If we were told once, during our undergraduate years reading dreary books by Montesquieu, Hume and Locke, we were told a thousands times: Leaders who feel contempt for traditional legal precepts, and consider moral constraints placed on them by international society an unwanted or an unacceptable burden, are a danger to order, liberty and civil society.
One such leader, who debased the oldest and most sacrosanct rules in the statesman’s canon, was Henry Kissinger.
That is why the administration’s decision more than two weeks ago to put him in charge of the commission investigating Sept. 11 was bizarre — a cruel insult to the memory of those who perished on that day and an affront to an American public deserving of a full accounting of that infamous event.
Lest we forget: Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security advisor and later secretary of state, was behind the secret (and illegal) bombing of Cambodia, and the deliberate prolongation and expansion of the Indochina war by his subversion of the Paris peace talks on the eve of the 1968 US presidential election, when he got the South Vietnamese negotiators to scuttle those talks, with the understanding that they would receive a better deal with a Republican in the White House.
Kissinger’s malfeasance was amply documented in Christopher Hitchens’ two-part, 40,000-word series in the February and March 2001 issues of Harper’s magazine, and in Peter Kornbluh’s recently released "The Pinochet File" — namely that not only did Kissinger coddle state-sponsored terrorists, but he was directly involved, via the so-called 40-Committee (named after the Old Executive Office Building room in which it met, and chaired by Kissinger between 1969 and 1976, which at the time maintained ultimate supervision over all US covert actions), in the kidnapping and murder of Chilean military commander Rene Schneider. The killing, by would-be coup makers working with and funded by CIA operatives, culminated in the ouster and assassination of the duly elected president, Salvador Allende, and the installation of the Pinochet dictatorship.
It was at that time that Kissinger came out with his now famous expression of contempt for democracy when he observed that he saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to "go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."
No need here to recapitulate Henry Kissinger’s machinations, also equally well documented, that led to the massacres in Bangladesh in 1971; to the Greek-sponsored coup in Cyprus which prompted a subsequent Turkish invasion of the island nation; and to Indonesia’s American-supported invasion of East Timor in December that same year. And the tragic car-bombing death of Allende’s former foreign minister and ambassador, Orlando Letelier, along with his American colleague Ronni Moffit, on Mass. Av., known as Embassy Row, in Washington in 1976.
In each case, it is now revealed, Kissinger either knew of, or took an active role in, engineering these shenanigans.
Though not on the same scale of egregiousness, consider Kissinger’s duplicitous relationship with Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president.
In the wake of the October War, when Kissinger mediated cease-fire talks between Egypt and Israel, known as "shuttle diplomacy," he was often photographed at Cairo airport being greeted, with kisses planted on both his cheeks, Arab-fashion, by President Sadat, who engagingly referred to the American secretary of state as "my friend Henry."
In "The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger" (1976), written by the prominent Israeli journalist Matti Golan, we read of how, in his meetings with Golda Meir at the time, Kissinger dismissed the Egyptian president as "that little buffoon."
Today, Henry Kissinger is a man wanted for questioning by many a court of law around the world. In the United States, there is a law suit filed against him by the family of Rene Scneider, and in another suit, several Chilean human rights victims claim Kissinger "knowingly provided political assistance to the Pinochet regime" in its slaughter of thousands of political opponents (Kissinger’s co-defendant in the case is Michael Townly, Pinochet’s agent in Washington, who was convicted of planting the car bomb that Killed Letelier and his colleague in 1976).
Outside the United States, the Chilean Supreme Court has questions to ask him, that he has not deigned to answer yet, about the murder of Charles Horman, the American journalist killed during the 1973 coup. In Spain, the judge who requested the 1998 arrest of Pinochet in Britain wants to question him about "crimes against humanity."
And in France, a judge looking into the "disappearance" of five French citizens in Chile during the Pinochet years is anxious to put Kissinger on the witness stand.
And this man was actually chosen to head an independent commission looking into the Sept. 11 terrorist assault on the United States, similar to the Warren Commission that looked into the assassination of President Kennedy, a commission answerable to the public?
For many people in the world, Henry Kissinger is a symbol of America’s unrestrained big-power arrogance. For many of us folks in the US, commentators included, the former secretary of state had to answer tough questions before his commission’s findings could be taken seriously.
Henry, no friend of mine or yours, least of all that of the late Anwar Sadat, must have felt the heat.
Last weekend, he resigned as head of the commission, complaining in a bitter letter to President Bush that concerns about conflicts of interest "could significantly delay" the panel’s work. The Washington Post reported simply: "The departure ended two weeks of intense political infighting over whether Kissinger’s controversial past would affect the commission’s findings."
Very controversial past indeed.
That past is already in the history books. Henry Kissinger is not a mere benign elder statesman. His reputation will never be rehabilitated regardless of how revisionist a view future researchers may adopt of the man. For, truth be told, you can put lipstick on a pig and call her Monique, but she’ll still be a pig.
As the influential Nation magazine editorialized last week, before news of Kissinger’s resignation broke: "A proven liar has been assigned the task of finding the truth ... He is not a truth seeker. Indeed he has prevaricated about his own actions and tried to limit access to government information. He should be the target of subpoenas, not one who issues them."
Or one to investigate terrorism when he himself coddled state-sponsored terrorists and approved, encouraged and financed their atrocious acts throughout his long, ignoble career in government.
Arab News Opinion 19 December 2002
