Kissinger’s Shadow

by Greg Grandin

  * Kissinger’s State Department arranged safe transit for Lon Nol out of the country and gave him half a million dollars in compensation: “We helped to arrange the transfer of $500,000,” said one State official, though “Nol wanted one million.” (See interview with Robert Keeley, in Cambodia: Country Reader, compiled by the Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training; available at http://www.adst.org/Readers/Cambodia.pdf.)

  * Eight months after their takeover of Phnom Penh, as late as November 1975, by which time he had been fully briefed on the extent of Khmer Rouge atrocities, Kissinger asked Thailand’s foreign minister to relay them a message: “You should tell the Cambodians [i.e., the Khmer Rouge regime] that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.”

  * On this point, Kissinger is unrepentant: he argues that “Cambodia was taken over by a homicidal clique primarily because Americans subordinated the country’s survival to their own domestic drama.” Only with this term, Americans, he means the domestic political pressure to stop the bombing—not his own instrumentalization of the terror to demonstrate his loyalty to Nixon and his toughness to Haig.

  * Kissinger agreed, writing in 1950 that “purely analytical criticism of Spengler will, however, never discover the profounder levels of his philosophy. These reside in the evocation of those elements of life that will ever be the subject of an inner experience, in his intuition of a mystic relationship to the infinite that expresses personality. Spengler’s vision encompassed an approach to history which—whatever our opinion of his conclusions—transcended the mere causal analysis of data and the shallow dogmatisms of many progress theories.” Spengler’s “poetry in life” is immune, Kissinger insisted, to criticism based on reason.

  * All political speeches, especially ones given at presidential nominating conventions, are partisan, but Kissinger’s remarks at the 1980 Republican Convention are notable for two reasons. First, they mimic nearly perfectly Reagan’s attacks on him four years earlier. Kissinger sounds like a movement-conservative critic of Kissinger, excoriating policies that have made America “impotent,” saying that the Soviets can’t be trusted, and denouncing a “philosophy of abdication.” Once again, Kissinger, as he did in the 1950s (and Reagan and Team B did in 1976), invoked a nonexistent missile gap. “We are falling behind,” he said, endorsing Reagan’s proposal to dramatically increase defense spending. Secondly, Kissinger’s litany of complaints against the Carter administration read like a roll call of the consequences of his policies: revolution in Iran, Cuban troops in Africa, high oil prices and America’s “dependence” on Gulf producers, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were all problems that were, if not created, then certainly worsened by Kissinger’s initiatives. Just as in the 1950s Kissinger urged Washington not to flinch in fighting little wars in the world’s gray areas, here he was again telling America to “prepare” itself “for battle” in what Kissinger called the “developing world.” This time he was more frank about the motive. Perhaps wanting to hold on to some distinction between his worldview and the heavy-handed moralism on display at the convention, he said: “to guarantee our access to vital minerals and raw materials.”

