Kissinger’s Shadow

by Greg Grandin

  Then there was Kissinger’s habit, which by 1975 had become marked in his public speeches, of referring to the “fact” or the “reality” of “interdependence”—a word that provoked conservatives almost as much as did détente. We live, Kissinger said, in “a new international environment—a world of multiple centers of power, of ideological differences both old and new, clouded by nuclear peril and marked by the new imperatives of interdependence.” “American policy” is based not on “confrontation” but on the “consciousness of global interdependence as the basis of the ultimate fulfillment of national objectives.” “A world of interdependence.” “The structure of global interdependence.” “The big problem is to bring the nations of the world together in recognition of the fact of interdependence.” “The awareness of our interdependence.” “Today’s interdependent world.” “Increasing interdependence.” “Interdependence impels international co-operation.” “Interdependence imposes,” Kissinger said, obligations.

  Reporter: “Mr. Secretary, you spoke a great deal about interdependence in your speech.” Secretary Kissinger: “Yes.”25

  In a recent book, The Age of Fracture, the Princeton intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers echoes Kissinger’s sense that the Reagan White House represented a new kind of presidency, a qualitative leap into a different realm of public symbolism. “No president before Reagan had invested belief itself with such extravagant power and possibilities. In Reagan’s urgency-filled speeches of the 1960s and early 1970s the enemies were institutionally and sociologically palpable: the Kremlin and its ‘anti-heap of totalitarianism,’ the planners and welfare-state advocates, the forces of ‘anarchy and insurrection’ on the Berkeley campus.”26 I would add Henry Kissinger to this list of tangible enemies to be vanquished.

  Yet however much they disliked him and what he stood for, the New Right couldn’t dispose of Kissinger so easily. His intellectual defense of war at a moment, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the idea of war was most vulnerable was too important. Over the course of his long career he articulated a powerful set of assumptions and arguments that would continue to justify bold action in the world, up to and beyond the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

  What Reagan and his followers did, then, was to keep Kissingerism by splitting it in two. They claimed as their own the half that emphasized that the human condition was radical freedom, that decline was not inevitable, that the course of history could be swayed by the will of purposeful men. Rodgers writes that “by the time Reagan entered the White House, freedom’s nemesis had migrated into the psyche. Freedom’s deepest enemy was pessimism: the mental undertow of doubt, the paralyzing specter of limits, the ‘cynic who’s trying to tell us we’re not going to get any better.’” Into Reagan’s speeches slipped an “enchanted, disembedded, psychically involute sense of freedom” celebrating the “limitless possibilities of self and change.”27

  As to the rest of Kissingerism—the part that said that history was tragedy, that life was suffering, birth death, that existence was, at the end of the day, meaningless, and that individuals come into the world trapped in a web of wants, necessities, demands, and obligations—that half was for the world’s other peoples, those who would be sacrificed in a revived Cold War. For those peoples, in Angola, Mozambique, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran and other frontline states, the Reaganites would recommend an ever-increasing degree of violence so they could have freedom, like us. “America’s not just a word,” Ronald Reagan said in his July 4, 1984, address, “it is a hope, a torch shedding light to all the hopeless of the world.… You know, throughout the world, the persecuted hear the word ‘America,’ and in that sound they hear the sunrise, hear the rivers push, hear the cold, swift air at the top of the peak. Yes, you can hear freedom.”28

  9

  Cause and Effect

  Values are, at best, a mode of causality. The mystery of life is limited by classifiable data; it exhausts itself in the riddle of the first cause.… Resignation as to the purposes of the universe serves as the first step toward ethical activity and the realization ensues that the meaning of history is not confined to its mere manifestations and that no causal analysis can absolve Man from giving his own content to his own existence.

  —Henry Kissinger

  On April 15, 1998, Pol Pot, the former leader of the Khmer Rouge, died in Cambodia, an old man with no remorse. A few months earlier, a journalist had asked him if he felt regret for the crimes committed against the Cambodian people—over a million people died after he took power in 1975. No, he answered. “My conscience is clear.” “We had to defend ourselves,” Pol Pot said, referring to the revolution’s enemies.1

  Henry Kissinger has faced similar questions about his role in Cambodia. Did he have “any pangs of conscience,” Die Zeit asked him in 1976, about a year after the fall of Phnom Penh to Pol Pot’s rebels. No, Kissinger said. North Vietnamese troops had invaded first and they were using Cambodian sanctuaries to kill American soldiers. “I may have a lack of imagination,” Kissinger told the German magazine, “but I fail to see the moral issue involved.” America, Kissinger said elsewhere, had to “defend itself.”2

  In 1979, not long after Kissinger left office, a British journalist, William Shawcross, published a best-selling book called Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia, which called him to account not just for his illegal war but for its subsequent effects: by polarizing Cambodia with a massive bombing campaign, Shawcross argued, Kissinger created the conditions for the triumph of the Khmer Rouge. “The Khmer Rouge were born out of the inferno that American policy did much to create.”3 The accusation gnawed at Kissinger. He devoted a considerable number of pages in each of his three memoirs, and in almost every other book he wrote, defending himself against the accusation that he was to blame for the rise of Pol Pot. Finally, by 1998, with the Cold War over and Kissinger well settled in his role as America’s statesman emeritus, the matter seemed to be behind him.

  But then Pol Pot died, and Kissinger once again found himself rehearsing arguments that he first started making in 1969: North Vietnam had violated Cambodia’s sovereignty first; the neutral country had become a haven for enemies of the United States; and America took care not to target civilians, just Vietcong and North Vietnamese. Interviewed by the BBC about Pol Pot’s legacy, Kissinger used the phrase “the so-called bombing of Cambodia.” The Guardian quipped the next day that this was “presumably … distinct from a proper bombing which would have destroyed the entire Cambodian infrastructure and traumatized the entire Cambodian people—not just a large proportion of both.”4

  The BBC interviewer also asked Kissinger the question “Do you feel responsible?” “Absolutely,” Kissinger replied. “I feel just as responsible as you should feel for the Holocaust because you bombed Hamburg.”

  It’s a fatuous answer. The Nazis, of course, had come to power before the British air assault on Hamburg in 1943, and they initiated the Holocaust before the Allies targeted that German city. The Khmer Rouge came to power after the carpet bombing of Cambodia. They launched their campaign of mass terror after Kissinger’s bombing campaign.

  The flimsiness of Kissinger’s comparison is instructive. Foreign policy makers often invoke analogies—usually ones involving Nazis, Hitler, or Munich—for two reasons. The first is to provide a simple framing mechanism to justify action in the present. Saddam is Hitler—three words that concisely convey a world of moral and historical meaning. The second is to deflect away from methods of historical inquiry, such as cause-and-effect analysis, that might place responsibility for current crises on past policies. Kissinger has said, over and over again, that one of the worst conditions that can befall a political leader is to become “prisoner of the past,” to be overly worried about repeating mistakes.5 Statesmen must refuse, as Kissinger has refused, to accept the proposition that the consequences of any previous action, no matter how horrific, should restrict their room to maneuver in the future. Kiss
inger’s analogy, though, is so unpersuasive it actually achieves the opposite of its intent, forcing us to look at the relationship of cause to effect, action to reaction, and the moral responsibility that attaches to that relationship.

  The bombing of Cambodia is distinct from Kissinger’s other transgressions, and not just because of its magnitude of cruelty or its body count. Most of Kissinger’s policies that draw censure can be justified by reason of state. Read Machiavelli—with his counsel to statesmen to act according to how the world really works as opposed to how it ideally should work—and you’ll have your defense for Kissinger’s support for Pinochet and the shah, his sanctioning of Suharto’s invasion of East Timor, and even his military aid to Pakistan while it perpetuated genocide against Bangladesh.* One might support or condemn any one of these actions, but the terms of the debate would have to do with questions of national interest, political effectiveness, and whether order is a higher value than justice or vice versa. The effect of most of these policies—the blowback—is two or three steps removed from Kissinger: one could argue, as Kissinger and his supporters have argued on different occasions, that backing allied strongmen is not the same thing as sanctioning the acts they do. As to the U.S. armed slaughter of hundreds of thousands in East Timor and Bangladesh, that, Kissinger has said, would have happened no matter what he did.

  In Cambodia, however, the relationship of cause and effect is much more direct—if only because it was the United States, and not a US-armed proxy, that executed the cause, or at least one of the causes (the four-year air assault), that led to the effect (Pol Pot’s genocide). And one can’t justify the bombing by reason of state for it was driven by motives that were the opposite of Machiavellian realism: it was executed to try to bring about a world Nixon and Kissinger believed they ought to live in—one in which they could, by the force of their material power, bend peasant-poor countries like Cambodia (and Laos and North Vietnam) to their will—rather than reflect the real world they did live in, one in which, try as they might, they had been unable to terrorize weaker nations into submission.6

  * * *

  That Kissinger, along with Nixon, presided over the bombing of Cambodia, and had done so since March of 1969, is now well known. Less so is that the worst of his bombing started in February 1973, a month after Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon signed the Paris Peace Accords. In 1972, the United States dropped, in total, 53,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. Between February 8 and August 15, 1973, that number increased nearly fivefold and targeted not just Vietnamese “sanctuaries” in the country’s east but most of the entire country.

  In other words, Washington dropped almost the same amount of explosives on Cambodia in these six months as it had in the entire previous four years. Think of it as an accelerando climax to Nixon and Kissinger’s epic bombing opera. “We would rather err on the side of doing too much,” Kissinger said to his envoy in Cambodia the day after the escalation began, referring to the bombing, than too little.7 “I see no reason not to really whack the hell out of them in Cambodia,” Nixon said to Kissinger a few days later.8

  The nominal reason for this intensified bombing was the same as it ever was: to save face. The initial secret bombing—Operation Menu—helped create an untenable situation in Cambodia, which led to a 1970 coup that broadened the social base of the insurgency to include not just Khmer Rouge but royalist “Sihanoukists” (supporters of deposed Prince Sihanouk) and other non-Communists. Nixon’s and Kissinger’s solution to this crisis aggravated by their bombing was more bombing, including phosphorous explosives and cluster bombs that each released thousands of either ball bearings or darts. The redoubled carpet bombing of 1973 was meant to force the Khmer Rouge insurgency to the bargaining table, or at least force North Vietnam (which was withdrawing from Cambodia) or China (which had no presence there) to force the Cambodian insurgents to the table. And, as always, there were domestic calculations: bombing Cambodia might distract from the Watergate scandal (the escalation started a week after the Watergate burglary trial ended in the convictions of Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord).

  It didn’t. Congress mandated that the assault end on August 15. Enough, it said. The war in Southeast Asia was over.

  * * *

  The historian Ben Kiernan calls this intensified phase of the bombing a “watershed” in Cambodian history.9 Kiernan is now a professor of history at Yale University and founding director of its Genocide Studies Program. In the 1970s, he learned the Khmer language and interviewed hundreds of Cambodian refugees, including victims and former members of the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan believes, as he told me, that the “cause of the genocide was the decision of Pol Pot’s leadership to conduct it.” As an historian, though, he places that decision within a broader context, a set of necessary conditions that made possible the execution of the decision. The U.S. bombing of Cambodia was a major cause (among others) of, if not the genocide directly, then the massive growth of the Khmer Rouge movement, which when in power conducted the genocide. In the period of the Nixon-Kissinger bombardment, the Khmer Rouge forces increased from about 5,000 in 1969 to more than 200,000 troops and militia in 1973. There were certainly other reasons for this rapid recruitment, including the support received from Sihanouk (itself a result of the U.S.-backed coup against him) and the Vietnamese Communists. But it is hard to deny that one major political effect of the 1969–73 bombing was the rapid spread of the Khmer Rouge insurgency and the increased control of that insurgency by its most radical, paranoid, and murderous faction.

  Based on his interviews, as well as extensive documentary research, including declassified CIA reports and air force bombing data, Kiernan drew the following three conclusions.

  First: The bombing caused “enormous losses” of Cambodian “life and property” on an almost unimaginable scale, across the country. The campaign was indiscriminate, with rural civilians the primary victims. Besides the more than 100,000 Cambodians killed, as many as two million people were forced out of their homes during the war, one-quarter of the country’s population. It’s impossible to read the testimonies taken by Kiernan and others and not be stunned: twenty people killed in one raid, thirty in another, entire families obliterated, hundreds of acres of crops scorched, whole villages destroyed. “They hit houses in Samrong,” one survivor recalls, “and thirty people were killed.” Another said that the “bombing was massive and devastating, and they just kept bombing more and more massively, so massively you couldn’t believe it, so that it engulfed the forests, engulfed the forests with bombs, with devastation.”10

  Second: The bombing was an effective recruitment tool for the Khmer Rouge. Propaganda doesn’t seem like quite the right word, since it implies some form of deception or manipulation. Object lesson might be a better description of the service Kissinger provided to Pol Pot. Here’s a former Khmer Rouge cadre describing the effect of the bombing:

  The ordinary people … sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came.… Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told.… It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them.… Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.

  Another told a journalist that his village had been destroyed by US bombs, as Kiernan reports, “killing 200 of its 350 inhabitants and propelling him into a career of violence and absolute loyalty” to the Khmer Rouge. One elderly woman said she had never met a Khmer Rouge until her village was destroyed. The propaganda was strategic but the fury and confusion real: “The people were angry with the US, and that is why so many of them joined the Khmer communists,” reported one witness. Another said that after the bombs destroyed a number of monasteries, “people in our village were furious with the Americans; they did not know why the Americans h
ad bombed them.”11

  Third: The bombing that took place between February and August 1973 had two consequences, delaying a Communist victory while at the same time radically transforming the nature of that victory when it did come two years later. Had Lon Nol fallen in early or mid-1973, the insurgent victors would have been comprised of diverse factions, including moderates and Sihanouk loyalists. By the time Lon Nol did fall in early 1975, not only had the Khmer Rouge come to dominate the insurgency but the most radical faction had come to dominate the Khmer Rouge.

  Nixon and Kissinger’s intensification of the bombing killed or scattered much of the anti–Lon Nol opposition, driving the insurgency into siege mode and giving the upper hand to a hardened corps of extremists circling around Pol Pot. The bombing sanctioned their extremism: when political-education cadres pointed to charred corpses and limbless children and said this was a “manifestation of simple American barbarism,” who could disagree? And the bombing provoked even greater extremism: in the villages, “people were made angry by the bombing and went to join the revolution,” and so it followed that those who didn’t join the revolution were accused of being “CIA agents” and targeted for reprisal. The destruction of the countryside also prompted a “revival of national chauvinism,” which included anger toward the Vietnamese for abandoning the struggle even as Cambodia was being devastated. Sihanouk supporters, Vietnamese-trained Communists, and other moderates were purged from the opposition forces.