Kissenger: Neocons are wrong, but we can't drop Bush now

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Kissenger: Neocons are wrong, but we can't drop Bush now

Postby Moniker » Tue Oct 19, 2004 12:42 am

Veteran statesman Henry Kissinger says the election of John Kerry would not bring more European military support to Iraq, and changing the Administration in the middle of a war would be a fateful decision




HENRY KISSINGER refuses to answer only two of my questions. The latter, asked, naturally, towards the end of our interview is about his reputation at the height of his fame in the Nixon administration as America’s number one playboy. His old enemy the journalist Christopher Hitchens later accused him of, in fact, sleeping in a single bed, Kissinger’s dirty little secret being that there was no dirty little secret. “I don’t comment on that,” Dr Kissinger grunts, and it is ambiguous as to whether he is referring to his sex life or to Hitchens. The playboy image “was unimaginable when it started and amusing while it lasted” is all he’ll say.



My other unanswered question regards the potential dangers of a John Kerry presidency. “Can we stop here a minute?” he asks to my surprise and, with the tape off, he explains why he will not criticise Kerry in the current circumstances. “I was in office during the Vietnam War,” he explains when we resume, “so I will not knowingly contribute to creating another set of divisions like that.”

Yet as Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser (the Condoleezza Rice job) and then his Secretary of State (Colin Powell’s), Kissinger is one of the authors of the divisions he recalls. For allegedly prolonging the war and the bombing of neighbouring Cambodia, the Nobel Peace Prize winner is castigated by some as a war criminal.

But Kissinger was also the architect of détente with both China and Russia, broking the international power balance with extraordinary skill. In the last two decades he has explained himself in three memoirs, a brilliant history of diplomacy, a book on Vietnam and, published within days of 9/11, Does America Need A Foreign Policy? He is a regular pundit on CNN and Fox News, who treat him reverently. As I say: he is a man who divides.

We meet in New York at Kissinger Associates, his consultancy. Twenty six floors above Park Avenue, his female staff toil with Trappist concentration, their silence broken only by him. “Get me Nancy!” he barks at one point, Nancy being his wife. Married to him for 30 years, she features in a wispily romantic portrait that hangs behind his desk, dwarfing the photographs of potentates that line his office. Kissinger lacks any obvious social skills when it comes to someone like me (“What is your name?” he inquires in his still heavily accented English), but when he is introduced to our photographer’s assistant he wobbles on the edge of flirtation. “And what,” he purrs, “is it that you do?” Despite a heart attack four years ago and a minor operation in January, he looks fit, less ashen than the last time we met. His expensive suit no longer looks about to burst.

He is 81, so this is the 17th presidential election he has witnessed since he arrived, aged 15, in New York from Germany. He considers it a vital one: “Changing an administration in the middle of a war is a fateful decision.”

It is the war that I want to discuss. He is “almost certain” that Richard Nixon would have taken the same decision as Bush to invade Iraq. The 9/11 attack, like those leading up to it, was intended to demonstrate that the US was incapable of, and unwilling to, defend its interests. A decisive refutation was necessary. “Iraq was not a state that was actively involved in the specific 9/11 operation, though it had intelligence contact with al -Qaeda, but it was a state that contributed to the atmosphere out of which the hostility to America was being fed. It had the largest army in the region. It had violated the ceasefire with the United States of 1991 I think 17 times, certified by the United Nations. It had used weapons of mass destruction and it was believed to possess weapons of mass destruction.”

“Believed” is the word. Could he have imagined the intelligence being so far off the mark? “No, I couldn’t. And nor did the President.”

He attended a Pentagon briefing given by Colin Powell a few weeks before he presented America’s case on WMDs to the United Nations. The chiefs of staff, the intelligence officers, and the Democrat and Republican cabinet members from previous administrations voiced no dissent.