  * The Iran-Contra scandal, which became public in 1986 and nearly brought down the Reagan administration, was an important step in the reformation of the national security state. The scandal was about many things, centering on the illegal triangle trade by which the United States sold high-tech missiles to Iran’s ayatollahs and then used the money to fund anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua. But its overarching motivation was to figure out how to counteract the cynicism and antimilitarism that had infected America’s political institutions. Based in the National Security Council, Oliver North ran a shadow foreign policy, establishing unaccountable sources of funding, bypassing the State Department, dodging Congress, and running domestic psych-ops to neutralize the press and skeptical public opinion. But before there was Oliver North, there was Henry Kissinger. His reorganization of the NSC in 1969 entailed transforming it from an office whose responsibility was primarily to advise the president into a body that made and executed decisions. Jimmy Carter reversed much of this, returning authority back to the Department of State. But, as Harold Koh argues, Kissinger’s precedent was crucial. Koh, a professor of law at Yale University and a former State Department official, writes that Kissinger’s NSC provided the blueprint for Reagan’s militarists: Iran-Contra, Koh argues, “only brought full circle an inversion of institutional responsibility” that Kissinger orchestrated in the late 1960s. And Kissinger’s covert war in Angola rehearsed many of the tactics that would be deployed in Iran-Contra, including the use of proxy countries and the running of propaganda campaigns within the United States to neutralize the post-Vietnam “adversary culture.” As Koh’s remark suggests, it is important not to isolate Iran-Contra as its own isolated conspiracy. To do so, would be to miss two of its key elements. The first is the way it really was just one phase in the evolution of the national security state. The second is how Iran-Contra was part of Reagan’s broader push to restart the Cold War in the Third World. In 1993, for instance, a yearlong Senate inquiry turned up what one investigator called a “precursor to Iran-Contra, an illegal, off-the-shelf operation involving the NSC and private funds just like Iran-Contra”—a covert plan, drawn up as early as March 1981, to “roll back communism worldwide by aiding resistance forces in Afghanistan, Cuba, Grenada, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Cambodia and Laos.” Laos in particular was an early focus; there, a “Reagan administration official secretly used donations from POW-MIA groups to arm and supply Laotian rebels in the early 1980s. It “sounds like a dry run” for Iran-Contra, said Jack Blum, a former investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (“Report Says Reagan Aide Sent POW Funds to Rebels,” Washington Post, January 14, 1993; “Probe Links ‘Reagan Doctrine’ to Covert Aid to Laos Rebels,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 1993). The report is published as United States Senate, Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. POW/MIA’s. Special Report 103-1 (1993).

  * Secretary of State George Shultz bristled at Kissinger’s framing Central American policy along these lines, especially Kissinger’s suggestion that if the Sandinista government in Nicaragua was identified as a problem, then there should be no limit to the support the White House might give to the Contras: “Henry Kissinger, I guess, argues that we either have to give up or declare nuclear war.”

  * On April 14, 1986, the Reagan administration launched an air strike on Libya, in response to Libya’s involvement in the April 5 bombing of a Berlin nightclub, which killed two US soldiers and one Turkish civilian. Secretary of State George Shultz said the US strike was “measured” and “proportionate” to Libya’s crime (US planes hit a number of residential buildings, killing an estimated fifteen civilians. Muammar Gaddafi’s daughter was also reportedly killed). To justify the reprisal, Shultz cited article 51 of the United Nations charter, which grants nations the right to “self-defense.” A nation, Shultz said, “attacked by terrorists is permitted to use force to prevent or preempt future attacks.” It was a generous interpretation of the doctrine of self-defense (the United States wasn’t attacked by Libya; rather, two of its soldiers were killed in Germany) which most legal scholars at the time disagreed with. Jimmy Carter’s former White House counsel, Lloyd Cutler, tried to capture the administration’s logic: “As a superpower with global responsibilities, if our forces are attacked in another country, you can construe it as an attack on our territory.” The day after the US strike, Kissinger appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America to voice his “total support” of the raid. Attacking Libya, he said, was “correct” and “necessary.” Asked if he was worried about a backlash—increased radicalization, reprisals, or a boost to Gaddafi’s stature—he answered: “The question is whose endurance is greater. I believe ours is.” The bombing would, Kissinger said, “reduce the i
ncidents of terrorism.” Kissinger was also asked what he thought of Reagan’s rhetoric. The president had called Gaddafi a “mad dog.” “President Reagan has,” Kissinger said, “his own exuberant way of communicating with the American public.” “Sixty percent of the public agrees with him,” Kissinger noted (Good Morning America, April 15, 1986, video available at Vanderbilt University Television News Archive; Washington Post, April 15, 1986). A case can be made that Shultz’s invocation of article 51 was both a vindication of the logic of Kissinger’s secret bombing of Cambodia—often justified by Kissinger as self-defense—and a preview of the Authorization to Use Military Force, passed overwhelmingly by the House and Senate on September 14, 2001, which sanctioned not just the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq but the open-ended Global War on Terrorism. There is, today, no part of the earth that cannot be considered “our territory.”

