Dear Commons Community,

Henry Kissinger, who was the top American foreign policy official for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, died yesterday at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.

Kissinger’s death was announced by his consulting firm on last night.  No cause of death was immediately given. 

I was not a fan of his. The Huffington Post has an article this morning entitled, “Henry Kissinger, America’s Most Notorious War Criminal, Dies at 100“.  Here is an excerpt.

“Kissinger served as secretary of state and national security adviser under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, positions that allowed him to direct the Vietnam War and the broader Cold War with the Soviet Union, and to implement a stridently “realist” approach that prioritized U.S. interests and domestic political success over any potential atrocity that might occur.

The former led to perhaps the most infamous crime Kissinger committed: a secret four-year bombing campaign in Cambodia that killed an untold number of civilians, despite the fact that it was a neutral nation with which the United States was not at war.

During his time in charge of the American foreign policy machine, Kissinger also directed illegal arms sales to Pakistan as it carried out a brutal crackdown on its Bengali population in 1971. He supported the 1973 military coup that overthrew a democratically elected socialist government in Chile, gave the go-ahead to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, and backed Argentina’s repressive military dictatorship as it launched its “dirty war” against dissenters and leftists in 1976. His policies during the Ford administration also fueled civil wars in Africa, most notably in Angola.

Even the most generous calculations suggest that the murderous regimes Kissinger supported and the conflicts they waged were responsible for millions of deaths and millions of other human rights abuses, during and after the eight years he served in the American government.

Kissinger never showed remorse for those misdeeds. He never paid any real price for them either. He maintained a mocking tone toward critics of his human rights record throughout his life, and remained a member in good standing of elite Washington political society until his death.

In May 2016, for instance, President Barack Obama came as close as the United States ever does to apologizing for its role in a human rights atrocity during a visit to Argentina. The U.S. “has to examine its own policies as well, and its own past,” Obama said, in an expression of regret for the United States’ role in the “dirty war.” “We’ve been slow to speak out for human rights, and that was the case here.” He pledged to declassify thousands of documents related to the dictatorship’s reign of terror and U.S. support for it.

Kissinger’s supporters argue that his accomplishments, including an opening of relations with China and detente with the Soviet Union, outweigh any abuses that helped make them possible. At the very least, they posit, his positions were part of a cold calculation that “ensuring a nation’s survival sometimes leaves tragically little room for private morality,” as Robert D. Kaplan argued in 2013. Kissinger’s defenders suggest that even more death may have occurred if the U.S. had pursued a more morally grounded foreign policy instead.”

I agree that opening up China was a significant accomplishment of his tenure but there were too many other abuses.

Tony

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