And Powell looked confident? “For those of us who have some experience in government, you can tell when the bureaucracy is uneasy by a combination of body language or the sort of interjections like ‘I wouldn’t quite phrase that this way,’ that shows you there’s some doubts. Nothing like that happened.” But Kissinger’s reasoning that a potentially belligerent and dissident state needed to be quashed, differs from the idealistic agenda of neoconservatives, the moral crusaders who backed the war in the belief that it was America’s destiny to reshape the region in democratic form.

“Yes. I don’t agree with that if it relies on the use of force,” Kissinger says. “I believe that America has to stand for human values and democracy because this is an essential part of the American experience. But I do not think that we can appoint ourselves as the moral guardian or as the immediate transformer of every government by pressure. I would leave something more to history.”

To time? “I would leave something more to time. I think the neoconservative view is very similar to the Trotskyite view, in the sense that many of them believe that foreign policy problems are really problems in the domestic structures and, if you can change those, the foreign policy problems will solve themselves automatically. I don’t believe that. I believe one has to be more modest and that one has to take into account the history, the culture and often the dignity of the country that’s involved.”

Although the vice president, Dick Cheney, was a signatory to the 1997 neocon manifesto, the New American Century Statement of Principles, Kissinger regards him as traditional, nationalist conservative. The deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, might fit the neocon description more closely.

“But the major issue is not one of personalities. The challenge that Bush will face, after re-election, is whether he can help create, as America did in the late 1940s, an international system that is relevant to the challenges of this period. It can’t be dealt with in slogans and you cannot have a peaceful order which is not supported by a significant number of the key countries because, otherwise, you’re engaged in an indefinite police action and no country can sustain hegemony psychologically for an indefinite period.”

Wouldn’t the easiest way for America to win a fresh start with Europe be to elect Kerry? “I didn’t want to get into personalities, but I can make a safe comment. It is absolutely out of the question that Kerry will get significant additional military support from Europe and the attempt to get it will involve such a bitter controversy that, paradoxically, in order to heal the alleged rift, or the supposed rift, one would re-create it. He cannot achieve this without raising the question of whether he is presenting a plan for winning or an alibi for withdrawing.” A year before the invasion, Kissinger publicly questioned the value of moral crusades because “looking at it as an American, they will eventually go beyond our capacity”. I wonder, considering the continuing anarchy in Iraq, the loss of American life, the huge debt incurred, the increase in oil prices, if the limit of the American public’s tolerance has not not already been reached.

“All of this may be true to some extent,” he interrupts, “but we cannot afford in Iraq to repeat the experience of Vietnam of tearing ourselves apart. Because the conflict will not stop at the borders of Iraq and the issues that drew us in will continue.

“The impact of a radical fundamentalist victory in Iraq on the Muslim world would be catastrophic from Indonesia to Morocco — including countries like India. The impetus it would give to radical challenges to advanced societies would be enormous.”

But isn’t Iraq beginning to look like Vietnam — a venture that has assailed America’s moral authority and left it looking military weaker than a superpower should look? “But I have the unfashionable view that we did not need to lose in Vietnam.”

How could America have won? “Well, this would get us into an endless discussion,” he begins but, in fact, his argument seems to be that America should have bombed the supply lines through Laos earlier. He tried to do so in 1971. “But by that time we had withdrawn American combat forces in Vietnam and there were congressional inhibitions against using airpower outside of the territorial limits of Vietnam.”

“Congressional inhibitions” is a classic Kissinger euphemism, covering in this case the huge outrage caused by the Cambodian bombing. For liberals such as John Kerry, newly back from service in Vietnam, it eroded the US’s claims to a higher morality. As the decade continued, the country’s reputation fell further as it smiled upon the Pinochet coup in Chile and the military junta in Argentina. In an essay last year in Presidential Studies Quarterly , Professor John Kane wrote that under Kissinger and Nixon the American exceptionalist myth pioneered by Woodrow Wilson (that a country as good and powerful as America had a duty to intervene internationally) “congealed into politically inflexible anti-communism”: “One consequence was that tin-pot dictators around the world would be assured of US backing so long as they declared themselves firmly anti-communist and opened up their economies to American capital.”

