richard lightner

Dec 3, 20234 min read

Kissinger Obsequies

FROM THE GUARDIAN

‘Aura of credibility’: why Democrats and elites revere Kissinger despite war crimes allegations

Julian Borger in Washington

Fri, December 1, 2023

Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

One of the very few things that still brings the Republican and Democratic political establishments together is their shared reverence for Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger’s death, at the age of 100, has served as a reminder that the frequent, wide-ranging and substantial allegations of war crimes against him never dimmed the admiration he inspired among the powerful in Washington.

“Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies,” was the Rolling Stone headline on his obituary, expressing the bewilderment and frustration of many progressives at his enduring popularity among the elite.

The Republican tributes were hardly surprising – it was as national security adviser and then secretary of state to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, that Kissinger made his mark on the world.

What is more striking is the enduring fealty of Democrats, who otherwise identify as liberals and defenders of human rights on the world stage.

The current secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on Thursday he had sought Kissinger’s counsel as recently as a month ago, and issued a lengthy and fulsome tribute to Kissinger’s “enduring capacity to bring his strategic acumen and intellect to bear on the emerging challenges of each passing decade.”

The defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, said he had also looked to Kissinger for advice and called him a “rare scholar turned strategist”.

Joe Biden was a little more measured, praising the late statesman’s “fierce intellect and profound strategic focus” while adding the two men often strongly disagreed.

That note of caution was the only veiled nod by the administration towards Kissinger’s record of ruthless acts, some of which have been widely categorised as war crimes or crimes against humanity.

In 1968, he helped sabotage Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s peace talks with the North Vietnamese, helping ensure Nixon’s election and the extension of the Vietnam war by another five years.

In 1969, he orchestrated the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country, which resulted in the killing of up to half a million people, without consulting Congress or declaring war. He gave US acquiescence in the 1971 slaughter of 300,000 Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan by the dictator, Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan.

In 1973, he helped orchestrate a coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, installing a military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. And in 1976 he gave a green light to the military junta that had taken over Argentina to get rid of its leftist opposition, telling it: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.”

It is a litany that cuts across everything liberal Democratic foreign policy is meant to stand for, and yet one powerful Washington Democrat after another has gone out of their way to fete Kissinger.

“I’ve always been genuinely mystified by it myself,” Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said.

Rhodes suggested a couple of possible explanations for the Kissinger syndrome, including an inferiority complex Democrats have long felt over foreign and national security policy.

“Some Democrats and some liberals have a lack ofconfidence on foreign affairs, and there’s this aura of credibility around Kissinger,” he said, adding that it imparted an air of hard-headed realism that helped contain the risk of being labelled an idealist.

“I think some people thought: here I am talking to Henry Kissinger, and that means I’m serious. I think that is entrenched in the American establishment,” he said.

Rhodes’ former boss, Obama, was a significant exception to the Democrats’ fandom, noting in 2016 that the Nixon and Kissinger legacy in southeast Asia had been “chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments”.

For others however, Kissinger’s record of pursuing détente with Russia and China, reducing the threat of nuclear conflict, was more important than his involvement in atrocities elsewhere.

“I think there are some Democrats and some liberals who are actually pure realists,” Rhodes said. “They might not have liked Vietnam and Chile and Bangladesh but his realpolitik was seen as an alternative to war, and a validation of diplomacy with countries like China and Russia.”

Sidney Blumenthal, a former adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, argues there was a more practical reason they were keen to meet Kissinger long after he had left office.

“He stayed around for a long time and made himself invaluable as an intermediary and made a tremendous amount of money, particularly as a channel to China,” Blumenthal said.

In July, Kissinger secretly flew to China, after he had turned 100, at the invitation of Xi Jinping, as the Chinese president made the first step towards improving relations with Washington.

Brett Bruen, the director of global engagement in the Obama White House, argued you could admire Kissinger’s craft without necessarily endorsing his policies.

