A Kissinger Reader
I don't know if you're mocking my mainstream sensibilities with this Pravda stuff, Carl, but I will take the opportunity to post a little background trail with K. Personally, I'd much prefer Kissinger style Realpolitik to the current Perle-inspired fantasies apparently dominant in WH circles these days. Kissinger is probably more intelligent, rational, and realistic than anybody on the inside now, except for Powell maybe on the realism front. But K was astonishingly miscast as the Earl Warren of 9/11 . It ain't just "liberals" who would be suspicious of K, as we will see.
Kissinger Pulls Out as Chief of Inquiry Into 9/11 Attacks nytimes.com
That one just for the record. A more amusing recent Kissinger sighting:
Briefing Depicted Saudis as Enemies washingtonpost.com
Of the two dozen people who attended the Defense Policy Board meeting, only one, former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, spoke up to object to the anti-Saudi conclusions of the briefing, according to sources who were there. Some members of the board clearly agreed with Kissinger's dismissal of the briefing and others did not.
One source summarized Kissinger's remarks as, "The Saudis are pro-American, they have to operate in a difficult region, and ultimately we can manage them."
Kissinger declined to comment on the meeting. He said his consulting business does not advise the Saudi government and has no clients that do large amounts of business in Saudi Arabia.
"I don't consider Saudi Arabia to be a strategic adversary of the United States," Kissinger said. "They are doing some things I don't approve of, but I don't consider them a strategic adversary."
Cool. K's problems with the current WH inner circle go back a long, long time.
CHENEY VERSUS POWELL, ROUND TWO.
Containment tnr.com
Cheney possesses a straightforward belief in the coercive power of military strength. "His guiding principle is toughness," says an associate of Cheney's. "He's not so much an ideas guy. He just doesn't want to take any crap from adversaries." As it happens, that's also an apt description of Rumsfeld. The press has painted the two-time defense secretary as the embodiment of Ford-administration blandness. That's absurd. Rumsfeld, a former fighter pilot known to boast about how many push-ups he could do, was a foreign policy heretic in an administration where détente with the Soviet Union was practically a religion. Rumsfeld torpedoed the strategy nearly single-handedly, scuttling the SALT II accord over Kissinger's and Ford's objections. . . .
Rumsfeld's deputy, Wolfowitz, is even more hawkish than his boss--as well as being the most intellectual member of Bush's foreign policy team. (While Chevron may have named an oil tanker after Condoleezza Rice during the campaign, Wolfowitz was the model for a character in Saul Bellow's latest novel, Ravelstein.) Wolfowitz made his Washington debut in the mid-'70s as a member of Team B, a group of conservative foreign policy hands whose 1976 report turned on its head the intelligence community's and Henry Kissinger's benign reading of Soviet intentions. During the Reagan administration, he quickly rose through the State Department and Pentagon ranks; when Bush pére won the presidency, he awarded Wolfowitz the number-three job at the Pentagon. There he served as one of the architects of the Gulf war and, more important, as Cheney's right-hand man. . . .
Bolstering Cheney's White House clout is his ally Rumsfeld, who has already proved himself a bureaucratic infighter without equal. On several occasions during the Ford administration, Rumsfeld bested Kissinger, who later described him as "a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability and substance fuse seamlessly."
When K was still in play for the 9/11 commission job, the Atlantic put up a link to this article on their home page, with a concise version of this quote, I think.
Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile theatlantic.com
Kissinger was given very gingerly treatment by the Intelligence Committee members, who did not directly raise the possibility that he was not telling the truth in his testimony. "The senators rolled over and played dead," says one committee staffer who investigated the Chile incident. "It was his celebrity status. When Kissinger came to testify [in the closed hearings], all of a sudden we let in the press and all the senators stood up and had photographs taken with him." Most of the staff members investigating Chile had no doubts about who was lying and who was not, but were unable to do more in the published reports than to note the various discrepancies—most of which pitted the CIA against the White House.
In his memoirs, Kissinger, freed from the burden of sworn testimony, takes the White House cover story a step further: "When I ordered coup plotting turned off on October 15, 1970, Nixon, Haig, and I considered it the end of both Track I and Track II. The CIA personnel in Chile apparently thought that the order applied only to Viaux: they felt they were free to continue with the second group of plotters [led by Valenzuela], of whom the White House was unaware." The Agency's efforts in Chile were "amateurish, being improvised in panic and executed in confusion. " What Kissinger could add, of course, is that much of the panic originated with Nixon on September 15, and much of the confusion with White House fears of exposure that grew out of Korry's warnings. Blood was going to be shed in Santiago that October, and the White House wanted no part of the responsibility.
In later interviews, CIA officials were amused and almost philosophical about the subsequent Nixon and Kissinger lies: "We're there as the whipping boy," said one senior operative who was directly involved in Track II. "Kissinger and Nixon left us holding the bag, but that's what we're in business for. And if you don't like it, don't join up."
Well, maybe that's what W was hoping for from K this time around too, who can say? The other Hersh story in that 2-parter:
Kissinger and Nixon in the White House theatlantic.com
Then there's the sometimes favorite "leftist" of the right, Christopher Hitchens, on K:
THE CASE AGAINST HENRY KISSINGER. findarticles.com findarticles.com
Plus a panel discussion:
Regarding Henry Kissinger harpers.org
Hitchen's introduction to K in that one:
As I said of the four people who conducted the election subversion in 1968, only one remains unindicted. If you, now, look at the international scene and see the people with whom Dr. Kissinger was in business during his tenure in office, you will find that almost all of them are also in jail in their own countries, or are going there. Of Mr. Kissinger's business and political partners, Mr. Suharto, General Pinochet, General Papadopoulos in Greece, the brigadiers in Bangladesh who committed the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and quite a number of others are in jail, I'm glad to say-tried in public courts in their own countries and condemned to life imprisonment.
Once again, the grand exception is the man who made their political or military careers possible. That he dwells as an honored citizen among us is a reproach to any society that considers itself bound by international law or responsive to the claims of justice on an international scale. So let that be my opening bid and let me accept counter offers for more enlargements or undercuts from these distinguished gentlemen. Thank you. |
