Kissinger’s Shadow

by Greg Grandin

  Then 9/11 happened, producing, among policy and opinion makers, a perfect marriage of strategy (what to do with the Middle East) and sentiment (the stimulant that comes from confronting an existential threat).*

  Kissinger was an early supporter of a bold military response to 9/11. On August 9, 2002, he openly endorsed the policy of “regime change” in Iraq in his syndicated column, acknowledging that such a policy was “revolutionary.” “The notion of justified pre-emption,” he wrote, “runs counter to modern international law.” That revolution is necessary, he argued, because of the novelty of the “terrorist threat,” which “transcends the nation-state.” But, Kissinger said, “there is another, generally unstated, reason for bringing matters to a head with Iraq”: to “demonstrate that a terrorist challenge or a systemic attack on the international order also produces catastrophic consequences for the perpetrators, as well as their supporters.”21 That secular Baathists were the enemies of Islamic jihadists and that Iraq neither perpetrated 9/11 nor supported the perpetrators of 9/11 didn’t enter into the equation. After all, being “right or not is really secondary” to the main issue: being willing to do something.

  Less than three weeks later, on August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney, who during the Ford presidency had repeatedly sidelined Kissinger, laid out his full case for why the United States had to invade Iraq, speaking before the national convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars. “As former Secretary of State Kissinger recently stated,” said Cheney, directly quoting Kissinger’s column, there is “an imperative for pre-emptive action.”22

  Judging from his writings, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon invigorated Kissinger, bringing him close to the neocon position that an external threat might clear away the main obstacle to an effective foreign policy: weak-willed domestic opinion. He did, though, worry that the window of opportunity wouldn’t stay open long. He advised Bush to act fast “while the memory of the attack on the United States is still vivid and American-deployed forces are available to back up the diplomacy.”23

  Kissinger announced that “time is of the essence,” as it always is in such cases. Specifically, in September 2002, he urged the White House to follow up its “success” in Afghanistan by launching what he called “phase two” of a global antiterrorist campaign. The removal of Saddam Hussein from power would be just the beginning of this phase. “The issue is not whether Iraq was involved in the terrorist attack on the United States,” he wrote, brushing away distractions. Rather, he said, the United States needed to “return Iraq to a responsible role in the region.” After that was done, the United States needed to move on to “the destruction of the global terrorist network.” Kissinger identified Somalia and Yemen as possible targets.24

  Kissinger, as he did when he made the case for action in Panama and Kuwait, avoided making moral or idealist arguments to justify what he was now envisioning as global war. But there was no way to launch the kind of expansive, never-ending response he was promoting that wouldn’t have resulted in an inflation of justifications. Recall George H. W. Bush’s “Keystone Kops” stumbling into democracy promotion to validate the quick invasion of Panama, a minor and relatively inconsequential country. What started out as an execution of a warrant for Manuel Noriega’s arrest evolved, within just a few months, into the wild-fire advance of a “great principle,” a “revolutionary idea.” The same inflation occurred in Iraq on a greater scale, especially once it was found that Hussein wasn’t actually hiding weapons of mass destruction.

  * * *

  In 2005, about two and a half years after the United States attacked Iraq, Michael Gerson, Bush’s speechwriter, went to visit Kissinger in New York.25 This was after Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, after the Blackwater massacres and the torture, after it became clear that the real beneficiary of the US invasion of Iraq would be revolutionary Iran, after revelations about cooking the intelligence and manipulating the press in order to neutralize opposition to the invasion. It was that strange, surreal moment when public support for the war was plummeting and Bush’s justifications for waging the war were expanding. America’s “responsibility,” Bush announced earlier that year at his second inaugural address, was to “rid the world of evil.”

  Gerson helped write that speech and he asked Kissinger what he thought of it. “At first I was appalled,” Kissinger said, but then he came to appreciate it for instrumental reasons. “On reflection,” as Bob Woodward recounted the conversation in State of Denial, Kissinger “now believed the speech served a purpose and was a very smart move, setting the war on terror and overall U.S. foreign policy in the context of American values. That would help sustain a long campaign.” Means and ends. Ends and means. Realism to idealism and back again.

