Kissinger’s Shadow

by Greg Grandin

  22.  For Pickering’s remarks, see Jordan Michael Smith, “Noriega’s Revenge,” Foreign Policy (December 19, 2009).

  23.  Richard Fagen, “The United States and Chile,” Foreign Affairs, January 1975.

  24.  The contradiction in denying sovereignty to other nations while claiming it for one’s own is obvious. But the contradiction can be managed as long as the double standard is justified, as Kissinger prefers, by the interests of state, by the need to establish international legitimacy and stability (and that justification, as we have seen, need not be considered amoral: a greater good can be achieved when great powers are allowed to create an orderly, stable, and peaceful interstate system). Problems emerge once denial of sovereignty is sanctioned by “democracy” and “human rights.” The idea that there exists a “universal jurisdiction” of justice that trumps national sovereignty, as Einaudi lectured Latin Americans, opens up a Pandora’s box, a threat that Kissinger immediately recognized: Kissinger supported the invasion of Panama to overthrow Noriega but objected to the “legality of the present legal proceedings” against Noriega in the United States. “I have some question whether you can try a foreign leader under American law for acts he didn’t commit on American soil.” It was an interesting question, said Kissinger, and it was indeed. Captured by the US military, Noriega was illegally transferred to the United States (Washington had no extradition treaty with Panama to justify the removal of Noriega), put on trial in Miami in April 1992 in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and convicted in September for drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering—crimes that he committed prior to Panama’s being “at war” with the United States. In 1998, the principle of “universal jurisdiction” advanced again when the British detained Augusto Pinochet in response to a Spanish extradition request, for crimes committed against Spanish citizens in Chile. This action moved Kissinger to write an essay in Foreign Affairs (July/August 2001) defending his old ally, titled “The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction.” “The ideological supporters of universal jurisdiction,” Kissinger wrote, want to “criminalize certain types of military and political actions and thereby bring about a more humane conduct of international relations.” It was a “dangerous precedent,” he wrote, referring to efforts to extradite former leaders. The essay reads like a brief for his own defense, for just two months after it was published, on September 10, 2001, the children of Chilean general René Schneider filed a suit in federal court in Washington charging Kissinger and cohorts with “summary execution” of their father. Judge Rosemary Collyer, a former Reagan administration official appointed to the bench by George W. Bush, dismissed the suit on technical and jurisdictional grounds, including upholding the defense’s argument that since Kissinger was acting as the national security adviser of the United States, the proper defendant of the suit would be the United States government, and the United States, based on the doctrine of sovereign immunity, is exempt from such suits. Since then, however, other countries have opened legal investigations of Kissinger’s activities. Returning to the case of Noriega, Kissinger’s protégé Scowcroft was also opposed to the idea of putting the Panamanian leader on trial, for much the same reason as Kissinger was: “In the late Reagan administration, Noriega was indicted, which I thought was a strange way to behave. I thought that the United States indicting foreign officials, over whom we had no jurisdiction, was really an aberration. So I didn’t take that very seriously. President Bush did. He kept mentioning the indictment of Noriega, and I kept saying, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t do that. You have no jurisdiction. It’s a foreign official. They’re unindictable anyway.’” Noriega is still in prison, now in Panama, having completed his term in the United States and then, on different charges, in France. For Scowcroft, see his interview cited earlier. For Kissinger’s opinion of Noriega’s transfer to the United States, see “Soviets Intervened on Autonomy Issue, Kissinger Suggests,” The Globe and Mail, January 26, 1990.

  11: DARKNESS INTO LIGHT

     1.  For the Tanter remark, see his Rogue Regimes (1990), p. 48.

     2.  “Conservatives Are Leading Murmurs of Dissent,” Washington Post, August 24, 1990.

     3.  “Doves Grow Talons in Cold War About-Face,” Australian Financial Review, August 23, 1990. For the Kirkpatrick essay mentioned in the footnote, see “A Normal Country in a Normal Time,” The National Interest (September 1990).

