About Kissinger and Pinochet, in the 1990s or early 2000s, I read something in a well-regarded newspaper about a comment of his. I’ve just had a look at eight Google pages of hits, and the two quotes below are very close to what I remember reading. Neither is documented in any way, and I don’t remember the details of what I read, other than the newspaper being well regarded at that time. So he might not have even said anything like this. That said, here are the quotes:
Privately, in the National Security Council, he said, “I see no reason why Chile should be allowed to go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Pinochet was indeed a horrible man. I recall Margaret Thatcher fawning over him back in the day.
As usual, East Timor is forgotten among the doctor’s sins:
“…Jakarta’s brutal suppression of the independence movement in East Timor was a development that neither Ford nor Kissinger wanted people to remember about their time in power. That the two decided on a course of action of dubious legality and that resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Timorese may well have also discouraged further reflection, at least in public.” - East Timor Revisited
There are many books about the East Timor civil war and the Indonesian invasion. Surely Kissinger is mentioned. I do not understand what is forgotten. Nancy Kissinger might fairly say that what is forgotten is that Suharto was the actual war criminal.
In retrospect, Kissinger should have told Suharto not to invade. But wouldn’t Suharto would have invaded, and used the U.S.-made arms at his disposal, and been equally brutal, anyway?
Given the nature of the U.S. as a military power, any President, or chief foreign policy advisor to the president, is going to be labeled a war criminal on the internet. It even has happened with Barack Obama, who surely is not a cruel man. But when someone has that sort of job, they have an significant life and death impact. Labeling them all as war criminals (or all the Republicans) IMHO detracts from understanding of why they made decisions which had negative results.
Despite what happened to his family, Kissinger treated the Germans under his military government, in 1945, well. And the many newspaper articles of his I have read do not leave the impression of a deranged killer. This suggests to me that the situations in the 1970’s need to be understood in historical context rather than dismissed as acts of a supreme criminal.
This book, sans dust jacket of course, is a perennial item at estate sales and used book stores, if they’re old enough. I finally decided to read it recently, and am pretty strongly convinced that if these books had not hit the best-seller lists back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we would not have gotten wrapped up in Vietnam.
All I knew going in was that Dr. Dooley’s work was secular, even though he was a devout Catholic, and he died very young (34) and was gay. I had not known (and obviously didn’t find out there) that he was basically a CIA shill and was willing to do that in exchange for not getting a dishonorable discharge when his, ahem, deviance was discovered. I think he did a lot of good things, and did a lot of not-good things either; this appears to have gotten the ball rolling.
I remember Ann Landers describing the Vietnam War as a response to “a regional skirmish that was none of our business” and I can’t say I disagree.
The relevant context for my comment was this thread and its consideration of Dr. K’s career. Before my post, neither East Timor nor Indonesia was mentioned. Perhaps “neglected” would have been a better choice of word than “forgotten.”
If Dr. K was able to give Suharto a “green light” to invade, it certainly seems reasonable to assume he could have given a “red light” instead. What might have come after that is speculative, but “(a)n East Timor Truth Commission later concluded that U.S. political and military support for Suharto was ‘fundamental to the Indonesian invasion and occupation.’” - A Quarter Century of U.S. Support for Occupation in East Timor
I put no labels on Dr. K. I merely added hitherto-unacknowledged data points to the discussion of his accomplishments.
I agree that top diplomats do not have an easy job and sometimes make bad decisions with catastrophic results. Taking responsibility for such decisions is a critical consideration when it comes to assessing the character and integrity of a top diplomat. Not taking responsibility is an equally critical sign. From my previous link in post #23:
“…on several occasions Kissinger has explicitly denied that he ever had substantive discussions of East Timor with Suharto, much less having consented to Indonesian plans.(2) The new evidence contradicts Kissinger’s statements: Indonesian plans for the invasion of East Timor were indeed discussed with Suharto, and Ford and Kissinger gave them the green light.”
Attempts at genocide tend to create their own contexts, subsuming other considerations with their scale, bloodshed and horror. Dr. K’s actions indisputably contributed to what many scholars call a “genocide” in East Timor. My impression is that communist insurgents in Indonesia ca. 1974-99 posed no credible threat to the U.S. (or to Indonesia), but for more than 25 years, we gave the Indonesians lots of military aid to fight the commies, much of which they used to invade and plunder East Timor. Given the death toll - around 150,000 from murder, disease and starvation, with Indonesian forces and their auxiliaries held responsible for 70% of the killings by the aforementioned Truth Commission - it is challenging for me to see how any historical context could justify or even rationalize Dr. K’s actions.
At the risk of contributing to a zombie thread, I wanted to share a multi-episode series that the always informative and entertaining Behind the Bastards podcast did on Kissinger.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” and honestly it lays the case out really well. It’s very short - it really only barely qualifies as a “book,” maybe 120, 130 pages, but he’s writing it to do a job, and when it’s done, the book ends. A very solid read. Highly recommend.
I bet Shawcross regrets his book. Read the neutral biography of him on Wikipedia and a casual observer will note that he has since moved so far to the right on every issue that he would be a regular on Fox News if an American.
I personally cannot imagine how anybody who lived through the Nixon Administration can think of him as anything other than a war criminal.
So Kissinger isn’t a war criminal because:
-Everyone did it
-Critics are unfairly labeling him a war criminal over a disagreement over his foreign policy decisions (good point, the only people who call Pol Pot a mass murderer are people who disagree with his domestic policy decisions)
-He isn’t as bad as Hitler or Milosevic – yeah there are degrees of war crimes
Seeing how many of the original posters of this thread are banned in the meantime shows what a dangerous person Kissinger is. I would like to have written was instead of is, but there you go. The kind of person who gives the concept of Realpolitik a bad rap. He had a talent for finding justifications for cruel political decisions in the name of a higher good.
Salvador Allende opposed dictatorship and supported parliamentary democracy. Salvador Allende was not a communist, nor was his main base of support. Within Chile, the Communist Party of the time was generally moderate, not advocating revolution and advocating cooperation with the centrist Christian Democratic Party, in contrast with another hard left faction.
Pinochet’s atrocities covered 27,255 tortured, 2,279 executed and 300,000 exiles out of a country of a little under 10 million.