It is Kissinger’s support for such dictators, rather than his successes with détente, that have returned to haunt his last decades, resulting in court cases against him in the US, France and Latin America. “One reads constantly about cases,” he grumbles. “One never reads when they are dismissed.” Have they been dismissed? “All the American cases have been dismissed. And all the foreign cases — which were not really cases but requests for information — have been satisfied in the sense that the American Government provided the answers these judges have asked for and that no new questions have been asked.”

Kissinger, as I would expect, does not use Tony Blair’s retrospective rationalisation for invading Iraq, that the world is a better place for the removal of a tyrant. Yet the idea that human rights do not register at all on Kissinger’s radar is self-evidently false. It was, he says, the Nixon administration that introduced the concept of human rights to American foreign policy. In 1969 it quietly let the Russians know that if they were to allow more Jewish emigration, the US would regard this as an attempt to improve relations. The same approach was taken in Latin America. Indeed, in Chile in 1976, he made a coolly received speech calling human rights “the very essence of a meaningful life”. “I then spoke to Pinochet and to the Argentine leaders in the language of diplomacy, which was, ‘It is in your self-interest to improve your human rights performance, because otherwise it will be difficult for us to help you as we want to help you. And we genuinely do not want to overthrow you’ — which implied the cut-off of aid.”

The release this year of declassified documents from the Nixon-Ford era has thrown up snippets of Kissinger memos and conversations suggesting, however, a more cynical cast of mind. Days after Salvador Allende’s election in Chile in 1970, he appeared to advocate regime change on the grounds that “a successful elected Marxist government” could have “precedent value” in the rest of the world (he has always denied backing the subsequent Pinochet coup). In another he assured the Argentine foreign minister that America wouldn’t cause his regime “unnecessary difficulties” if there were “things” that had to be done.

When such headlines appear, does he fret for his posthumous reputation? “It’s not my posthumous reputation that I fret about, it’s the day-to-day newspaper coverage,” he almost jokes. “You ought to remember this: I made available 30,000 telephone conversations. Only maybe less than ten of those produced controversy, even though I’m not short of traducers who are searching eagerly through them. If you analyse what they find, it is exactly what I’ve described here, that my approach to human rights depended on diplomacy and was attempted to be built into the geopolitics of the period.”

I bet in office he never imagined that, 30 years on, people would be demanding his imprisonment. “A tiny minority. I’m not complaining. I had an opportunity to practise my hobby as my profession.”

Judge a statesman by his intellect and Kissinger ranks as high as any of the past century. Judge him by the company he kept, and the record becomes questionable: Pinochet, Nixon, even Lord Black of Crossharbour, the recently disgraced former Telegraph group owner on whose board he lucratively sat. (“I never give up friends,” he says of Black, “but I am disappointed in many things I have learnt and saddened by them.

”) History will decide whether Kissinger has this time chosen wisely in befriending Bush in the critical hour. “The way the American system works,” he says, a change in administration “would mean substantial paralysis for three months in Washington and another period of reorganisation as the new administration established itself, and as foreign leaders descended on Washington to attempt to establish their priority. So I support Bush on merit, but it is also an extremely awkward period for the transition.”

In awkward times, Americans might counter, it is all the more important that they exercise their right to choose the best leader available. But it is hard to dismiss Kissinger’s chilly pragmatism. It must always have been.
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Postby goat balls » Tue Oct 19, 2004 2:38 pm

Good stuff man...thanks

I'd like to make about 50 replies to what Kissinger said, but I'd have to hunt and peck for two days. But I do agree with him.
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Postby Skirita » Tue Oct 19, 2004 3:00 pm

While we're at it, Pat Buchanan made his case for Bush's reelection yesterday:

Coming Home

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In the fall of 2002, the editors of this magazine moved up its launch date to make the conservative case against invading Iraq. Such a war, we warned, on a country that did not attack us, did not threaten us, did not want war with us, and had no role in 9/11, would be “a tragedy and a disaster.” Invade and we inherit our own West Bank of 23 million Iraqis, unite Islam against us, and incite imams from Morocco to Malaysia to preach jihad against America. So we wrote, again and again.

