Kissinger, who served as secretary of state for President Richard Nixon and then President Gerald Ford, is a symbol of the worst of US foreign policy. Though he guided the United States through détente with the Soviet Union and initiated the historic opening to China, he engaged in underhanded and covert diplomacy that led to massacres around the globe, as he pursued his version of foreign policy realism. This is no secret.
Chile: Nixon and Kissinger
plotted to thwart the democratic election of a socialist president. The eventual outcome: a military coup and a military dictatorship that killed thousands of Chileans.
Argentina: Kissinger gave a
"green light" to the military junta's dirty war against political opponents that led to the deaths of an estimated 30,000.
East Timor: Another
"green light" from Kissinger, this one for the Indonesian military dictatorship's bloody invasion of East Timor that yielded up to 200,000 deaths.
Cambodia: The
secret bombing there during the Nixon phase of the Vietnam War killed between 150,000 and 500,000 civilians.
Bangladesh: Kissinger and Nixon turned
a blind eye to—arguably, they tacitly approved—Pakistan's genocidal slaughter of 300,000 Bengalis, most of them Hindus.
And there's more. Kissinger's mendacity has been chronicled for years. See Gary Bass' recent and damning book on the Bangladesh tragedy, The Blood Telegram. There's Seymour Hersh's classic, The Price of Power. In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens presented the case against Kissinger in his full polemical style. As secretary of state, Kissinger made common cause with—and encouraged—tyrants who repressed and massacred many. He did not serve the American values of democracy, free expression, and human rights. He shredded them.
Once upon a time, Hillary Clinton protested the Vietnam War. She attended the 1968 GOP convention in Miami to join the effort to draft Nelson Rockefeller in order to prevent Nixon from winning the party's presidential nomination. She served on the staff of the House judiciary committee, which voted to impeach Nixon; one of the articles of impeachment drafted by the staff (but which was not approved) slammed Nixon for covering up the bombing in Cambodia. She knows what Kissinger has done. She knows what Kissinger represents. There's none of that in her self-serving review. Instead, she hails him as a champion of a values-driven foreign policy. Maybe when he's typing in front of a computer these days—but not when he wielded power. Clinton lets him off the hook and participates in the long-running pretense that Kissinger is a grand old statesman who deserves respect rather than scorn.
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