Obama
Granted Henry Kissinger a Distinguished Public Service Award
An outsized personality who has committed
outsized mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context.
By Greg Grandin
May 12, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "The Nation" - Yesterday Secretary
of Defense Ashton Carter honored Henry A. Kissinger at the
Pentagon by presenting the former secretary of state with the Distinguished
Public Service Award, apparently the highest award the Department of Defense
has for private citizens. Carter himself deserves an award for
understatement, calling the man who is responsible, directly or indirectly,
for the deaths of millions of people in Southeast Asia, East Timor,
Bangladesh, and southern Africa, among other places—”unique in the annals of
American diplomacy.” Kissinger, Carter said, “demonstrated how serious
thinking and perspective can deliver solutions to seemingly intractable
problems.” As to allegations of war crimes, “the fact is,” said Kissinger, he
and Richard Nixon “were engaged in good causes.”
Where to start? It’s exhausting trying to
keep track of what is now a quarterly celebration of the 92-year-old
Kissinger. It was just six or so months ago when The New
York Times Book Review assigned Kissinger’s preferred
authorized biographer to review a Kissinger biography written by Kissinger’s
second-choice biographer. A “masterpiece”! the first said of the second. And
then, three months ago, Hillary Clinton, in a debate with Bernie Sanders, cited
Kissinger’s recommendation as a referral for the White House.
At the time, Clinton’s remarks seemed a
misstep, allowing Sanders an opening to criticize her catastrophic
interventionism in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Now, though, it is clear that
Clinton’s invocation of Kissinger wasn’t a fluke but rather a preview of a
general election strategy to
run to Trump’s right on foreign policy and win over the hawkish wing of the Republican
Party. “The candidate in the race most like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
from a foreign-policy perspective,” Republican strategist Steve Schmidt
recently said, “is in fact Hillary Clinton.”
It would be pointless to provide yet another
recitation of the many miseries Kissinger caused around the globe during his
long run in public office from 1969 to 1977. By now, those who want to know
his atrocities know his atrocities. Even his authorized biographer, Niall
Ferguson, doesn’t deny that Kissinger is a criminal but rather mitigates the
crimes by comparing them to other crimes: “Nearly a hundred times as many
people,” Ferguson writes, “died” as a result of John Foster Dulles’s actions
in Guatemala as “were ‘disappeared’ in Chile” after the 1973 coup vigorously
encouraged by Kissinger, yet “you will search the libraries in vain for The
Trial of John Forster Dulles” (Ferguson apparently hasn’t yet read
the books by David Talbot and Stephen
Kinzer).
Kissinger is implicated in at least three genocides (Cambodia, Bangladesh,
and East Timor) and, give or take, 4 million deaths.
Kissinger’s unusually high body count and
singular moral imperiousness has the effect, among his critics, of obscuring
his didactic utility. An outsized personality who has committed outsized
mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context. Yet as animals were to the
anthropologist Claude
Levi-Strauss,
Kissinger is good to think with.
Kissinger celebrants inevitably point to two
things to justify their admiration: an opening to China—“rapprochement”—and
improved relations with the Soviet Union—détente—which included SALT, a
historic arms-limitation treaty. These initiatives are often described as the
pillars of his “grand strategy,” stabilizing the post-Vietnam international
order and allowing the United States, the Soviet Union, and China to stake
out spheres of influence.
Let’s grant these two achievements to
Kissinger (even though scholars of foreign relations question just how
central he was to either). If these policies—purportedly enacted to stabilize
the interstate system—had been allowed to mature, one could imagine a number
of salutary effects. In the United States, for instance, Washington could
have demilitarized in the wake of the Vietnam War, using funds that would
have gone into the military budget to recapitalize domestic infrastructure
and nonmilitary research and development, making possible a different kind of
response to the 1973–75 economic crisis, a value-added, good-paying,
mass-industrial public policy rather than the “free trade” race to the bottom
that was put into place. But they didn’t have a chance to mature, and they
didn’t because of, at least in part, the actions of Henry Kissinger.
In the realm of foreign policy, in the years
following the end of the Vietnam War, Kissinger, in one region after another,
executed policies that helped doom his own grand strategy, undermining
détente and canceling out whatever steadying effect it might have provided
the planet. In southern Africa, for instance, Kissinger supported civil wars
that would last decades and kill millions. In the Middle East, he pointlessly
provoked the Soviet Union and laid the foundation for the jihadists. The
militarization of the Gulf, including the brokering of ever larger arms sales
to Saudi Arabia in exchange for petrodollars, was a Kissinger initiative, one
that was enthusiastically continued by all subsequent secretaries of states,
including Hillary Clinton (see this essay I did for TomDispatch, drawn from Kissinger’s
Shadow, on Kissinger’s consequential post-Vietnam turn toward the Middle
East).
Domestically, Nixon and Kissinger, as they
themselves put it, intentionally used foreign policy to “break the back” of
domestic opponents and “destroy the confidence of the people in the American
establishment.” They had mixed results with the former (Nixon did win a
landslide reelection in 1972, though he was subsequently driven out of
office), but succeeded, stunningly, with the latter, beginning the erosion of
confidence in the “establishment” (see Trump, Donald).
Under Nixon and Ford, Kissinger constantly
invoked Weimar Germany to warn liberals about the “brutal forces in the society,” the “real tough
guys,” who were
waiting in the wings. Kissinger, Kissinger said, was the only thing standing
between them and the fascists (that’s why, one of his rationales goes, he had
to bomb Cambodia, as blood tribute to a rising New Right). Well, by 1980, he
was with those brutes. Endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kissinger threw in
with America’s new militarists, who would jump-start a revived Cold War and
drive to retake the Third World.
That the policies Kissinger would hand off to
his successors were morally indefensible is a matter of opinion. Less contestable
is the claim that he left the world polarized and, in the long-run, volatile,
despite the short-term stability of the jackboot. In a way, Kissinger did to
the larger Third World what he did to Cambodia: He institutionalized a
self-fulfilling logic of intervention. Action led to action, reaction
demanded more action. Just as his secret bombing so roiled Cambodia’s borders
that, by early 1970, it made a major land invasion using US troops seem like
a good idea, Kissinger’s global post–Vietnam War diplomacy so inflamed the
international order that it made the neocons’ radical vision of perpetual war
look like a reasonable option for many of the world’s problems.
Zack Beauchamp over at Vox had a good summary
of Kissinger’s war crimes, though the premise of the essay’s title—“The Obama Administration Is
Honoring Henry Kissinger Today. It Shouldn’t Be”—is exactly backwards.
Of course the White House should be honoring
Kissinger, since it runs its endless war by Kissinger’s rules. The right to bomb neutral
countries the United States isn’t at war with in the name of national
security is now unquestionably accepted across the foreign policy spectrum,
as is the right of the White House to engage in extrajudicial assassination at will (Kissinger’s illegal
Cambodia bombing set a precedent, but he also lent critical legitimacy by
supporting Reagan’s bombing of Libya, George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama
and Gulf War I, and George W. Bush’s Gulf War II).
At 92, Kissinger, after picking up a few more
honorifics and celebrating a few more star-studded birthdays, will soon go to his grave
eulogized by President Hillary Clinton, at a funeral attended by Samantha Power, knowing that he’s won.
Greg Grandin teaches history at New York
University and is the author of Kissinger’s Shadow.
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