Henry Kissinger, a man who continues to believe that history can be tamed by resort to imperial solutions — read, the dispatch of the marines or the boys from Langly — is still making waves.
In short, Kissinger, even at the advanced age of 91, remains a nuisance. Several weeks ago, for example, he foisted a new book on us, World Order, in which he defined the exercise of diplomacy through a typically Kissingerian lens. Were Niccolo Machiavelli with us today, he would tip his hat to Heinz (later changed to Henry) Alfred Kissinger, the German immigrant with a heavy accent who went on to become, hyperbole aside, the most ruthless diplomat in American history.
But the waves that Kissinger is making do not stem from his new book, but from newly disclosed government documents released earlier this week about how, as secretary of state in 1976, he drew plans to “smash Cuba”, to launch airstrikes against Havana, to mine and bomb its harbours, to “clobber that pipsqueak” Fidel Castro and effectively to send the little island nation of 8 million back to the stone age — all because of Cuba’s military incursion into Angola, where Cuban troops had gone there to help the newly independent nation ward off attacks from then apartheid South Africa and right-wing guerrillas.
Chilling account
The documents show that Kissinger meant business, but happily the idea went nowhere because Jimmy Carter won the presidential election.One wonders what would have happened to our world order if Jerry Ford remained in office and Kissinger had had his way, given the fact that the Soviet Union was a close Cuba ally at the time.
In one meeting with advisers, for example, he reportedly said, as we read the chilling account in the documents, released last Tuesday, the man was seething with rage at seeing a small country like Cuba ruin his plans for Africa. “If we decide to use military power, it must succeed”, he says in one meeting. “There should be no halfway measures — we would get no award for using military power in moderation. If we decide on a blockade, it must be ruthless and rapid and efficient”.
Kissinger was never what Churchill called a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. He was always up front about his role as a cold warrior, counter-revolutionary, old-style Machiavellian global chess player to whom nations, along with the people who inhabited them, were mere pawns on a global chess board to be moved around in response to a big power’s strategic interests. His record is well known and abhored by those commentators in the US who value the human in human beings.
Here’s a case in point: when, around the end of 2002, Henry Kissinger was tasked by the Bush administration to head the commission that investigated the 9/11 terrorist assault on the US, a great many of these commentators were shocked at the decision. They saw it as a cruel insult to the memory of those who perished on that day and an affront to an American public deserving of a full accounting of that infamous event.
Controversial past
The influential magazine Nation editorialised: “A proven liar has been assigned the task of finding the truth ... he is not a truth seeker. Indeed he has prevaricated about his own actions and tried to limit access to government information. He should be the target of subpoenas, not one who issues the”.
After two weeks of controversy, Kissinger resigned. The Washington Post reported blandly: “The departure ended two weeks of intense political infighting over whether Kissinger’s controversial past would affect the commission’s findings”.
And that past was controversial indeed, a past where he not only repeatedly, but also brazenly, showed nothing but contempt for what we all consider a statesman’s canon. Lest we forget, Henry Kissinger, as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, was behind the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the deliberate prolongation and expansion of the Indo-China war by his subversion of the Paris peace talks on the eve of the 1968 US presidential elections, when he got the South Vietnamese negotiators to scuttle the talks, with the understanding that they would receive a better deal with a Republican president.
All that is already in the history books. Also in the history books are facts about his complicity in the kidnapping and murder of Chilean commander Rene Schneider in 1973 by would-be coup-makers working with and funded by CIA operatives (who took their orders from the so-called 40-Committee, chaired by Kissinger himself between), which culminated in the ouster and assassination of the democratically elected president Salvador Allende, and the installation of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Democratically elected? No matter, for it was around that time that Kissinger came out with his now famous expression of disdain for democracy when he observed that he saw no reason why any country, in this case Chile, “should be allowed to go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people”.
His mischief knew no bounds. He was behind the massacres in Bangladesh in 1971 and the Greek-sponsored coup in Cyprus in 1974, behind Indonesia’s American-supported invasion of East Timor in 1975 and behind the tragic car-bombing death of Allende’s former foreign minister Orlando Letelier, along with his American colleague Ronnie Moffit on Embassy Row in Washington in 1976.
Though not on the same scale of egregiousness, consider Kissinger’s duplicitous relationship with President Anwar Sadat during America’s shuttle diplomacy, in the wake of the October War, when as Kissinger was getting kisses, Arab-fashion, planted on his cheeks, and getting called “my friend Henry” by the Egyptian president, he was dismissing his clueless host to Golda Meir as “that little buffoon”, according to “The Conversations of Henry Kissinger” (1976) by Israeli journalist Matti Golan.
Still, at 91, Heinz Alfred Kissinger continues, as the bard would put it, to strut and fret his hour upon the stage — at least till he’s heard no more. Meanwhile, think of, well, the chutzpah of the man.
— Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.