Kissinger’s Policy of “Total Hypocrisy”: The Past and Present Human Rights Violations of the United States Government
Jessica McGehee
Brigham Young University-Hawaii
History 202-02
June 19, 2007
Friday, April 10, 2009
Kissinger’s Policy of “Total Hypocrisy”: The Past and Present Human Rights Violations of the United States Government
"I've said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize."
- Tom Lehrer [1]
During the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals the word genocide was used to describe the ultimate human rights violation: indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians on a seemingly unimaginable scale. Unfortunately the horror of genocide is not a rare anomaly. It is a regular and increasingly prevalent phenomenon, unimaginable to the American public only because of willful ignorance. American disinterest has allowed the United States government to develop a foreign policy that tolerates, encourages, and at times perpetrates human rights violations including genocide. Henry A. Kissinger was a major developer of this policy. In order to further his career, maintain “American credibility,” create strategic alliances with corrupt regimes, and gain access to oil, copper and other resources Kissinger sabotaged the peace process of the Vietnam War, supervised the illegal bombing of Cambodia, removed democratically elected leaders of sovereign nations and replaced them with brutal dictators, and lied to the United States Congress. These historical scandals have rarely drawn the attention they warrant from American citizens or media. Never charged with any crimes, Henry Kissinger served in the cabinets of two U.S. presidents and informally advised several others including current President George W. Bush [2]. For his crimes against humanity, Henry Kissinger was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Until American citizens, journalists and media networks take a conscious interest in events and trends outside the borders of their own country, or until a more benevolent power replaces the U.S. on the world stage, policy-makers like Henry A. Kissinger will allow genocide to continue when it supports their short-sighted agendas.
In a 1979 television interview discussing America’s illegal bombing and invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger said, “It is an absurdity to say a country can occupy a part of another country, kill your people, and that then you are violating its neutrality when you respond against the foreign troops that are on that neutral territory. It is total hypocrisy.”[3] Whether or not this statement is historically or philosophically accurate, “total hypocrisy” is a fitting description of many aspects of U.S. foreign policy since Kissinger rose to power in the Richard Nixon Administration.
Henry Kissinger’s appointment as Nixon’s national security advisor in 1968 surprised many who knew him to be a vocal critic of Nixon and loyal supporter of his Republican competition, Senator Rockefeller. “[Before his appointment] a wire service reporter asked Henry what he thought of Nixon as a man… ‘Ridiculous,’ Kissinger said. The reporter pressed him and asked for his opinion of Nixon as President. ‘Even more ridiculous,’ Kissinger added.”[4] Although he was offered a position in Nixon’s campaign team before the election, Kissinger declined. Soon after Nixon won, however, Kissinger joined his administration and became the most powerful national security advisor in history. A biography written about Kissinger in 1972 explained this inconsistency by emphasizing Kissinger’s surprise at Nixon’s offer.
Kissinger was astonished to get a call from...Nixon's personal aid...Halfway through the conversation, Kissinger began to realize...the President-elect of the United States was offering this German-Jewish stranger the most important job in foreign policy...After he got over the shock and the surprise, he was impressed...They would try to end a war, make some friends, and remedy America's shrinking stature...It took less than a month for Kissinger to become not only the most powerful figure on foreign policy in this country, but the second most powerful man in the United States government"[5].
Most modern historians tell a different story. Kissinger flew to France to advise Lyndon B. Johnson’s delegates during the 1968 peace talks with North Vietnam. Gaining access to privileged information, he began working for both the Johnson Administration (Vice President Hubert Humphrey was running on the Democratic platform) and Richard Nixon in order to secure a place for himself with whoever won. According to Daniel Davidson, one of President Johnson’s delegates in France, in October of 1968 Kissinger offered him a job in the next administration, “regardless of the President’s name.”[6]
Kissinger secretly contacted Nixon on September 10, and in a series of communications warned him that Johnson’s delegates were close to reaching an agreement with the North Vietnamese, but did not want to tell the South Vietnamese until the terms were final.[7] Knowing a peace agreement would favor his opponent, Nixon opened a clandestine communication channel with President Thieu of South Vietnam and asked him not to sign the peace treaty. A potential end to the Vietnam War put Humphrey ahead in the polls [8], but 3 days before the election President Thieu refused to join the peace talks. According to Davidson, “Certainly one reason is the advice they got from Nixon’s people. It is clear they were being told to hold out and not go to Paris."[9] FBI documents released later prove Nixon explicitly told South Vietnam, “Hold on, we are gonna win.”[10] Nixon prevailed in the election by a margin of less than 1%[11] and the war continued until 1973.