  Kissinger, at that meeting, gave Gerson a copy of an infamous memo he wrote for Nixon in 1969 and asked him to pass it along to Bush. “Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public,” Kissinger warned Nixon. “The more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded.” Don’t get caught in that trap, Kissinger told Gerson, for once withdrawals start, it will become “harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers.”

  Kissinger then reminisced about Vietnam, reminding Gerson that incentives offered through negotiations needed to be backed up by credible threats—and that for the former to be effective the latter had to be unrestrained. He recounted one of the many “major” ultimatums he gave to the North Vietnamese, warning of the “dire consequences” they would face if they didn’t make the concessions needed for the United States to withdraw from Vietnam with honor. They didn’t.

  “I didn’t have enough power,” Kissinger said.

  EPILOGUE

  Kissingerism without Kissinger

  Men become myths.

  —Henry Kissinger, 1954

  Henry Kissinger ended his latest book, World Order, published in 2014, on a note of humility. “Long ago, in youth,” its very last paragraph reads, “I was brash enough to think myself able to pronounce on ‘The Meaning of History.’ I now know that history’s meaning is a matter to be discovered, not declared. It is a question we must attempt to answer as best we can in recognition that it will remain open to debate.” Elegiac and vaguely rueful, it’s an evocative coda to this book—and to his career. Kissinger is ninety-two.

  But Kissinger here is feigning a recantation of something that he is in fact affirming. Few readers would have recognized the allusion to his undergraduate thesis; fewer still would know of the author’s immersion in German metaphysics. So they would not have recognized that Kissinger was describing himself as having humbly grown into agnosticism when in fact Kissinger has been agnostic about history’s meaning at least since his early twenties. The driving argument of his thesis was exactly to insist that the meaning of history wasn’t to be “declared” but to be “discovered” and that our freedom as conscious beings depends on the recognition that history has no predetermined meaning, a recognition that in turn allows us to carve out more room to maneuver, just a bit more freedom. “The riddle of time opens up for Man, not to be classified as a category of Reason as Kant attempted,” he wrote in youth and seems to believe still in age. “Time represents a denotation for something inconceivable. It expresses itself in the eternal becoming.” “History discloses a majestic unfolding,” and the only meaning it holds is the meaning “inherent in the nature of our query,” the questions we, in our solitude, put to the past.

  Kissinger here, his plaintive endnote notwithstanding, isn’t offering an autumnal apologia. The book admits no mistakes and claims no responsibility for his part in rallying the nation to invade Iraq. He downplays his role as an informal consultant to George W. Bush and Bush’s foreign policy team, omitting that he met regularly with Dick Cheney and that, in 2005, he wrote that “victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.”1 There is no discussion of the long-term effects of his Middle East policies: yoking Wash
ington to Riyadh; his bolstering of Pakistani intelligence, which in turn cultivated the jihad; his playing off Iraq and the Kurds; and then, as a private citizen after the fall of the shah, his cheerleading as Iranians and Iraqis slaughtered each other.

  Kissinger remains consistent that one shouldn’t look to history to find the causes of present problems or the origins of blowback. Too much information about the past makes for paralysis. As Bush’s hawkish ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, recently said, past decisions are “irrelevant to the circumstances we face now.” What is relevant is how we act to contain the current threat. “If we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago,” Dick Cheney insists, “we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face.” “I won’t talk about the past,” Jeb Bush said, when asked if he would address his brother’s foreign policy if he ran for the presidency himself. “I’ll talk about the future.” Never let yesterday’s catastrophes get in the way of tomorrow’s actions. Rather than learning from the past to understand the present, Kissinger still sees the primary function of history as a way to imagine the future: maybe some combination of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and the 1815 Congress of Vienna, he suggests, would be a good fusion model to contain Islam and balance power among competitive allies. “Words of wisdom,” said Nicholas Burns, a former diplomat and Bush official and now Harvard professor.

