[ It’s Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday today. The fact that
this monster is celebrated instead of in jail tells you that he’s
part of a much bigger problem — and that problem is America’s
global empire.]
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HENRY KISSINGER IS A DISGUSTING WAR CRIMINAL.  
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Ben Burgis
May 27, 2023
Jacobin
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_ It’s Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday today. The fact that this
monster is celebrated instead of in jail tells you that he’s part of
a much bigger problem — and that problem is America’s global
empire. _

The ugliest truth about Henry Kissinger is that he isn’t a unique
monster., Adam Berry / Getty Images

 

The late Anthony Bourdain wrote
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in 2001 that “once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop
wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”

However many people might have _wanted _to do that over the decades,
Kissinger remains with us. Today is his hundredth birthday. And he
continues to be treated as a respected elder statesman. That should
tell you everything you need to know about America’s global empire.

At Least He Likes Sports

Tributes have been flowing to Dr Kissinger all week. At CNN, foreign
correspondent David Andelman enthuses
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“at 100, Henry Kissinger is still teaching us the value of
‘Weltanschaüng.’” (_Weltanschaüng_ roughly translates to
“worldview,” and here it means something like “a comprehensive
understanding of how the world works.”) On the website of the
International Olympic Committee, IOC president Thomas Bach calls
[[link removed]]Kissinger
a “great statesman” and “political genius” who is also a
“great sports enthusiast” and has long been involved with the
Olympics.

None cared to mention his various crimes.

As Richard Nixon’s national security advisor — and then secretary
of state, a role he took on without giving up his original job —
Kissinger personally oversaw a bombing campaign
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killed 150,000 civilians in Cambodia. And among many other atrocities
he abetted, he helped overthrow Salvador Allende
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the democratically elected socialist president of Chile. Kissinger
notoriously said
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he didn’t see “why we need to stand by and watch a country go
communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”

The evidence for these crimes has never been in doubt. It’s all a
matter of public record. So why hasn’t “Dr K” ever seen the
inside of a jail cell?

The ugliest truth about Kissinger is that he isn’t a unique monster.
He is an unusually plainspoken representative of a monstrous _system_
of US global hegemony.

Kissinger and Nixon

Nixon didn’t live to see his own hundredth birthday. He died at the
age of eighty-one in 1994. But a posthumous centennial birthday
celebration was held for the disgraced former president in 2013.
Kissinger spoke at that event, ending his remarks
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Nixon as a “patriot, president, and, above all, peacemaker.”

It’s true that Nixon was willing to pursue pragmatic détentes with
America’s superpower rivals, China and the Soviet Union. But when I
watched the clip of Kissinger’s “peacemaker” toast, all I could
think about was an infamous snippet from the 1970 conversation
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between Kissinger and his deputy Alexander Haig in which Kissinger
relays Nixon’s instructions for the bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger
knew some members of the administration might have qualms about
extending the war to a neutral country, but he made it clear that the
commander in chief didn’t want to hear it.

K: Two, he wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t
want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything
that flies on anything that moves. You got that?

H: (Couldn’t hear but sounded like Haig laughing.)

A few years later, Nixon and Kissinger would burnish their
“peacemaker” credentials by finally throwing in the towel after
several years of ratcheting up bloodshed in Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia. Perhaps this is the achievement Kissinger was fondly
remembering when he toasted his old boss’s memory.

If so, Kissinger was conveniently forgetting that he and Nixon had
been spurning essentially the same deal the whole time they’d been
escalating the war. In fact, even before Nixon arrived at the White
House, he’d worked to sabotage his predecessor Lyndon Johnson’s
Paris peace talks — encouraging the South Vietnamese delegation to
stonewall in the hopes of getting a better deal when Nixon assumed
office.

That much no one bothers to deny. There is some controversy about the
extent of Dr Kissinger’s role. In his CNN tribute, David Andelman
defends Kissinger by arguing that while “some have suggested that it
was Kissinger who sought to slow the process toward peace during
Nixon’s presidential campaign,” the evidence from the White House
tapes points to H. R. Haldeman as Nixon’s primary accomplice in
“monkey wrenching” the talks. But even Adelman allows that Dr
Kissinger “may well have tipped off Nixon’s campaign team to
Johnson’s thinking.”