     4.  “US Has Crossed Its Mideast Rubicon—and Cannot Afford to Lose,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1990.

     5.  “Confrontation in the Gulf,” New York Times, August 13, 1990.

     6.  Ibid.

     7.  “If you look at the United States in the postwar world,” Kissinger told a reporter a few years after the first Gulf War, “we always stopped military actions too soon.” At this point, he sounded less like America’s top diplomat emeritus and more like a disappointed tourist: “We didn’t go to Hanoi, we didn’t go to Pyongyang, we didn’t go to Baghdad.” “I personally thought,” he said, “we should have forced the overthrow of Saddam.” Georgie Anne Geyer, “Should the U.S.-Led Coalition Have Driven on to Baghdad?,” Denver Post, October 16, 1994. For the quotation in the text, see “The President and His Hasty Hawks,” New York Times, August 22, 1990.

     8.  General John Brown, introduction, Operation Just Cause (2004), p. 3.

     9.  John Mueller, Public Opinion in the Gulf War (1994), p. 162.

  10.  CBS Evening News, January 17, 1991 (transcript available via LexisNexis).

  11.  CBS Evening News, January 18, 1991 (transcript available via LexisNexis).

  12.  March 1, 1991, Remarks to the American Legislative Exchange Council; available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=19351.

  13.  “Right Fears Bush May Have Gone Too Far,” Guardian, August 20, 1990.

  14.  Quoted in, among other places, John Dower, Cultures of War (2011), p. 92.

  15.  “Attack on Iraq,” New York Times, December 17, 1998.

  16.  “Deep Scars Are Expected in Senate Hearings,” New York Times, February 3, 1997.

  17.  Nomination of Anthony Lake to Be Director of Central Intelligence, Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate (1998); Anthony Lewis, “Again, Scoundrel Time,” New York Times, March 21, 1997.

  18.  “The Paris Agreement on Vietnam: Twenty-Five Years Later,” conference transcript, Nixon Center, Washington, DC, April 1998; available at https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/paris.htm.

  19.  In Present Dangers (2000), ed. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, p. 311.

  20.  William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy (July–August 1996).

  21.  Published widely through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International; available at http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/The-Politics-of-Intervention-Iraq-regime-2784793.ph.

  22.  Transcript available at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0208/26/se.01.html.

  23.  “Phase II and Iraq,” Washington Post, January 13, 2002; available at http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp011302.html.

  24.  “Phase II and Iraq.”

  25.  The following meeting of Gerson and Kissinger is recounted in Bob Woodward, State of Denial (2007), pp. 408–10.

  EPILOGUE: KISSINGERISM WITHOUT KISSINGER

     1.  Henry Kissinger, “Lessons for an Exit Strategy,” Washington Post, August 12, 2005.

     2.  Kissinger had started taking an active role in bringing the various parties who would write that trade treaty together during the George H. W. Bush administration. And all of Kissinger’s allies in the White House, including Mack McLarty, who would soon join Kissinger Associates, pushed Clinton to prioritize Nafta over the health care legislation that Hillary Clinton was working on. It was Kissinger wh
o came up with the idea of having past presidents stand behind Clinton as he signed the treaty. Reagan was sick and Nixon still non grata, but “flanked by former presidents Bush, Carter and Ford at a White House ceremony, Mr. Clinton delivered an impassioned speech,” the Wall Street Journal reported. No such presidential backdrop was assembled to help support Hillary Clinton’s health care proposal, which by August 1994 was dead.

     3.  Jeff Faux, The Global Class War (2010), p. 21.

     4.  Kristen Breitweiser, Wake-Up Call: The Political Education of a 9/11 Widow (2006), pp. 137–40.

     5.  “Kissinger’s Client List Sought,” USA Today, March 16, 1989.