“We need to separate what Kissinger contributed to modern diplomacy from his policies and politics,” Bruen said. “You can admire the ways in which he created concepts like shuttle diplomacy, and how he worked to overcome enormous divides with Beijing, while at the same time detesting some of the things that he did with those diplomatic tactics.”

Aaron David Miller, a former senior diplomat under a series of administrations, argued that it was Kissinger’s agility as a statesman, and his ability to get things done in government that was the real secret to an appeal that transcended political differences. Other diplomats simply admired his power.

“What is the world’s most compelling ideology?” Miller asked. “It’s not nationalism, it’s not communism, it’s not even capitalism. It’s success.”

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Different Points of View over the future of Atomic weapons.

During the Afghan War, President Donald Trump (GAG!) authorized a General to use the Mother of all Bombs, a bomb just shy of the power of an atomic bomb, on his own. Notice that this had no positive affect for the US in the outcome of the war. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/asia/moab-mother-of-all-bombs-afghanistan.html)

There is a plethora of information about the development and use of the atomic bomb during World War II. Much of the world was astounded that the US used such a bomb on civilians. Others said, drop more.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 9, 1945, “served as the symbolic coronation of American global power.” Nevertheless, the use of the atomic bomb in World War II brought international condemnation. At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials of 1946-1948, Justice Pal of India cited the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as war crimes. U.S. President Harry S. Truman responded by publicly saying that the atomic bombs were dropped “in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands of young Americans.” However, President Truman in correspondence with John Foster Dulles that his reasons for dropping the atomic bombs were the attack on Pearl Harbor and the murder of our prisoners of war. “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.” (Martin Sherwin. “Hiroshima and Modern Memory.” The Nation. October 10, 1981)

“In the summer and fall of 1945, US atomic policy left us troubled and perplexed. Roosevelt, we thought, had been committed to a policy of international understanding and conciliation. . . . Truman’s policy, however, appeared to have the opposite aim: to keep a monopoly of the atomic bomb in U.S. and British hands, and to use it as a strong trump card in tough political bargaining with the Soviet Union.” (Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. 1975. xi)

And, well before the bombings FDR and Churchill “rejected steps that might have led to the international control of atomic energy.” (Martin Sherwin. “Hiroshima and Modern Memory.” The Nation. October 10, 1981)

According to nuclear physicist Hans Bethe who worked on the Manhattan Project, “Many of us had been influenced directly or indirectly by Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist. He argued that only international control of nuclear weapons could save the world from a nuclear arms race, and that such a race would imperil, not enhance the security of the United States and Great Britain. Many other scientists, especially at the University of Chicago Metallurgic Laboratory, at the initiative of Leo Szilard, had come independently to the same conclusion.

Martin Sherwin, George Mason University History professor who specialized in the history of nuclear weapons, wrote that, this interpretation by physicists and historian is wrong. Roosevelt decided, with Churchill, “that the bomb should remain and Anglo-American monopoly.” (Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. 1975. xii)

However, this is not mentioned in Hiroshima in America: fifty years of denial, by Robert Jay Lifton and Gregg Mitchell.

KOREA

There are numerous arguments about whether or not the atomic bomb should have been used in Korea, Vietnam, or other existential circumstances.

In late 1950, following their invasion of Korea, Chinese forces surrounded U.S. Marines. “Distraught himself, the chief executive (Truman), told a press conference on November 30 that nuclear bombsight be used against the enemy and seemed to indicate that the decision would be MacArthur’s.” (William Manchester. American Caesar. 608, 610; Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 30)

The U.S. developed the ability fire an “atomic shot from a cannon.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 34)

“In mid-May Ike (President Dwight Eisenhower) told the [American] National Security Council that using nukes in Korea would be cheaper than conventional weaponry, and a few days later the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended launching nuclear attacks against China.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 34)

This is interesting since Eisenhower’s reaction to Hiroshima was, we didn’t have to use that awful thing on them. (Lifton, Robert Jay and Mitchell, Greg. Hiroshima in America: fifty years of denial. 1995. 213)