A small point, maybe, to hold against an Important Statesman who
throws around words like _Weltanschaüng_.

A Story of Continuity

When Congress brought articles of impeachment against Nixon for
corruption and obstruction of justice, Michigan Democratic
representative John Conyers proposed including an article on the
illegal bombing of Cambodia — which had initially been kept secret
from the US public. The proposal was defeated 26 to 12. As Conyers
reflected in an article [[link removed]] later
that year, this may have been because raising the issue of war crimes
in Southeast Asia would have impugned “previous administrations”
and Congress’s own failure to constrain presidential war-making
power.

When Nixon left office, Kissinger stayed on, continuing to serve his
highly unusual dual role as national security advisor and secretary of
state for Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford. And _every single
_president between Ford and Joe Biden — Democrats and Republican
alike — has at some point extended an invitation to Dr K to come to
the White House to discuss matters of war and diplomacy.

Some of those visits may have even afforded Kissinger a chance to
catch up with old friends. That ghoul softly laughing on the other end
of the line as Kissinger relayed Nixon’s instructions for the
indiscriminate mass murder of Cambodian civilians, Alexander Haig? He
served as commander of US European Command and NATO supreme allied
commander for most of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Ronald Reagan made
him secretary of state.

Kissinger Isn’t the Only Kissinger

Oddly, Kissinger hasn’t been to the Biden White House, or at least
not yet. I’d like to believe that the current president is disturbed
by Kissinger’s long history of involvement in prosecutable crimes
against humanity. But Biden’s history suggests otherwise.

Does it bother Biden that Kissinger killed lots of civilians in
Cambodia? Senator Biden showed no such qualms about the “shock and
awe” bombing of Iraq when he backed that war in 2003.

Does it bother Biden that Kissinger plotted coups against elected
leftists in Latin America? Vice President Biden doesn’t seem to have
uttered a peep of protest when President Barack Obama and Secretary of
State Hilary Clinton supported the coup against Honduran president
Manuel Zelaya.

And while we’re on the subject of Hilary Clinton, it’s worth
remembering that she touted her relationship with Henry Kissinger —
whom she called a friend and trusted advisor — when she was running
for president in 2016. When her primary challenger Bernie Sanders
responded [[link removed]] by bringing up
Salvador Allende, the response from both Clinton and the moderator
might as well have been, “Salvador who?”

 

Kissinger has never deigned to conceal his complicity in clear
violations of US and international law that killed vast numbers of
innocent people. The fact that he’s reached the age of one hundred
as a free man isn’t an oversight; it’s a symptom of a much deeper
pathology.

A willingness to bend the global rules — order an assassination
here_, _massacre some villagers there, depose an elected leftist or
two in countries that, come on, don’t really matter anyway — was
integral to how the United States managed its spheres of influence
around the world long before Henry Kissinger came on the scene.

It’s not like Dwight Eisenhower needed advice from Henry Kissinger,
who was just about finishing up graduate school at the time, when he
decided to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company by
overthrowing
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the government of Guatemala in 1954. And Secretary Clinton may or may
not have picked up a phone to consult with a very elderly Dr K about
how to handle the crisis in Honduras.

I certainly won’t shed any tears when Dr Kissinger finally dies. And
I’ll be ecstatic — if shocked — if he sees the inside of a
courtroom before that happens. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into
thinking that he’s unique. You don’t run a globe-spanning empire
for this many decades, batting down geopolitical rivals, peasant
revolutions, insurgencies in occupied countries, and inconvenient
electorates in crucial client states, without a lot of people staffing
your imperial apparatus who think like Henry Kissinger.

There may be something almost demonic in how unabashed Dr K is about
his crimes. But when it comes to his basic willingness to disregard
legal and moral obstacles to the United States working its will in the
world?

It’s Kissingers all the way down.

* Henry Kissinger
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* war criminals
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