“Kissinger is a friend”

Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels. Though we have often seen the world and some of our challenges quite differently, and advocated different responses now and in the past, what comes through clearly in this new book is a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order. – Hillary Rodham Clinton

I think later I will discuss exactly what Hillary’s “friendship” says about her politics and leadership, but right at the moment I want to talk about how, at least by body count, Henry Kissinger is the United States’ biggest living War Criminal, fully comparable to Hitler and Stalin.

Really? How can you say that ek?

In the excerpts below, historian Greg Grandin details how he came up with a conservative estimate of 4,124,000 civilian deaths directly attributable to Kissinger’s policies (so, one mere order of magnitude less than Hitler and Stalin) exclusive of those he caused in Vietnam.

I would like to highlight Vietnam.

It’s not so much the deaths of Vietnamese I want to draw your attention to, those are tragic and unconscionable given that it was a war of aggression based on the lies of the Johnson Administration (yup, War Criminal), it’s the 21,000 United States soldiers that were killed between 1969 and 1974 (36,000 killed under Kennedy and Johnson).

It’s not much remembered, but after the Tet Offensive in 1968 when public sentiment turned firmly against the war and Johnson decided that he would not be able to win re-election, he opened peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. For their part they were willing to come to the table because Tet was a military disaster for them, effectively wiping out the Viet Cong revolutionary forces in the South and severely damaging their conventional Army.

The terms were pretty much the same as those later accepted by Nixon and Kissinger so every last one of those 21,000 basically died for nothing.

See, Kissinger was a peacemaker. That’s why he won the Nobel Prize.

Whoa there Joe, the part you maybe don’t know is that in 1968 Henry Kissinger went to Paris to sabotage that agreement to tilt the Presidential Election in favor of Nixon. This is exactly the same kind of treason practiced by Reagan against Carter in 1980. Reagan as you may recall went on to trade arms for hostages and to finance his illegal War in Nicaragua.

How did Henry do it? He peeled away the South Vietnamese government by promising them a better deal from Nixon.

So the South refused to sign, the talks fell apart, there were 7 more years of war at the end of which the South Vietnamese government was crushed, many people who worked with the United States were executed or imprisoned, and there were all those humiliating pictures of the United States evacuating under fire in abject defeat.

Who lost Vietnam? Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize winner and “Statesman”. Someone you want to be friends with, who’s advice you want to take.

The blood of every single one of those 21,000 servicemen and women is on his hands, but there’s a lot of other blood.

Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace
By Greg Grandin, The Nation
February 5, 2016

Let’s consider some of Kissinger’s achievements during his tenure as Richard Nixon’s top foreign policy–maker. He (1) prolonged the Vietnam War for five pointless years; (2) illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos; (3) goaded Nixon to wiretap staffers and journalists; (4) bore responsibility for three genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; (5) urged Nixon to go after Daniel Ellsberg for having released the Pentagon Papers, which set off a chain of events that brought down the Nixon White House; (6) pumped up Pakistan’s ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to destabilize Afghanistan; (7) began the US’s arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran; (8) accelerated needless civil wars in southern Africa that, in the name of supporting white supremacy, left millions dead; (9) supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America; and (10) ingratiated himself with the first-generation neocons, such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who would take American militarism to its next calamitous level.
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Pull but one string from the current tangle of today’s multiple foreign policy crises, and odds are it will lead back to something Kissinger did between 1968 and 1977. Over-reliance on Saudi oil? That’s Kissinger. Blowback from the instrumental use of radical Islam to destabilize Soviet allies? Again, Kissinger. An unstable arms race in the Middle East? Check, Kissinger. Sunni-Shia rivalry? Yup, Kissinger. The impasse in Israel-Palestine? Kissinger. Radicalization of Iran? “An act of folly” was how veteran diplomat George Ball described Kissinger’s relationship to the Shah. Militarization of the Persian Gulf? Kissinger, Kissinger, Kissinger.
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Then there’s Libya. Kissinger has long had the secular radical Muammar Qaddafi in his crosshairs (Kissinger, a close ally of Saudi Arabia, prefers to work with Wahhabi theocrats). On April 14, 1986, when the Reagan administration launched an airstrike on Libya in clear violation of international law, Kissinger did the rounds on news shows to justify the bombing. The day after the bombing, Kissinger appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America to voice his “total support.” Attacking Libya, he said, was “correct” and “necessary.” Asked if he was worried about a backlash—increased radicalization, reprisals, or a boost to Muammar Muhammad Qaddafi’s stature—he answered, “The question is whose endurance is greater. I believe ours is.” The bombing, which reportedly killed one of Qaddafi’s daughters, would, Kissinger said, “reduce the incidents of terrorism.”