     6.  “Second-guessing the methods by which the Executive Branch chose to deal with a new Socialist regime in Chile in the 1970s vis a vis their effect on foreign citizens,” Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in her opinion, “is not the proper role of this Court.” It would be impossible for the court, she said, to “measure and balance a myriad of thorny foreign and domestic political considerations, i.e., the magnitude of any threat to the United States and its democratic allies from the spread of Marxism to Chile. The Court lacks judicially discoverable and manageable standards to resolve these inherently political questions.” And besides, since Kissinger was acting as the national security adviser of the United States, the proper defendant of the suit would be the United States government, and the United States, based on the doctrine of sovereign immunity, is exempt from such suits.

     7.  Paul Bass and Doug Rae, “The Story of May Day 1970,” Yale Alumni Magazine (July–August 2006).

     8.  “Hillary Clinton Reviews Henry Kissinger’s World Order,” Washington Post, September 4, 2014.

     9.  For conflicts of interest, see “Henry Kissinger’s Entangling Ties,” New York Times, December 3, 2002; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, “Henry Kissinger: The Walking, Talking Conflict of Interest,” October 31, 1989 (http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/henry-kissinger/); “Tricky World of Mr. Kissinger,” Orlando Sentinel, September 20, 1989; for conflicts of interest regarding his lobbying on Chinese and Latin American Policy, see Isaacson, Kissinger, 746–48.

  10.  For Kissinger’s 1975 support, see the cables released by WikiLeaks, including (1) February 4, 1975, cable from Delhi embassy to State Department detailing Union Carbide’s avoidance of Indian funding and corporate structure requirements for foreign subsidiaries; (2) August 22, 1975, cable from Delhi requesting review of Union Carbide’s loan application; (3) September 11, 1975, cable from Kissinger about review of Union Carbide loan application; (4) September 25, 1975, US ambassador indicates Union Carbide negotiations as one of the “success stories” in US government’s campaign to weaken regulations on foreign investment in India; (5) November 18, 1975, cable from Kissinger to Delhi embassy detailing approval of and content of Eximbank loan to Union Carbide ($1,260,000 credit covering 45 percent of plant’s construction costs); and (6) January 6, 1976, cable from Kissinger to Delhi indicating terms of the approved loan and the $2.8 million in US goods and services Union Carbide will purchase to construct the Bhopal plant. The above cables can be found at https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975NEWDE01606_b.html; https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975NEWDE11369_b.html; https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975STATE216298_b.html; https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975NEWDE12918_b.html; https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975STATE272385_b.html; and https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976STATE001679_b.html.

  11.  For Kissinger’s role in brokering the settlement, see the 1988 letter obtained by the environmental reporter Rob Edwards, found here: http://www.downtoearth.org.in/dte/userfiles/images/JRD-Tata-letter-to-PM-May-31,-1988.jpg. The New York Times reports that Kissinger’s firm had an account with Union Carbide (“Nominee for Deputy Post at State Is Challenged on Consulting Ties,” March 16, 1989).

  12.  In Argentina, Kissinger Associates helped implement the economic policies that led to that country’s 2002 collapse (Eagleburger advised the Argentine Economy Ministry’s team); elsewhere, it actively lobbied against “protectionism,” urging Latin American nations to lower tariffs and subsidies, in a way helping to implement what Kissinger in his 1980 speech at the Republican National Convention said should be US policy. “Privatisation Groundswell,” Australian Financial Review, June 7, 1990; “Argentina’s Big-Name, High-Dollar Advocates,” Washington Post, April 11, 2002.

  13.  August 6, 2002.

  14.  http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/transcript-kissinger-talks-isis-confronts-his-history-chile-cambodia/.

  15.  In Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, p. 24.

  16.  “The Myth of the Terrorist Safe Haven,” Foreign Policy, January 26, 2015.

  17.  Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (1973), p. 215.

  18.  The Bryan Times, June 2, 1970.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I mentioned to friends and colleagues that I was writing a book about the legacy of Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy, many often made mention of Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger. I think then that here would be the place to point out that I see my interest in Kissinger as somewhat antithetical to Hitchens’s 2001 polemic. The Trial of Henry Kissinger is a good example of what the great historian Charles Beard, in 1936, dismissed as a “devil theory of war,” which blames militarism on a single, isolatable cause: a “wicked man.” To really understand the sources of conflict, Beard said, you had to look at the big picture, to consider the way “war is our own work,” emerging out of “the total military and economic situation.” In making the case that Kissinger should be tried—and convicted—for war crimes, Hitchens didn’t look at the big picture. Instead he focused obsessively on the morality of one man, his devil: Henry Kissinger. It must have been a fun book to write, giving the author the satisfaction of playing the people’s prosecutor. Yet aside from assembling the docket and gathering the accused’s wrongdoing in one place, The Trial of Henry Kissinger is not very useful and is actually counterproductive; righteous indignation doesn’t provide much room for understanding. Hitchens burrows deep into Kissinger’s dark heart, leaving readers waiting for him to come out and tell us what it all means. That is, besides the obvious: Kissinger is a criminal. But Hitchens never does. In the end, we learn more about the prosecutor than the would-be prosecuted. The book provides no insights into the “total situation” in which Kissinger operated and makes no effort to explain the power of his ideas or how those ideas tapped into deeper intellectual currents within American history. Hitchens depicts Kissinger as a ravager of American values, so out of place in his adopted democratic land it was as if Wagner had wandered into a production of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, muscled the baton from the conductor, and added a little Götterdämmerung to the square dances and fiddles.

  Hitchens is by far the most damning of Kissinger’s chroniclers, but he is not alone in missing the point. Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn’t about Kissinger. He is such an outsized figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings. Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, published in 1983, did capture the secretive world of the national security apparatus as it was functioning during the Vietnam War, and his study of Kissinger’s paranoia reads like a (somewhat innocent) prelude to the all-pervading surveillance and counterterrorism state we now live under. But Hersh, writing in the early 1980s, couldn’t know the long-term effects—not only of specific policies but of how Kissinger’s imperial existentialism enabled a later generation of militarists who, in the 1990s, took us, after a quick detour through Central America and Panama, deeper into the Gulf, and then, after 9/11, into Afghanistan and Iraq. Kissinger’s Shadow.

  Friends, family, and colleagues helped with this book, including reading all or parts of
the manuscript, answering questions, assisting with the research, or just talking about the topic. I owe a large debt to Marilyn Young, Ben Kiernan, Bob Wheeler, Carolyn Eisenberg, Chase Madar, Corey Robin, Jim Peck, David Barreda, Matt Hausmann, Cos Tollerson, Rachel Nolan, Christy Thornton, Barbara Weinstein, Philip Gourevitch, Ada Ferrer, Sinclair Thomson, Josh Frens-String, Maureen Linker, Kate Doyle, Esther Kaplan, Nick Arons, Richard Kim, Roane Carey, Jean Stein, Katrina van den Heuvel, Tom Hayden, Arno Mayer, Bev Gage, Chris Dietrich, Kirsten Weld, Peter Kornbluh, Susan Rabiner, Mario del Pero (for his helpful book on Kissinger, The Eccentric Realist), Mark Healey, Ernesto Semán, Tannia Goswami, and Toshi Goswami.

  I don’t know if there is a devil theory of publishing, but there should be, for Sara Bershtel explains it all. Or at least she does for me. Sara’s intense reading and much needed skepticism turned a jumble of a manuscript (“I think you are saying something important,” she remarked about the first draft, “I just don’t understand what it is.”) into a passable finished product. Thank you. Thanks also to all the others at Metropolitan Books, including Connor Guy, Roslyn Schloss, Riva Hocherman, Maggie Richards, and Grigory Tovbis.

  This book is for Manu Goswami and Eleanor Goswami Grandin. Eleanor will be three when it is published.

  INDEX

  The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Abrams, Creighton

  Abu Ghraib

  Afghanistan; Soviet war in; U.S. war in