”The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.
“The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.”
While such a complex intellectual with such an influence on US foreign policy - and thereby, on the world - can hardly be judged in simple black-and-white terms, much speaks in favour of judging Kissinger’s life work as much more destructive than constructive for the world.
The constructive part is definitely related to his contribution to opening up relations between China and the United States some fifty years ago and to his visit to China at the age of 100 in July this year.
His deep concerns about the consequences of the present Cold US War on China shall, therefore, also not be forgotten.
Likewise, it speaks for him that - at least at an early stage - he said wise things about never making Ukraine a NATO member but finding some kind of neutral position for the country (which he later seems to have changed in awkward loyalty with the disastrous US/NATO policy which - indeed - was and is miles away from a rational Realpolitik thinking that Kissinger stood for).
Some criminals may be forgiven to some extent if they repent, if they apologise or try to make good in some kind of way. Robert McNamara - another splendid intellectual war criminal - interacted for decades with the Vietnamese and wrote books about the necessity of a completely different US foreign policy. A short analysis here.
Comparatively speaking, Kissinger was both a moral and intellectual dwarf in such a perspective.
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PS You may also take interest in a - surprisingly positive - evaluation of Kissinger by Scott Ritter here. Among other things, he writes:
“It turns out that without Henry Kissinger, there probably would have been no INF treaty, no START treaty, no SALT agreements, no ABM treaty — no arms control.
Without Henry Kissinger, there would very likely have been a nuclear war.”