Operation Hudson Harbor - flying lone B-29 bombers over North Korea to simulate a dropping of an atomic bomb. North Korean leaders must have had “steel nerves” as this simulation was eerily similar to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Operation Hudson Harbor concluded that the use of atomic weapons would not be “useful” as it was difficult to identify “large masses of enemy troops.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 157-159)

The United Nations/United States forces faced defeat in Korea but Truman looked strong because he “threatened to use the atom bomb against China.” However, this “made peace talks virtually impossible.” (Stone, I.F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. 213)

Major General Emmett (“Rosy”) O’Donnell, commander of the Far East Air Force’s Bomber Command . . . [stated that] “We have never been permitted to bomb what are the real strategic targets, the enemy’s real sources of supply.” He said that the strategic bombing commanded been “designed to deliver the atomic offensive to the heart of the enemy” and indicated very clearly that he thought the bomb should have been used against the Chinese.”” (Stone, I.F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. 245)

RICHARD NIXON

Richard Barnet, former State Department aide, activist and scholar, who founded the Institute for Policy Studies (Wikipedia) warned “of the danger that the United States government might resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Barnet then cites Vice President Richard Nixon speaking to the Executive Club of Chicago on March 17, 1955 as saying,

“The weapons which were used during the Korean War and World War II are obsolete. Our artillery and our tactical Air Force in the Pacific are now equipped with atomic explosives which can and will be used on military targets with precision and effectiveness.

“It is foolish to talk about the possibility that the weapons which might be used in the event war breaks out in the Pacific would be limited to the conventional Korean and World War II types of explosives. Our forces could not fight an effective war in the Pacific with those types of explosives if they wanted to. Tactical atomic explosives are now conventional and will be used against the military targets of any aggressive force.”

Of course, we are not aggressors by threatening China or invading Vietnam.

VIET NAM

1964 American Republican Presidential candidate Senator Goldwater of Arizona was a reserve Air Force General and “suggested that the United States could isolate the Vietcong in South Vietnam any bombing the supply routes connecting China and North Vietnam.” He also proposed using nuclear weapons “to clear the jungles where the Vietcong were presumably hiding. The public reaction to those notions was one of horrified alarm.” (Thomas Powers, The War at Home. 2) It turns out that the United States bombed Southeast Asia the equivalent of many atomic bombs through out the war.

“Although Goldwater was finally persuaded to stop talking about nuclear weapons.”

Although Goldwater’s advocacy of atomic weapons scared people his idea to win the war did not. Johnson portrayed himself as “responsible” as opposed to Goldwater who he implied would get us all killed. (Thomas Powers, The War at Home. 9)

Noted military writer Hanson Baldwin believed that the US should use its overwhelming technological power to counter communism even if that meant nuclear weapons. Of course, only for “defensive purposes.” “If we cannot do this, he says, we had better “call it quits.” (Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia. 52)

General Curtis LeMay advocated the use of nuclear weapons to end the conflict with communism once and for all. “We ought to nuke the chinks. . . . We are swatting flies when we should be going after the manure pile.” (Thomas Powers. The War at Home. 40; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Lyndon B. Johnson: the Exercise of Power. 538)

So, there is pretty much agreement that the use of the atom bomb was on the table. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki completely ignored.

In 1954 the United States “assuming the Chinese Communists intervene would engage in a “highly selective atomic offensive.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 46) However, if the “Chinese Communists do not intervene” then the use of atomic weapons would occur if it would aid the US in the war. (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 47)

McNaughton drafted a “Proposed Course of Action” to McNamara. In his long list of actions McNaughton noted risks. One was the “escalation to the use of nuclear weapons.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 442-445, passim)

Presidential assistant for national security, Walt. W. Rostow, wrote a memorandum on May 6, 1967, analyzing U.S. bombing strategy in Viet Nam. One of his conclusions was “we do not want a nuclear confrontation over Viet Nam.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 585, 588)

Kissinger Obsequies

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