Kissinger supports Bush's war against terrorism
Saturday September 18, 2004
Radicalism will spread if U.S. abandons Iraq, says former secretary of state.
By: DOUGLAS J. GUTH Staff Reporter
clevelandjewishnews.com
In 1979, two years after he left government, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said about U.S. foreign policy, "Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem."
This is the situation facing the Bush administration in light of the continuing conflict in Iraq, over a year after President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat. Kissinger, who addressed a City Club of Cleveland forum at the Marriott Hotel at Key Center on Sept. 8, fully supports Bush's determination to fight terrorism.
"I am confident that we will prevail, and ultimately we must," Kissinger said. "There is no alternative. The consequence of the spread of radicalism around the world if the United States abandons what it is doing in Iraq is incalculable."
Kissinger's speech was the first of four forums leading up to the vice presidential debate Oct. 5 at Case Western Reserve University. Kissinger, 81, was secretary of state in the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the 1970s. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Vietnam peace accords. He now heads Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm.
During Kissinger's time in office, the world's main security threats came from large nations like China and the Soviet Union. The moment the planes struck the World Trade Center, however, "security threats became privatized," he said.
Cold War-era fears of the Soviet Union, Kissinger continued, have been replaced by an enemy living and operating out of a state but not necessarily representative of the state itself.
The "policy of deterrence," which worked during the Cold War when the Soviet Union threatened other countries, has now been replaced by the "policy of preemption," a much trickier proposition to sell to the world. "Diplomacy is impossible against a (terrorist group) when their objective is the destruction of our society," the former secretary noted.
After 9/11, Bush felt he had to act swiftly, even if the rest of the world was not on his side. The possibility of an Al Qaeda tie to Iraq, combined with Saddam Hussein's past use of (chemical) weapons of mass destruction, was too great to ignore.
Consequently, there was no time to wait before taking action in Iraq. "I think anybody who would have been president of the United States would have come to the same conclusions that President Bush did," noted Kissinger.
If Iraq has WMD, then where are they? Kissinger doesn't know, but their previous existence cannot be argued, he said. Hussein had used chemical weapons, with disastrous effects, against Iran and Iraq's Kurdish population. In 1998, President Bill Clinton justified four days of air strikes against Iraqi targets by listing stockpiles of WMD he thought were there.
Kissinger recently read a British government report that said Al Qaeda terrorists had contacts with Iraqi intelligence in looking to develop chemical weapons. British pre-war intelligence assessments of connections between Al Qaeda and Hussein's government were similar to U.S. intelligence assessments.
"Iraq may have trained some Al Qaeda terrorists since 1998," the report said. "Al Qaeda has shown interest in gaining chemical and biological expertise from Iraq, but we do not know whether any such training was provided."
Based on these and other reports, "the U.S. could not wait for the existence of WMD to be proven," Kissinger said.
The invasion of Iraq was a unilateral move by the Bush administration, one that has been highly criticized by Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry and various world leaders.
Kissinger feels the next phase of foreign policy will emphasize continued preemptive strikes against radical fundamentalist Islam wherever it may be. However, unlike Iraq, these preemptive strikes must be launched with the cooperation of allied countries such as India, China, Japan and Russia.
"A multilateral effort is essential to destroy Al Qaeda and any terrorist groups associated with them," Kissinger said.
After his speech, Kissinger sidestepped responding directly to specific criticism of the Bush administration's war policy offered by Kerry earlier in the day.
Kerry, speaking in Cincinnati, argued that the president was wrong in his Iraq policies. The "hard reality," he added, is that Bush's choices have led to "spreading violence, growing extremism, havens for terrorists that weren't there before."
"I strongly support President Bush," Kissinger told reporters. "I don't think that's the level at which the debate should be conducted. I really don't want to get into a debate with Sen. Kerry." |