  Kissinger’s reputation, since he left office in 1977, has had its ups and downs. The early 1990s were good years, as Bill Clinton, a Democrat, embraced him. The two men had their differences over military policy but they agreed on economics, particularly the need to push through the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Kissinger, unofficially, helped negotiate.2 The former statesman was, writes the economist Jeff Faux, “the perfect tutor for a new Democratic president trying to convince Republicans and their business allies that they could count on him to champion Reagan’s vision.”3 But then later in the decade, Pol Pot’s death and Pinochet’s arrest in London stirred old ghosts, reminding the public of Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia and Chile. Shortly after, Christopher Hitchens published a best-selling indictment of Kissinger, calling for his prosecution as a war criminal.

  9/11 drew Kissinger close to the George W. Bush administration. He was even named by Bush to be the chair of the official investigation into the attacks. But a number of 9/11 widows were suspicious of Kissinger Associates’ business dealings with the gulf kingdom, believing Saudi Arabia to be a sponsor of Al Qaeda. Kissinger met with a delegation of widows as a courtesy but was “stunned” when they insisted he reveal the names of his clients, according to one of the widows present at the encounter. “He seemed stricken and became unsteady,” spilling his coffee, which he blamed on a bad eye.4 (Kissinger’s “client list” has been one of the most sought-after documents in Washington since at least 1989, when Senator Jesse Helms unsuccessfully demanded to see it before he would consider confirming Brent Scowcroft as the head of the NSC and Lawrence Eagleburger as deputy secretary of state. “We can look at [the list] up in the secure room of the fourth floor of the Capitol,” Helms said, to no avail.)5 The day after meeting with the widows, Kissinger resigned from the commission.

  In 2004, a federal judge dismissed, on jurisdictional grounds, a lawsuit filed against him by the family of a Chilean military officer who was killed in an attempted kidnapping that Kissinger helped organize. Kissinger’s public standing once again rebounded.6 There are still rumors that he can’t travel to this or that country out of fear that he would be arrested, but with Hitchens’s death in 2011, Kissinger outlived one of his most relentless critics.

  More recently, Hillary Clinton’s review of World Order in the Washington Post must have been satisfying. Earlier, as a law student at Yale in the spring semester of 1970 (a year before she met Bill Clinton), Hillary Rodham was at the center of what she called “the Yale-Cambodia madness,” a series of protests that started around the “New Haven Nine” Black Panther trial but escalated when Nixon, on April 30, announced the invasion of Cambodia. On May 1, the day after Nixon’s speech, a 2006 article in the Yale Alumni Magazine recounts, “Vietcong flags filled the air; gas masks were distributed. Streaming banners and impromptu chants abounded: ‘Seize the Time!’ ‘End U.S. imperialism around the world!’”7

  Whatever Hillary Clinton might then have felt about Kissinger’s war on Cambodia, she has made her peace. In her review, Clinton admitted that “Kissinger is a friend,” that she “relied on his counsel,” and that he “checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.” The “famous realist,” she said, “sounds surprisingly idealistic.” Kissinger’s vision is her vision: “just and liberal.”8

  * * *

  No former national security adviser or secretary of state has wielded, after leaving office, as much influence as has Kissinger, and not just with his advocacy for increasingly spectacular shows of military strength. Especially after the Reaganites gave up the White House to George H. W. Bush, who appointed many of Kissinger’s close allies to top foreign policy posts, Kissinger, through Kissinger Associates, became a global power broker. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he acted as a shadow emissary to China, lunched with Mexico’s president to get what became Nafta moving, boxed “isolationists” like Jeane Kirkpatrick into a corner to provide intellectual support for neoconservative internationalism, and consulted with Latin American governments on how best to privatize their industries.