Kissinger, as he often is, was wrong. A case can be made that Reagan’s bombing accelerated regional polarization and radicalization, contributing to blowback.

Henry Kissinger’s “mad and illegal” bombing: What you need to know about his real history — and why the Sanders/Clinton exchange matters
by Greg Grandin, Salon
Friday, Feb 12, 2016 01:29 PM EST

I was queried about how I came up — in a Nation piece last week — with these numbers: “A full tally hasn’t been done, but a back-of-the-envelope count would attribute 3 million, maybe 4 million deaths to Kissinger’s actions,” in my post on Hillary Clinton’s pride in being tutored by Henry Kissinger.
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Kissinger’s hardline in southern Africa – in response to movements of national liberation in Angola and Mozambique and anti-white supremacy struggles in Rhodesia and South Africa — led him to support allied insurgencies. We might wish,” Ford’s secretary of defense James Schlesinger said during one 1975 strategy session, “to encourage the disintegration of Angola.” And that’s what Kissinger did. In July, he stepped up covert aid to UNITA, a pro-American, anti-MPLA insurgency in Angola that he had already been running. Likewise in Mozambique. All told, historians guess that these wars killed between 1,750,000 and 2 million people. Neither country “disintegrated.” But they were devastated, their infrastructure ruined, their governments militarized and bankrupted, their hospitals and morgues filled beyond capacity. Mozambique’s civil war ended in 1992, while fighting in Angola dragged on for yet another decade.

Pakistan’s genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), which Kissinger greenlighted: Between 300,000 and a million.

The U.S.’s illegal bombing campaign in Cambodia: 100,000 civilians dead in the bombing. 1,671,000 killed in the resultant genocide.

Indonesia’s invasion and occupation of East Timor, which Kissinger greenlighted: 200,000 dead.

Chile: at least 3,000

The Guatemalan genocide is an atrocity often not associated with Henry Kissinger, since the worst of its slaughter came in 1978-1983, a few years after he left office. But here, too, his fingerprints show. In 1970, Kissinger and his military aide Alexander Haig were involved in passing the names and addresses of “Guatemalan terrorists” to security forces, even though Washington was well aware that that the government was using its U.S.-funded counter-terror program to eliminate not just armed insurgents but all political opposition and that the great majority of political prisoners taken were summarily executed. Shortly thereafter, repression in Guatemala got so out of hand that a member of Kissinger’s NSC staff urged that the so-called “40 Committee” – the committee chaired by Kissinger that brought together various arms of the national security state, which helped organize the campaign to overthrow Allende in Chile – reconsider U.S. support for the Guatemalan government. Kissinger, as chair, didn’t think it was an issue worth taking up and robust military support continued, paving the way for the killing of over 100,000 people.

So, to sum up, using the lower estimates above: Kissinger’s policies resulted in at least 4,124,000 civilian deaths, probably many times that number of wounded and refugees – and that doesn’t include Kissinger’s victims in Vietnam — a war that he (and Nixon) helped prolong for five years when they sabotaged 1968 peace talks — Laos, or Argentina, Uruguay, the Middle East and Persian Gulf, at the hands of Kissinger’s partners, such as the Shah and the Saudis.

Some friend, huh? I wonder how these butchers look at themselves in the mirror.