  * Here’s one account of Kissinger’s diverse activities in the late 1980s: “He makes about 20 speeches a year and charges $20,000 for each. Shearson Lehman pays him over $500,000 a year for four luncheon speeches and ad hoc advice. His own company, Kissinger Associates—high-income, low-profile, containing only a handful of specialists—brings in an estimated $5 million in revenues from consulting. Kissinger’s former associates, for whom he is mentor, riddle the Bush administration. The deputy Secretary of State, Mr Lawrence Eagleburger, took the position fresh from working for Kissinger Associates. Eagleburger, the Administration’s East-West guru, declared an income of $916,989 last year, solely from his work with Kissinger. General Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s National Security Adviser, was a deputy to Kissinger in the Nixon administration, a loyal follower and a founder of Kissinger Associates” (“Resurrected and Visible,” Australian Financial Review, October 13, 1989).

  * US forces were in and out (with their prisoner Noriega) relatively fast, making Operation Just Cause one of the most successful military actions in US history. At least in tactical terms. There were casualties. More than twenty US soldiers were killed and three to five hundred Panamanian combatants died as well. Disagreement exists over how many civilians perished. In the “low hundreds,” the Pentagon’s Southern Command said. But others charged that US officials didn’t bother to count the dead in El Chorrillo, a poor Panama City barrio that US planes indiscriminately bombed because it was thought to be a bastion of support for Noriega. Grassroots human rights organizations claimed thousands of civilians were killed and tens of thousands displaced. As Human Rights Watch wrote, even conservative estimates of civilian fatalities suggested “that the rule of proportionality and the duty to minimize harm to civilians … were not faithfully observed by the invading U.S. forces.” That may have been putting it mildly when it came to the indiscriminate bombing of a civilian population. Civilians were given no notice. The Cobra and Apache helicopters that came over the ridge didn’t announce their pending arrival by blasting Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” The University of Panama’s seismograph marked 442 major explosions in the first twelve hours of the invasion, about one major bomb blast every two minutes. Fires engulfed the mostly wooden homes, destroying about four thousand buildings. Some residents began to call El Chorrillo “Guernica” or “little Hiroshima.” Shortly after hostilities ended, bulldozers excavated mass graves and shoveled in the bodies. “Buried like dogs,” said the mother of one of the civilian dead.

  * This quotation might be apocryphal. But Raymond Tanter, who served on the National Security Council, writes that at a foreign-policy briefing meeting for Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan, in October 1980, attended by Kissinger, Kissinger remarked that “the continuation of fighting between Iran and Iraq was in the American interest.”

  * In an essay written before Iraq’s invasion (but published subsequently in the National Interest), Kirkpatrick even suggested that the United States, with the Cold War over, might “again become a normal nation—and take care of pressing problems of education, family, industry and technology.” Peter Beinart, in The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, details the attacks of a younger, more bellicose group of neoconservatives led by figures such as Charles Krauthammer and Paul Wolfowitz (those who went on to lead the United States into Iraq in 2003) on Kirkpatrick-style restraint. Kissinger’s call for an aggressive response in the first Gulf War helped tip the intellectual argument in favor of these younger “Wilsonians.” And as the number of US troops increased in Saudi Arabia, even Kirkpatrick began to take a tough line.

  * Clinton’s errant cruise missile strike took place in 1993, not 1994. Out of twenty-four Tomahawk missiles launched at the Iraqi intelligence service for supposedly plotting George H. W. Bush’s assassination, three went astray and hit private homes, killing eight civilians as they slept in their beds, including Layla al-Attar, one of Iraq’s most famous artists. Another killed the husband and eighteen-month-old child of Zahraa Yhaya, who was twenty-nine at the time. “Please tell the people of America, the mothers of America, that when a missile makes mistakes, it kills people. It kills babies. It kills families sleeping at night, with no war and no warning,” she said to the Los Angeles Times (July 26, 1993).

