At Thursday night's Democratic presidential debate, one of the most heated exchanges concerned an unlikely topic: Henry Kissinger. During a stretch focused on foreign policy, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, jabbed at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for having cited Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon's secretary of state, as a fan of her stint at Foggy Bottom.
"I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country," Sanders huffed, adding, "I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger." He referred to the secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war as a Kissinger-orchestrated move that eventually led to genocide in that country.
[...]
[Clinton] cast her interactions with Kissinger as motivated by her desire to obtain any information that might be useful to craft policy. "People we may disagree with on a number of things may have some insight.
[...]
What [she] did not mention was that her bond with Kissinger was personal as well as professional, as she and her husband have for years regularly spent their winter holidays with Kissinger and his wife, Nancy, at the beachfront villa of fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who died in 2014, and his wife, Annette, in the Dominican Republic.
This campaign tussle over Kissinger began a week earlier, at a previous debate, when Clinton, looking to boost her résumé, said, "I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time. [...] A few days later, Bill Clinton, while campaigning for his wife in New Hampshire, told a crowd of her supporters, "Henry Kissinger, of all people, said she ran the State Department better and got more out of the personnel at the State Department than any secretary of state in decades, and it's true." His audience of Democrats clapped loudly in response.
Mother Jones
Bill and Hillary Clinton themselves opposed the Vietnam War that Nixon and Kissinger inherited and continued. Hillary Clinton was a staffer on the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Nixon, and one of the articles of impeachment drafted by the staff (but which was not approved) cited Nixon for covering up his secret bombing of Cambodia. In the years since then, information has emerged showing that Kissinger's underhanded and covert diplomacy led to brutal massacres around the globe, including in Chile, Argentina, East Timor, and Bangladesh.
[...]
Last April, the Weekly Standard noted that the Clintons had spent a week around the previous New Year's at [de la Renta's] Punta Canta and that Secret Service protection for the trip had cost $104,000. It was during this vacation that Hillary Clinton reportedly decided to run for president for the second time.
Sound familiar?Kissinger served as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and helped revive a militarized version of American exceptionalism.
During his time in office, Henry Kissinger oversaw a massive expansion of the war in Vietnam and the secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia. In Latin America, declassified documents show how Kissinger secretly intervened across the continent, from Bolivia to Uruguay to Chile to Argentina. In Chile, Kissinger urged President Nixon to take a, quote, "harder line" against the Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. On September 11th, 1973, another September 11th, Allende was overthrown by the U.S.-backed general, Augusto Pinochet. [...] While human rights activists have long called for Kissinger to be tried for war crimes, he remains a celebrated figure in Washington and beyond.
[...]
PROFESSOR GREG GRANDIN: "He’s 92 years old, and there’s been a rehabilitation of Henry Kissinger and supposedly what he stands for, not just by the political right, but by the—across the political establishment. Hillary Clinton embraced Kissinger last year in a review in The Washington Post of his last book. [US Ambassador to the UN] Samantha Power [who made her name writing about genocides, including three genocides that Kissinger is implicated in] went to a Boston Red Sox-Yankee game with him.
[...]
"I think that he’s instrumental in re-establishing covert activities and clandestine activities, and figuring out ways to bypass a lot of the focus that reporters, critical reporters, [...] and a critical Congress began to place on the presidency. I think you can see a continuity between what he was doing in southern Africa, for instance, supporting—in using third-party mercenaries in order to wage an illegal war, with what comes later under Reagan, Iran-Contra.
[...]
"Kissinger is not a realist. He comes out of a certain kind of German irrational, kind of will-to-power idealism. He’s very much influenced by German metaphysicists, such as Oswald Spengler, such as Immanuel Kant, that believe that human beings actually don’t have access to reality, that their understanding of reality comes through their action."
[...]
AMY GOODMAN [quoting Henry Kissinger]: "There are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality."
Democracy Now!
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush [ed: believed to be Karl Rove]. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
NYT
Remember when Code Pink tried to make a citizens' arrest of Henry Kissinger? Good times.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment