Kashmir Reader - May 29, 2023
Prophets of Doom:
Kissinger and the ‘Intellectual’ Decline of the West in World
by Dr Ramzy Baroud
It is unclear why 100-year-old Henry Kissinger has been elevated by Western intelligentsia to serve the role of the visionary in how the West should behave in response to the Russia-Ukraine war.
But does the centenarian politician have the answers?
Every major global conflict that involved the US and its NATO allies in the past had its own state-sanctioned intellectuals. These are the people who usually explain, justify and promote the West’s position to their own countrymen first, then internationally.
They are not ‘intellectuals’ in the strict definition of the term, as they rarely use critical thinking to reach conclusions that may or may not be consistent with the official position or interests of Western governments. Instead, they advocate and champion stances that are dominant within the various strands of power.
Quite often, these intellectuals have the privilege of time. In the case of Iraq, for example, neoconservative intellectuals, the likes of Bernard Lewis, worked tirelessly to promote war, which ended in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Though the neocons continued to strongly support greater involvement in Iraq and the Middle East through military surges and the like, they were eventually – though not permanently – sidelined by a different group of intellectuals, who supported a stronger American military presence in the Asia-pacific region.
The West also had its own intellectuals who dominated news headlines during the so-called ‘Arab Spring.’ The likes of French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy played a disruptive role in Libya and labored to shape political outcomes in the whole Middle East, posing as a dissident intellectual and a great advocate of human rights and democracy.
From Lewis, to Levy, to others, the powerful Western intellectual practiced more than mere intellectualism. They have traditionally served a fundamental role in politics without being politicians per se, elected or otherwise.
Kissinger, however, is an interesting and a somewhat different phenomenon.
He is the quintessential US-western politician, who defined a whole era of realpolitik. Such notions as human rights, democracy and other moral considerations were rarely factors in his hawkish approach to politics throughout his stints as a Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and other official or non-official political roles.
For Kissinger, what ultimately matters is Western hegemony, particularly the sustaining of the current power paradigm of Western global dominance at any cost.
Thus, Kissinger’s intellect is the outcome of real-life experiences related to his long expertise in US diplomacy, the Cold War and other conflicts involving mainly the US, Russia, China, the Middle East and a host of NATO members.
Another difference between Kissinger and other state-sponsored intellectuals is that the man’s wisdom is now being sought regarding an event that has not, per the West’s own claims, been instigated by US-NATO actions. Indeed, many Western countries believe that they are in a state of self-defense.
Usually, this is not the case. Western foreign policy intellectuals typically shape policies in advance, promote and justify them while these policies are being carried out.
In the case of Kissinger, Western intelligentsia sought his wisdom as a result of their palpable desperation, reflecting their own failure to read and respond to events in Ukraine, in a unified and strategic manner.
It is as if Henry Kissinger is a 100-year oracle, whose prophecy can save the West from the supposed invasion of the hordes coming from the East. This claim is substantiated by the infamous statement made by the EU Foreign Policy Chief, Josep Borrell, when he said that “Europe is a garden … (but) most of the rest of the world is a jungle.”
The problem, however, is that the oracle does not seem to make up its mind regarding the proper course of action.
In a recent interview with the Economist, Kissinger sharply contradicted earlier comments he made last September at a forum organized by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Back then, Kissinger stated that the “expansion of NATO beyond its present context seemed to me an unwise measure.”
Relative to Kissinger’s legacy, that position seemed sensible enough as a starting point for future dialogue. The response to Kissinger’s comment from Western analysts and ideologues, however, forced him to alter his position.
In an article in The Spectator in December, Kissinger articulated his own peace plan, one that ensures the “freedom of Ukraine” within a new “international structure”, one that would allow Russia to “find a place in such an order.”
As for Ukraine and NATO, Kissinger proposed that some kind of a “peace process should link Ukraine to NATO, however expressed.”
That too was rejected, and loudly so, by many.
Almost a year after the start of the war, Kissinger shifted further away from his original position, by declaring that Ukrainian membership in NATO was the “appropriate outcome” of the war.
And, finally, in his long interview with the Economist, Kissinger linked Ukraine’s membership in NATO to the very “safety of Europe”.
It would be convenient to claim that the apparent inconsistencies in Kissinger’s position were necessitated by new events on the ground. But little has changed on the ground since Kissinger made his first statement. And the possibility of a global, even nuclear war, remains a real one.
The problem, of course, is not Kissinger himself. The crisis is twofold: The West is unwilling to accept that war, for once, will not solve its problems; but it also has no alternative to ending conflict, except through the triggering of yet more conflicts.
This time around, Kissinger does not have the answer.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out’. His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
The World Socialist Web Site – May 29, 2023
Henry Kissinger and the crimes of American imperialism
By Patrick Martin
Kissinger’s crimes
Kissinger was directly in charge of US foreign policy, as national security adviser and then secretary of state, from 1969 to 1976, a critical period of worldwide revolutionary upsurge of the working class and oppressed peoples. In every country where American imperialism intervened, either with military force or political subversion or propping up bloodstained dictatorships, he played a sinister role.
At least one million people died in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the period of Kissinger’s direction of American policy, most of them killed by US bombs, incinerated by US napalm, or poisoned by US chemicals like Agent Orange. Many were simply massacred by American troops even as Nixon and Kissinger voiced the usual lies about America defending “freedom” and “democracy” against Communism.
The Nixon administration proclaimed a policy of “Vietnamization” and began the long-drawn-out process of negotiations with North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. Throughout these seven years, American soldiers, nearly all draftees from the working class, continued to die, adding another 30,000 to the death toll.
The war crimes in southeast Asia are innumerable, but the most important include the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the 1970 invasion of Cambodia that set the stage for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and the “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong, the major urban centers of North Vietnam.
In 1973, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Kissinger and the chief North Vietnamese negotiator at the Paris talks, Le Duc Tho. Kissinger did not go to Norway to collect his award, fearful of the likely mass protests. Le Duc Tho refused his award altogether.
In Latin America, Kissinger oversaw a wave of military coups and imposition of dictatorships, most notably in Chile in September 1973, when Augusto Pinochet launched his CIA-backed military overthrow of the reformist regime of Salvador Allende. It ended in the death of Allende and the torture and murder of tens of thousands of Chilean workers and political activists.
It was about Chile that Kissinger made one his most notorious and oft-quoted remarks, telling a meeting of the top secret 40 Committee before the 1970 Chilean elections, won by Allende, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” He wrote later of the bloody 1973 coup, “The Chilean military had saved Chile from a totalitarian regime and the United States from an enemy.”
Similar coups followed in Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia, and these dictators joined forces with military regimes of longer standing in Brazil and Paraguay to mount Operation Condor, a joint venture of the region’s secret police and the American CIA to hunt down and kill revolutionary exiles and leftists of all kinds.
There were equally reactionary events in other parts of the world in which Kissinger is implicated: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975; the military slaughter in Bangladesh in 1971; US support and aid for dictatorial regimes in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Iran; US support for the ultra-right insurgencies against nationalist regimes in Angola and Mozambique; US backing for the Canberra Coup, which ousted the elected Labor Party government of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.
In the Middle East, Kissinger helped stave off the military defeat of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, rushing huge volumes of military equipment to the Zionist state, and then bribed the Egyptian regime of Anwar Sadat to change sides in the Cold War and become an American rather than a Soviet client.
Kissinger’s legacy
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, George W. Bush appointed Kissinger to head a bipartisan commission to investigate, with a Democratic vice chair, former Senator George Mitchell. The congressional Democrats approved this arrangement, but public protests threatened to discredit the commission even before it could begin, and Kissinger had to step down.
As the WSWS noted at the time, “Selecting Kissinger to head this body amounts to an admission that the US government has much to hide in relation to September 11, and that the Bush administration, working in tandem with the congressional Democrats and the media, is determined to bury the truth.”
We also pointed out the growing notoriety of Kissinger internationally:
Kissinger can no longer travel freely in Europe and Latin America. He had to cancel a trip to Brazil last year because of human rights protests. He was sought for questioning by French police during a visit to Paris, in a case involving a French citizen murdered by the US-backed military dictatorship in Chile. He is the subject of lawsuits in Chile and the US for his role in the assassination of General Rene Schneider, the Chilean military commander whose elimination paved the way for the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet…..
While Kissinger’s criminality was of a particularly overt character, it set a standard for ruthlessness which has continued and indeed deepened in the subsequent development of American imperialism. It is in some way fitting that his 100th year on earth coincides with an escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia that is bringing mankind to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.
As for the present day representatives of American imperialism, they confront the “stark reality of a revolutionary period” ill equipped to do anything to contain it.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/29/rhjp-m29.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Henry Kissinger, War Criminal—Still at Large at 100
Greg Grandin writes in the Nation on May 15, 2023: We now know a great deal about the crimes he committed while in office, from helping Nixon derail the Paris Peace Talks and prolong the Vietnam War to green-lighting the invasion of Cambodia and Pinochet’s coup in Chile. But we know little about his four decades with Kissinger Associates.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/kissinger-100-crimes-watergate/
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