Henry Kissinger, Elliott Abrams, and the Rot of American Foreign Policy
By Jeet Heer, July 7, 2023
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kissinger-elliott-abrams-war-crimes/
 
“As Eric Alterman noted in a 2013 column in The Nation, Elliot Abrams repeatedly and purposely misled Congress about the government’s involvement with the death-squad-riddled Salvadoran military, the Nicaraguan Contra counter-revolutionaries and other Central American mass murderers. He whitewashed their massacres as well as the abuses of the Argentinean junta (who were kidnapping babies at the time and selling them) and the genocidal Guatemalan regime of Gen. Efrían Ríos Montt…. Abrams did all this while casting aspersions on the motives of journalists and human rights workers who sought to tell the truth about these crimes.”
 
“But there is one group of shadowy miscreants that do operate under a code of omertà designed to ensure that almost all misdeeds will be forgiven, forgotten, and shielded from punishment: the American foreign policy establishment. Once you’re an accredited member of the cozy club of Washington policy warlords, you need never worry about having to face the consequences of your actions. […]
 
“Kissinger was recently feted at New York’s Public Library, in an event so private that no guest list was posted. But standing outside the library, reporter Jonathan Guyer got a glimpse of a stellar constellation of the political and economic upper crust, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, former representative Jane Harman, tech billionaire Eric Schmidt.”
 
“USAID administrator Samantha Powers was also there to raise a toast to Kissinger. This is perhaps the best example of elite coziness since, as Guyer notes, in her 2002 book “A Problem From Hell”: America in the Age of Genocide, Powers detailed both Kissinger’s sins of commission (the carpet bombing of Cambodia) and omission (turning a blind eye to the murder of a million Bengalis killed by America’s allies in the Pakistani military).”
 
“In their eagerness to share a birthday cake with the centenarian war criminal, Powers and her ilk conveniently forgot about all the spots on the globe soaked in blood by the wars and coups Kissinger fomented: in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, and Bangladesh—among other places.”
 
“Although less famous than Kissinger, Elliott Abrams is another prime example of the special licence enjoyed by national security mavens. On Monday, the Biden administration announced that it was appointing Abrams to the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. This is an astonishing development given Abrams’s sordid history of deception, criminality, and promotion of human rights abuses.”