Henry Kissinger: The World's Oldest War Criminal and Peggy Noonan's Hero

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

10-25-22

 

Reading Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal weekend edition on October 22/23^rd, brought back some memories. She writes of the hectic week she’s had likening it to a similar description by one of her heroes, William F Buckley who documented one of his in a small book he wrote called Cruising Speed.

 

Her week involved talking to students at a university, raising money for the poor and immigrants from the rich and greedy at the Archdiocese of New York’s annual fundraiser. The Catholic Church whose head office is covered in gold and fine art, raises money now and then to atone for its sins.

 

But the one that got me was her interview with the mass murderer and war criminal Henry Kissinger. She refers to him as a “legend” and indeed he is.  Buckley might have called Kissinger the “…biggest thing since Bismarck” she writes and she relished being in the presence of a “great statesman”. This is from a woman, a respected bourgeois and Republican Party strategist, who thinks Mike Pence is a “good man” so it’s par for the course.

 

Noonan asked Henry about the anxiety people feel about the world and the dangers facing us all. “Is it unrealistic to be experiencing this moment as uniquely dangerous?”, she asks him. Kissinger validates the fears and warns that leaders must keep “….all lines of communications up”, and to “keep the conversation going.” Noonan doesn’t reveal much. Else.

 

Kissinger’s Crimes

 

"only a nation in deep spiritual and psychological disarray could honor a man with as much blood on his hands as Henry Kissinger" Fred Branfman

 

With a prominent U.S. political theorist talking with Kissinger as the war in Ukraine rages on, we cannot expect terms like, killer, psychopath, or power hungry to be applied to this great American statesman. We certainly don’t hear Kissinger compared to Hitler as Putin and before him Saddam Hussein have been in the US mass media in order to garner public support for U.S foreign policy and numerous military ventures. Putin and Hussein are not like Hitler, neither is Kissinger. And Russia, Iraq or the U.S. are not fascist regimes.

 

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Kissinger is responsible for the deaths of millions of people mind you, including thousands of young US workers sent to Vietnam. Christopher Hitchens wrote a short account of some of Kissinger’s crimes against humanity in his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger  published in 2001. Kissinger shouldn’t shoulder all the blame for the death of some 3 million Vietnamese people as he was just a part of the team, but a big part; a quarterback one might say.

 

But as Hitchens points out, the Nixon Administration of which Kissinger was a crucial part, worked behind the scenes with South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu (a violation of the Logan Act) in an effort to scuttle the Paris peace talks of 1968 in order to undermine their political opponents.  John A. Farrell Nixon’s biographer: “Nixon gave Haldeman his orders: Find ways to sabotage Johnson’s plans to stage productive peace talks, so that a frustrated American electorate would turn to the Republicans as their only hope to end the war.” Also, see Anna Chennault

 

Hitchens’ claims in the book that “….20,492 American servicemen lost their lives in Indochina between the day that Nixon and Kissinger took office and the day in 1972 that they withdrew United States forces and accepted the logic of 1968” There is a reason that cannon fodder is such a popular term to describe workers of any side that are sent to fight wars for those that profit from them. The U.S. government’s use of the defoliant Agent Orange that contains dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to us, was not only poured on the Vietnamese and their food supply but on US troops as well.

 

Cambodia and Laos

After the Paris Peace agreement was eventually signed in 1973 by Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Lê Đức Thọ they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Tho refused to accept it having a lot more integrity than Kissinger. But the U.S. wasn’t done yet and after this ignominious defeat by the Vietnamese people invaded neighboring Cambodia in order to root out Vietnamese guerillas the Nixon Administration believed were hiding there. This was illegal and done without the knowledge of the US Congress or the American people. (Think of Julian Assange as you read that snippet).

 

Massive bombing raids of Cambodian villages followed as did an invasion of Laos to the north situated between Vietnam and China. The Asian people we know as Hmong that are extremely poor and often homeless in various parts of the US, are victims of the US invasion of Laos. The CIA got the Hmong to assist them and naturally, they are traitors as far as most Laotians are concerned. For their cooperation they often live in poverty and suffer severe discriminated here in the U.S.