  Detractors have criticized Kissinger for having used the contacts he made as a government official as a private consultant. Others have said that his consultancy work is a conflict of interest with his influence as an opinion maker (not only did Kissinger, until recently, appear regularly on network and cable shows, he has sat on the boards of major news corporations).9 Another criticism is that Kissinger Associates has profited from the consequences of Kissinger’s foreign policies. In 1975, for example, Kissinger, as secretary of state, worked with Union Carbide to set up its chemical plant in Bhopal, India, working with the Indian government and helping secure a loan from the Export-Import Bank of the United States to cover a major portion of the plant’s construction.10 Then, after the plant’s 1989 chemical leak disaster, Kissinger Associates represented Union Carbide, helping to broker, in 1989, a $470 million out-of-court settlement for victims of the spill. The payout was widely condemned as paltry in relation to the scale of the disaster.11 The spill caused nearly four thousand immediate deaths and exposed another half million people to toxic gases. In Latin America and Eastern Europe, Kissinger Associates also profited from what one of its consultants called the “massive sale” of public utilities and industries, a sell-off that, in many countries, was initiated by Kissinger-supported dictators and military regimes.12

  And then there is the odd role Kissinger continues to play in this country’s foreign policy debate, with defense intellectuals and journalists regularly penning essays reconsidering Kissinger’s legacy and prescribing a neo-Kissingerian tonic for today’s troubles, though they have trouble defining what exactly such a policy would look like. Often Kissingerism is defined in negative terms. It’s not the reckless adventurism of the neocons (though, as I’ve tried to show, it actually is). And it’s not Barack Obama’s pragmatic overcorrection, a foreign policy that mistakes power for purpose (though, again, Kissinger himself did exactly that). That Kissingerism is so hard to pin down is, I think, an effect of Kissingerism, of Kissinger’s rehabilitation of the national security state and the relentless militarism that goes with it. Constant, unending war—be it fought with neocon zealotry or Obama’s dronelike efficiency—has done more than coarsened thought and morality. It has brought about a “semantic collapse,” a dissociation of words and things, belief and action, in which ethics are unmoored from their foundation and abstractions are transmuted into their opposite: in Clinton’s review of Kissinger’s last book, “idealists” are “realists” and everybody is a “lib
eral”—and Henry Kissinger is our avatar.

  At this point in his life, however, Kissinger is as much pure affect as he is power broker. The gestures Clinton mentioned in her review—I rely on his counsel; he checks in with me and gives me reports from his travels—are ceremonial, meant to bestow gravitas.* Kissinger himself has become the demonstrative effect, whatever substance there was eroded by the constant confusion of ends and means, the churn of power to create purpose and purpose defined as the ability to project power. Evidence continues to mount that his diplomacy was, on its own terms, a failure; cables continue to be released that show his callousness in the face of, and often his complicity in, mass atrocities. “Fired by the discovery of some factual error,” the intellectual historian Stuart Hughes wrote of Oswald Spengler’s critics, “they have dashed off to meet him on a field of battle where he never had the slightest intention of putting in an appearance.” Kissinger, too, enjoys some sort of Spenglerian immunity. Neither fact, reason, nor all those declassified documents revealing sordid doings of one kind or another can touch him. Just four days after he wrote his August 2002 column urging Bush to quickly take “pre-emptive action” to bring about “regime change” in Iraq, the Times ran an article citing Kissinger as a realist gadfly to the neocons’ dream of toppling Hussein, in an article headlined “Top Republicans Break with Bush on War Strategy.”13 Kissinger, it seems, can simultaneously be himself and his negation. Talk about unity of opposites.

  It’s not all spectacle though. There are a few skeptical reporters around who, occasionally, pierce the facade, usually by bringing up either Chile or Cambodia. One is Todd Zwillich, who in 2014 did an hour-long interview with Kissinger for NPR’s The Takeaway. Kissinger was largely on autopilot for the first half of the discussion, giving his opinions on the world’s hot spots. But he was caught off guard when Zwillich brought up the 1973 coup in Chile. The former secretary of state tried to deflect: “Let me tell you something here—it’s an issue that our audience cannot possibly know much about. This happened over 40 years ago.” “With all due respect to you,” Kissinger told Zwillich, “it’s not an appropriate subject.” But the host kept pushing the question, leading Kissinger to cite Obama’s efforts to overthrow Assad in Syria and his ouster of Gaddafi in Libya to validate his actions in Chile.