Henry Kissinger was born May 27, 1923. Happy #80, Dr. Kissinger.
Kissinger was most famous (or infamous) for being Richard Nixon's Secretary of State, and thus a co-planner (or co-conspirator if you hate him) in some of the harshest American applications of force since WWII.
Kissinger would generally be regarded as the American embodiment of some idea of "realpolitick" meaning that policies are judged stringently on advancing what are seen as America's national interest with little regard to, for example, worrying about how this will affect the populaces of countries controlled by our enemies, ie Cambodia.
People of the left seem in some cases to especially and particularly hate him to a degree that seems irrational. People who have a wink and a nod for Castro think that Kissinger is Satan. I'm not particularly endorsing anything that Kissinger has done. He just doesn't seem like an evil Nazi to me, even if some policy calls seem questionable.
Christopher Hitchens in particular seems to have special personal grudge against the man, what with his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger. There's so much as a whole movie to go with it.
The point of Hitchens' book is to argue that Kissinger should even today absolutely stand trial for war crimes in front of an international tribunal "for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture."
Is he really quite THAT bad?
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Article comments
1 - Steve Rhodes
Yes.
Nobody is saying he is an evil Nazi, but he should be held accountable for his policies on Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, East Timor and other places.
Read the book or at least the website and watch the documentary if you get the Sundance Channel (it will be showing several times in June).
2 - Doctor Slack
Well, among other things, Kissinger was one of the primary architects of the clandestine (and then not-so-clandestine) American bombings that killed a quarter million people in Cambodia -- many of them AFTER the rationale of protecting American lives in Vietnam had vanished. Those bombings also destroyed the Cambodian infrastructure and rendered about two million people homeless -- providing ready recruits for the Khmer Rouge and basically making Pol Pot's ascendancy possible.
[If you're looking for something closer to home, there are of course the thousands of people tortured, imprisoned or disappeared via Operation Condor, which is the source of the recent fracas.]
All of which was over the top and counterproductive even by the standards of Cold War "realpolitik." So yes, Kissinger was really that bad. More than a match for Castro in the Crimes Against Humanity Sweepstakes, and I don't say that lightly. Hitchens happens to be right on this one in general IMO, though I find it hard to buy his general moral outrage given his recent career as a war-whore. It would be interesting to see a treatment of the legal issue by someone who aspires to be more than an "intellectual entertainer."
3 - John Whitley
The following revealing item on Henry Kissinger is extracted from an article from the 'New World Order Intelligence Update' [http://www.nwointelligence.com/NEWWORLD.HTM]:
'And, fellow-Canadians, as a faint echo of the freedoms we have now lost in this once great Dominion, here's a robust exercise of free speech, fresh from the Mother Country, which is now impossible to imagine in modern Canada!
[Henry Kissinger walks out on Paxman radio program in the U.K. after being asked, among other things, if he felt "like a fraud." Exchange below, as reported by THE GUARDIAN, 29th June, 1999]
Jeremy Paxman: "It's been 17 years since the last volume of your memoirs. You said you wanted to let the dust settle but [didn't you] need the distance in order to rewrite history?"
Dr Kissinger: "No I based these memoirs on documents which were as valid then as they are now."
Paxman: [describes Kissinger's claim that he ended the cold war as "farfetched"] "What bothers a lot of people is you seem to ignore the human rights of people within regimes with which you're trying to establish a balance of power."
Kissinger: "That's not correct either."
Paxman: question about supporting General Pinochet and undermining President Allende in Chile.
Kissinger: "We did not support Pinochet. In what way did we support Pinochet?"
Paxman: "You supported the military regime."
Kissinger: "After the coup we preferred Pinochet to Allende."
Paxman: "It doesn't stop there... You're on record justifying the [behaviour of the] Chinese government in Tiananmen Square."
Kissinger:... "I have never supported what the Chinese did in Tiananmen Square."
Paxman: "Did you feel a fraud for accepting the Nobel Prize [for the Indo-China agreement]?"
Kissinger: "I wonder what you do when you do a hostile interview?"
Paxman: [accuses Kissinger of a "wilful misreading of history"]
Kissinger: "It may be a misreading but it wasn't wilful."
Paxman: question about the "hundreds of thousands of people killed in the bombing of Cambodia".
Kissinger: "That's absolutely untrue. We have no evidence that hundreds of thousands of people were killed... I think this is an absolute outrage, it's nonsense."
Paxman: "You don't deny [the bombing of Cambodia] was secret though?... This was a secret operation against a neutral country..."
Kissinger: "Come on now, Mr Paxman, this was 15 years ago, and you at least have the ability to educate yourself about a lie on your own programme... "
Paxman: "What's factually inaccurate?"
Kissinger: "... That's outrageous... " [Kissinger abruptly leaves: Paxman calls out, "'Bye, Dr. Kissinger"!]'