  * Kissinger expressed contempt for these interventions for a number of reasons: they were ad hoc, they were justified in the name of “humanitarianism,” and they lacked focus, in terms of both immediate objectives and long-term vision. In 1992, he thought the deployment of troops to Somalia, in the last months of the George H. W. Bush’s term, a mistake (“We must not seem to be claiming for ourselves a doctrine of universal unilateral intervention,” he wrote [“Somalia: Reservations,” Washington Post, December 13, 1992]). But once the Black Hawk Down incident occurred early in the Clinton administration, he called for swift retaliation. In 1994, he criticized Clinton for sending soldiers to Haiti to restore its elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide: “I do not favor a military invasion because I can’t describe the threat Haiti presents to the United States” (“Kissinger Speaks at Nixon Library,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1994). And the Bosnia conflict seemed to confuse him. The breakup of Yugoslavia started under George H. W. Bush, and Kissinger’s ally Lawrence Eagleburger, Bush’s deputy secretary of state, came under intense criticism for bungling Washington’s response to the crisis. When he was a member of Kissinger Associates, Eagleburger had deep business ties to the Serbs, and some suggested a conflict of interest made him too soft on Slobodan Milosevic (“Eagleburger Anguishes over Yugoslav Upheaval,” New York Times, June 19, 1992). In 1995, Kissinger said he was opposed to war, arguing that Serbs were not aggressors and that one solution might be to enclose Muslims into their own state (see his appearance on the Charlie Rose show, September 14, 1995). Then, once war started, he said it had to be won. He was opposed to the intervention in Kosovo, parting ways with some prominent neoconservatives who were strong for that war. But once fighting started, he agreed with William Kristol that “the war must be won,” as John Podhoretz writes, that “victory means that Milosevic is forced to bend to NATO’s will—or is driven from power,” that Clinton’s “conduct of the war has been shameful” and is “weakening NATO’s resolve dangerously, and that if the president does not stiffen his resolve and NATO’s collective spine in the next month, the alliance’s commitment will begin to fall apart” (“This War’s Strange Bedfellows,” New York Post, May 26, 1999). Even as he advanced these criticisms of Clinton, and even as he grew closer to neoconservatives over Iraq, Kissinger still occasionally had ideological disputes with Reaganite “Wilsonians,” especially over his defense of China. His last serious pre-9/11 skirmish with neoconservatives took place with the 1999 publication of the third volume of his memoir, Years of Renewal. In that book, Kissinger tried to credit détente for bringing about the end of the Cold War. Robert Kagan offered an extremely negative review of the book in The New Republic (“The Revolutionist: How Henry Kissinger Won the Cold War, or So He Thinks,” June 21, 1999). Kagan was particularly upset over Kissinger’s attempt to take credit for the 1975 Helsinki hu
man rights accords (which neoconservatives view as a repudiation of amoral realpolitik).

  * In July 2003, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the invasion of Iraq, explained to Tim Russert on Meet the Press that the unsustainability of “containment” was the major reason for war—not supposed Iraqi links to Al Qaeda or WMDs: “Let me say a couple of things, Tim. People act as though the cost of containing Iraq is trivial. The cost of containing Iraq was enormous, 55 American lives lost, at least, in incidents like the Cole and Kobar Towers, which were part of the containment effort, billions of dollars of American money spent.… And worst of all, if you go back and read Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwa from 1998, where he calls for killing Americans, the two principal grievances were the presence of those forces in Saudi Arabia, and our continuing attacks on Iraq, 12 years of containment was a terrible price for us, and for the Iraqi people it was an unbelievable price, Tim.… And I think one of the things that would have come by waiting [to depose Hussein], frankly, is more instability for the key countries in our coalition, including Arab countries.”

  * It wasn’t just neoconservatives who thought that 9/11 might provide meaning to post–Cold War America, as political theorist Corey Robin points out. For George Packer, America’s patriotic response to the attacks awakened in him “alertness, grief, resolve, even love.” For David Brooks, 9/11 was “a cleanser, washing away a lot of the self-indulgence of the past decade” (Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea [2004], pp. 157–58).

  * It’s now a ritual among our political class to seek out Kissinger and engage in some form of public banter with him, as Samantha Power, Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, recently did when the two diplomats went to a Yankee game together. Power, the author of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell, that earned her a reputation as a fierce opponent of genocide, jokingly asked Kissinger why he became a Yankee fan. “Was that in keeping with a realist’s perspective on the world? Was that where victories were likely?” Power continued, referring to herself: “The human rights advocate, of course, falls in love with the Red Sox, the downtrodden, the people who can’t win the World Series.” “Now we are the downtrodden,” replied Kissinger, a man implicated in three of the genocides—Cambodia, Bangladesh, and East Timor—that Power wrote about.