https://unherd.com/2023/05/kissingers-final-warning/
Kissinger's final warning
How one chooses to celebrate Kissinger’s Century depends on where you sit in the “Kissinger wars”. To his detractors, Henry Kissinger was an imperialist who pursued US global supremacy with unmatched ruthlessness and cynicism. To his supporters, he was a diplomatic genius and a peacemaker.
In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens famously called for his prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offences against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture”. For him, the Kissinger Doctrine was dangerously straightforward: the US reserved the right to intervene anywhere in the world in defence of its interest, including by conspiring against democratically elected governments.
This manifested itself in a number of ways: in Kissinger’s support for Pinochet’s violent overthrow of Allende’s socialist government in Chile and for the 17-year-long dictatorship that followed; in his approval of the equally brutal Argentinian military junta of Jorge Videla; in his enabling of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and the campaign of state-sponsored terror that followed; in his secret support for Pakistan as it committed shocking atrocities in Bangladesh; and in his encouragement of Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against neutral Cambodia and Laos, which killed an estimated 150,000 civilians. So wide-ranging was US interventionism under Kissinger that, in 1976, a 33-year-old Joe Biden accused him of trying to promulgate “a global Monroe Doctrine”.
Of all the offences committed by Kissinger, the Indochina bombing campaign is perhaps the most damning. In Kissinger’s Shadow, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin chronicled the scope of the destruction. The United States, Grandin wrote, dropped “a trillion pieces of shrapnel — either ball bearings or razor-sharp barbed darts” on Indochina. In Laos, American pilots deployed “a ton of explosives for each and every” citizen, which continue to maim and kill Laotian men, women and children to this day. As a portrait of Kissinger’s “grand strategy”, it is hard to disagree with Hitchens’s conclusion that his actions reveal a “a callous indifference to human life and human rights” — and to democracy, one may add.
With his reputation largely (and questionably) untainted by Watergate, Kissinger went on to found, in 1982, his own lucrative geopolitical consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, which he continues to run. We know relatively little of the work it carries out. Several attempts have been made, at the congressional level, to get the company to hand over its secretive “client list” — but all have failed. In 1989, Senator Jesse Helms unsuccessfully demanded to be shown it before he would consider confirming Lawrence Eagleburger (a Kissinger protégé and an employee of Kissinger Associates) as Deputy Secretary of State. In 2002, Kissinger chose to quit as chair of the 9/11 Commission rather than hand over the list for public review.
It is no secret, however, that Kissinger has used his extensive knowledge of and close relationship with foreign governments — including, one must assume, the several dictatorships he helped come to power — to advance the interests of some of the world’s largest corporations, including American Express, Coca-Cola, Daewoo, Heinz, Ericsson, Fiat and Volvo. As Grandin writes: “Kissinger Associates was an early player in the wave of privatisations that took place after the end of the Cold War — in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Latin America — helping to create a new international oligarchic class.”
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https://unherd.com/2023/05/kissingers-final-warning/
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