Kissinger Dead

[PeterRS]

I think CNN summed up his life and work succinctly this morning. To many he was revered; to many others he was reviled.But we should not, I suggest, consider his legacy without recalling that his German Jewish family fled to the USA in 1938 after suffering many humiliations at the hands of the Nazis. Nor that he was very much a product of the Cold War during which he was determined to protect American interests. I have read much about his career, mostly those parts which are more reviled today. 

Of his achievements, there is the ending of the Vietnam War for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize (although this rather hides his many actions in the pursuit of that war), the major change in policy towards Mao's China, his many attempts to find a solution to the crises in the Middle East, and a gradual detente with the Soviet Union. 

On the negative side of the balance, I suppose the illegal invasion of Cambodia which resulted in the rise of the Khmer Rouge with the estimated murder of between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians, and engineering the murder of the elected President and the consequent coup in Chile are the ones that first come to mind. To that and other errors of judgement/deliberate policy decisions we have to add his agreement in advance by promising the USA would not interfere in any way when Pakistan invaded East Pakistan, a war that resulted in savage butchery and the consequent genocide of around 3 million Bengalis. As he said to Nixon when the war ended with the establishment of the state of Bangladesh, "Congratulations, Mr. President. You saved West Pakistan," a reference to a possible invasion by India with assistance from China.

The late Christopher Hitchens was no fan of Kissinger. Indeed, one of his books is titled The Trial of Henry Kissinger. As the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer wrote, "he presents damning documentary evidence against Kissinger in case after case." In a two-article piece for The Guardian written in 2001 before some of the documents about Kissinger and the Presidents he worked under were declassified, there is this paragraph about the fact that after leaving office he became a fixture on the lists of those who were desperate to have him as one of their dinner guests -

Everybody "knows", after all, that Kissinger inflicted terror and misery and mass death on that country [Cambodia], and great injury to the United States Constitution at the same time. (Everybody also "knows" that other vulnerable nations can lay claim to the same melancholy and hateful distinction, with incremental or "collateral" damage to American democracy keeping pace.) Yet the pudgy man standing in black tie at the Vogue party is not, surely, the man who ordered and sanctioned the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and clerics who got in his way? Oh, but he is. It's exactly the same man. 

Later in the article he adds one sentence about Chile -

Kissinger once observed that he saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to "go Marxist" merely because "its people are irresponsible".

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/feb/24/pinochet.bookextracts

Another expert who knew him and had been curator of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library said this morning, "Kissinger was a much greater hawk than most realised. His major flaw was that he failed to understand the human consequences of his strategic decisions." I wonder if the world will see his like again, a man with such huge influence on the occupants of the White House.

[PeterRS]

I forgot to add that one of the books that has most affected me during my many decades living in Asia is Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia by renowned British journalist and historian William Shawcross. Shawcross has impeccable credentials apart from the fact that his father Lord Shawcross was the lead British prosecutor at the WWII Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal. I read the original version when it was first published. The 2002 revised edition is fractionally less critical of Kissinger and Nixon but still a masterful piece of reporting and a devastating account of a foreign policy disaster.

Of the revised edition, The Boston Globe wrote, "Remarkable and compelling . . . FIrst and foremost an American political thriller . . . where American officials spied on each other, lied to each other and falsified reports . . . ALL TOO REAL!"

The New York Times wrote, "Sideshow excels . . . it has the sweep and shadows of a spy novel as it portrays the surreal world of power severed from morality."

https://www.amazon.com/Sideshow-Kissinger-Nixon-Destruction-Cambodia/dp/081541224X

[JKane]