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The butcher Kissinger referred to Cambodia as a sideshow and William Shawcross wrote a book about this crime against humanity perpetrated by the Nixon Administration of which Kissinger was the chief architect. The title of the book is Sideshow and reading it many years ago was how I discovered the truth about the crimes the US committed in Cambodia.  There’s a very good review of the book here.  Stanley Hoffmann, the author of the review, adds that Congress eventually put an end to the bombing of Cambodia (recall, the US was not at war with Cambodia which had been a neutral country) in August 1973 but, “By that time, we had dropped on that small country 50 percent more tons of bombs than we had dropped on Japan during the Second World War.”

 

Hitchens points out that the raids in to Cambodia and Laos had names, a sort of “Menu of bombardment” as the code names for the raids were, “Breakfast”, “Lunch”, “Snack” and “Desert.” Between March 1969 and May 1970 3,630 raids were flown in to Cambodia and some 350,000 civilians were killed although Kissinger told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that areas selected for bombing were “’unpopulated’.”  It should be noted that the US attempted to count all deaths as soldiers.

 

As the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, and the Vietnamese who had just forced French colonialism from their land were now defending it against state terrorism in the form of US imperialism that was concerned about losing further markets to Stalinism under the guise of freedom and fighting communism. Some co-worker once tried to explain the U.S. defeat in Vietnam as a lack of resolve and “we should have just nuked them”. He didn’t understand that you can’t sell toothpaste and other commodities under those conditions.

 

Some 40 years later I have lost a few American friends due to cancers caused by the use of Agent Orange. The US lost some 70,000 young workers in the Vietnam War and if we add the trauma inflicted on families, wives, husbands, children and grandparents etc. the numbers increase. The documentary Sir No Sir, about the Vietnam war is worth watching. The Vietnamese lost three million people and even today their children are being born with cancers and deformities due to the US using chemical warfare against them. Such wasted lives in a war fought for markets and profits.

 

Part of my reason for this commentary is that reading Noonan’s piece and her groveling praise of one of the world’s most vicious killers forces me to think again about history. The victors write the history as they say. But the victors in wars between nations don’t only write that history; as the ruling classes of those nations they write our nation’s history too. They chronicle the history of their own nations and their rise to power at the head of it. The history of the working classes and of course the history of slavery is buried. In the US, the Native population was almost wiped out in a genocidal war fought over a few centuries, the U.S.’s longest and most hard fought war.

 

In the US we are taught the history of the class that was victorious in the foundation of the US as a modern nation state, the industrial capitalist class of the North. It was this class that defeated the slaveocracy, again using workers as cannot fodder and consolidated the nation state along capitalist lines. The slaves of the South had every reason to fight that war and did in their thousands only to be betrayed at the end of it. The US Civil War was the second half of the American revolution and the history of the US post colonization has been white capitalist history.

 

The US never declared war on Vietnam, it invaded the country in the interests of Wall Street and sided with a regime that couldn’t get elected by its own people. It was a crime against humanity and those Americans that lost their loved ones in that futile venture should direct their anger no further than Washington DC.

 

Victorious and dominant after WW2 the US did the same in Korea; that conflict was a civil war as well and the US supported the side that would lead to the most profit taking and it lead instead to the totalitarian regime in North Korea to this day just as US policy in Cambodia led to Pol Pot.

 

We need to reflect on this praising of the war criminal Kissinger in the light of what we now know and with the Biden Administration considering sending more weaponry to Ukraine. They are very generous with our money, not so in Mississippi and we need to not follow blindly, the architects of US foreign policy brought to us as state department memos in the mass media.

 

A recent poll found that more Americans fear Russia than Germans do. The massive campaign to demonize Russia over the last few years has had an effect.

 

One doesn’t have to be a Putin fan to recognize that the US (NATO) could have acted differently. But the drive to war is an integral part of the capitalist system and they cannot escape it; they are driven by the laws of the system toward the endgame. As things stand, with competing imperialist powers threatening to take us over the abyss, the working class in Europe and globally is the only force that can halt this madness.