In a 6,000-word article entitled “Whose War?” we warned President Bush that he was “being lured into a trap baited for him by neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations...”

Everything we predicted has come to pass. Iraq is the worst strategic blunder in our lifetime. And for it, George W. Bush, his War Cabinet, and the neoconservatives who plotted and planned this war for a decade bear full responsibility. Should Bush lose on Nov. 2, it will be because he heeded their siren song—that the world was pining for American Empire; that “Big Government Conservatism” is a political philosophy, not an opportunistic sellout of principle; that free-trade globalism is the path to prosperity, not the serial killer of U.S. manufacturing; that amnesty for illegal aliens is compassionate conservatism, not an abdication of constitutional duty.

Mr. Bush was led up the garden path. And the returns from his mid-life conversion to neoconservatism are now in:

• A guerrilla war in Iraq is dividing and bleeding America with no end in sight. It carries the potential for chaos, civil war, and the dissolution of that country.

• Balkanization of America and the looming bankruptcy of California as poverty and crime rates soar from an annual invasion of indigent illegals is forcing native-born Californians to flee the state for the first time since gold was found at Sutter’s Mill.

• A fiscal deficit of 4 percent of GDP and merchandise trade deficit of 6 percent of GDP have produced a falling dollar, the highest level of foreign indebtedness in U.S. history, and the loss of one of every six manufacturing jobs since Bush took office.

If Bush loses, his conversion to neoconservatism, the Arian heresy of the American Right, will have killed his presidency. Yet, in the contest between Bush and Kerry, I am compelled to endorse the president of the United States. Why? Because, while Bush and Kerry are both wrong on Iraq, Sharon, NAFTA, the WTO, open borders, affirmative action, amnesty, free trade, foreign aid, and Big Government, Bush is right on taxes, judges, sovereignty, and values. Kerry is right on nothing.

The only compelling argument for endorsing Kerry is to punish Bush for Iraq. But why should Kerry be rewarded? He voted to hand Bush a blank check for war. Though he calls Iraq a “colossal” error, “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he has said he would—even had he known Saddam had no role in 9/11 and no WMD—vote the same way today. This is the Richard Perle position.

Assuredly, a president who plunged us into an unnecessary and ruinous war must be held accountable. And if Bush loses, Iraq will have been his undoing. But a vote for Kerry is more than just a vote to punish Bush. It is a vote to punish America.

For Kerry is a man who came home from Vietnam to slime the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and POWs he left behind as war criminals who engaged in serial atrocities with the full knowledge of their superior officers. His conduct was as treasonous as that of Jane Fonda and disqualifies him from ever being commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.

As senator, he voted to undermine the policy of Ronald Reagan that brought us victory in the Cold War. He has voted against almost every weapon in the U.S. arsenal. Though a Catholic who professes to believe life begins at conception, he backs abortion on demand. He has opposed the conservative judges Bush has named to the U.S. appellate courts. His plans for national health insurance and new spending would bankrupt America. He would raise taxes. He is a globalist and a multilateralist who would sign us on to the Kyoto Protocol and International Criminal Court. His stands on Iraq are about as coherent as a self-portrait by Jackson Pollock.

With Kerry as president, William Rehnquist could be succeeded as chief justice by Hillary Clinton. Every associate justice Kerry named would be cut from the same bolt of cloth as Warren, Brennan, Douglas, Blackmun, and Ginsburg. Should Kerry win, the courts will remain a battering ram of social revolution and the conservative drive in Congress to restrict the jurisdiction of all federal courts, including the Supreme Court, will die an early death.

I cannot endorse the candidate of Michael Moore, George Soros, and Barbra Streisand, nor endorse a course of action that would put this political windsurfer into the presidency, no matter how deep our disagreement with the fiscal, foreign, immigration, and trade policies of George W. Bush.

As Barry Goldwater said in 1960, in urging conservatives to set aside their grievances and unite behind the establishment party of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and Lodge, the Republican Party is our home. It is our only hope. If an authentic conservatism rooted in the values of faith, family, community, and country is ever again to become the guiding light of national policy, it will have to come through a Republican administration.

The Democratic Party of Kerry, Edwards, Clinton & Clinton is a lost cause: secularist, socialist, and statist to the core. What of the third-party candidates? While Ralph Nader is a man of principle and political courage, he is of the populist Left. We are of the Right.

The Constitution Party is the party closest to this magazine in philosophy and policy prescriptions, and while one must respect votes for Michael Peroutka by those who live in Red or Blue states, we cannot counsel such votes in battleground states.

For this election has come down to Bush or Kerry, and on life, guns, judges, taxes, sovereignty, and defense, Bush is far better. Moreover, inside the Republican Party, a rebellion is stirring. Tom Tancredo is leading the battle for defense of our borders. While only a handful of Republicans stood with us against the war in Iraq, many now concede that we were right. As Franklin Foer writes in the New York Times, our America First foreign policy is now being given a second look by a conservative movement disillusioned with neoconservative warmongering and Wilsonian interventionism.

There is a rumbling of dissent inside the GOP to the free-trade fanaticism of the Wall Street Journal that is denuding the nation of manufacturing and alienating Reagan Democrats. The celebrants of outsourcing in the White House have gone into cloister. The Bush amnesty for illegal aliens has been rejected. Prodigal Republicans now understand that their cohabitation with Big Government has brought their country to the brink of ruin and bought them nothing. But if we wish to be involved in the struggle for the soul of the GOP—and we intend to be there—we cannot be AWOL from the battle where the fate of that party is decided.

There is another reason Bush must win. The liberal establishment that marched us into Vietnam evaded punishment for its loss of nerve and failure of will to win—by dumping LBJ, defecting to the children’s crusade to “give peace a chance,” then sabotaging Nixon every step of the way out of Vietnam until they broke his presidency in Watergate. Ensuring America’s defeat, they covered their tracks by denouncing their own war as “Nixon’s War.”

If Kerry wins, leading a party that detests this war, he will be forced to execute an early withdrawal. Should that bring about a debacle, neocons will indict Democrats for losing Iraq. The cakewalk crowd cannot be permitted to get out from under this disaster that easily. They steered Bush into this war and should be made to see it through to the end and to preside over the withdrawal or retreat. Only thus can they be held accountable. Only thus can this neo-Jacobin ideology be discredited in America’s eyes. It is essential for the country and our cause that it be repudiated by the Republican Party formally and finally. The neocons must clean up the mess they have made, themselves, in full public view.

There is a final reason I support George W. Bush. A presidential election is a Hatfield-McCoy thing, a tribal affair. No matter the quarrels inside the family, when the shooting starts, you come home to your own. When the Redcoats approached New Orleans to sunder the Union and Jackson was stacking cotton bales and calling for help from any quarter, the pirate Lafitte wrote to the governor of Louisiana to ask permission to fight alongside his old countrymen. “The Black Sheep wants to come home,” Lafitte pleaded.

It’s time to come home.
[url]
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover.html[/url]
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." - W.B. Yeats
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Postby Prodigal Son » Tue Oct 19, 2004 4:27 pm

The problem I have with Buchananites, besides social policy, is that their "America First" foreign policy is an anachronism -- it's a throwback to the days when borders actually meant something, when capital couldn't fly to 20 different banks in 20 different countries in less than 30 seconds. It's a policy that just doesn't take into account that:

A. America is something much more than a nation-state. From economics, to culture, military force to scientific research, it affects the world a hell of a lot more than the world affects it.

B. The problems America faces are transnational in nature. Take the border...what will policing the border REALLY accomplish? Not a whole hell of a lot.
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