Kissinger was rewarded handsomely for undermining the Johnson peace talks, an act that bordered on treason. President Nixon structured his administration to give his National Security Advisor an exceptional amount of power. A popular joke in the 1970s was: “Remember! If anything should happen to Kissinger, then Nixon would be President.”[12] The power he amassed under Nixon gave Kissinger the celebrity, access and contacts he needed to remain in the administration of Gerald Ford after Watergate forced Nixon to resign. He also used his political connections to begin a successful international consulting firm in the 1980s. The cost of his success was “four more years of an unwinnable and undeclared and murderous war, which was to spread before it burned out, and was to end on the same terms and conditions as had been on the table in the fall of 1968.”[13] According to the Pentagon there were 31,205 American, 86,101 South Vietnamese, and 475,609 “Enemy” casualties between 1968 and 1972.[14]
Nixon had promised during his presidential campaign to find a just and honorable end to the Vietnam War if elected, and his administration began discussing how to resolve the conflict as soon as he assumed office. In their first month in office, Kissinger and Nixon also drafted a plan to illegally extend the war into Cambodia, first through secret bombing missions and later by installing a new government in a CIA supported coup and launching a full-scale invasion. These plans ignored Cambodia’s neutral status and another Nixon campaign promise: “I would not invade North Vietnam, and incidentally I would not invade any of the other countries in the area of Vietnam."[15]
Under the United States Constitution, the bombing of a neutral country is an act of war that requires approval from the legislative branch. Neither the American public nor Congress wanted an extension of the war and would not have authorized Cambodian incursions.[16] Kissinger and his staff kept Cambodia off the bombing logs by giving pilots targets in South Vietnam and issuing new coordinates for bombing sites in Cambodia after the B-52 bombers were in the air. The pilots reported they had bombed South Vietnam, and the Cambodian targets were never included in the manifest.[17]
Sites chosen to be carpet bombed, often with the intimate involvement of Kissinger[18], were each home to up to 1,640 Cambodian civilians. The administration had full knowledge that “some Cambodian casualties would be sustained” and that “the surprise effect of attacks could tend to increase casualties, as could the probable lack of protective shelters around Cambodian homes."[19]
The bombing campaign began as it was to go on-with full knowledge of its effect on civilians, and with flagrant deceit by Mr. Kissinger in this precise respect…Kissinger was lying when he later told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that areas of Cambodia selected for bombing were “unpopulated”…[A]s many as 350,000 civilians in Laos, and 600,000 in Cambodia, lost their lives. (These are not the highest estimates.) Figures for refugees are several multiples of that. In addition, the widespread use of toxic chemical defoliants created a massive health crisis which naturally fell most heavily on children, nursing mothers, the aged and the already infirm, and which persists to this day.[20]
After fourteen months and 110,000 tons of bombs, the illegal war had disrupted the nation’s agricultural systems and a widespread famine killed thousands more. Approximately 2 million Cambodians flooded into overcrowded cities like Phnom Penh for protection.[21]
Failing to destroy North Vietnamese sanctuaries, the CIA deposed King Sihanouk, who insisted on remaining neutral, and installed General Lon Nol to head the government of Cambodia. No one in the Nixon Administration knew anything about Lon Nol. “There was to be no pause to see whether Sihanouk might return or even whether the new government was at all competent."[25] It wasn’t. Lacking the support of the peasants, who backed the deposed monarch, Lon Nol used racist propaganda to make Vietnamese-Cambodians into scapegoats. Although he admitted “that the murder of Vietnamese civilians was not essential to his revolution,"[26] thousands were gunned down.
Lon Nol attacked the North Vietnamese, but proved to be an ineffective military leader. The U.S. sent Cambodian soldiers who had been well-trained in South Vietnam to help, but Lon Nol saw them as a threat to his power and sent them to the front lines to be killed off.[27] Nixon decided to invade, reportedly saying, “Let’s go blow the hell out of them.”[28] Several of Kissinger’s staff members resigned in protest, including Roger Morris:
I felt that the Cambodian invasion was a betrayal of the President's pledge to seek an honorable and just peace in Vietnam. I knew that peace was within our graps. I was intimately involved in the negotiations. I knew that the other side was ready to agree, that we were ready to agree, and that the Cambodian invasion really destroyed all of that...devastated it for years to come, and literally cost tens of thousands of American lives [and] hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives.[29]
Young Americans feared being drafted into a war they strongly opposed and began to riot. Universities across the nation shut down. At Kent State, national guardsmen opened fire on protestors, killing four students. Despite the public outcry about the American invasion, little emphasis was placed on the effect it had on Cambodian civilians.
Sihanouk later allied himself with the Khmer Rouge communists against Lon Nol. Khmer Rouge documents note that they joined “in a public alliance with Sihanouk for propaganda purposes.”[30] Along with the devastating bombings, Sihanouk’s endorsement gave the Khmer Rouge enough recruits to take control of Phnom Penh in 1975. According to Ben Kiernan, director of the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project, the effect of the U.S. covert war on the Khmer Rouge recruiting tactics has important parallels with the war in Iraq.
In mid-March 2003, when asked whether the approaching US invasion of Iraq would provoke more terrorism, Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman replied in the negative, stating that "the terrorists already hate us."...Pol Pot already hated America in 1969. But he was only the leader of a small group of 1,500 Khmer Rouge insurgents in the Cambodian jungle. Nixon and Kissinger's invasion of neutral Cambodia in 1970 and their escalation of the pre-1970 "secret bombing"...provided Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leadership with the windfall they needed. The CIA's Directorate of Operations reported on 2 May 1973 that the communists had launched a new recruiting drive: "They are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propoganda."...From 1969 to 1973, the Khmer Rouge forces grew from 1,500 to over 200,000 soldiers....On the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, a senior US counter-intelligence official was reported as saying that "An American invasion of Iraq is already being used as a recruitment tool by Al Qaeda and other groups...And it is a very effective tool."...Ten days into the war, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak said that as a result of the invasion of Iraq, "If there was one bin Laden before, there will be 100 bin Ladens in the future." Someone might explain the difference to Senator Lieberman.[31]
The U.S. increased the intensity of the bombing raids to protect Lon Nol from communists until they had dropped as many bombs in Cambodia as they had in Japan during the whole of World War II.[32] This was counter-productive; North Vietnamese strongholds were never fully destroyed and the extreme number of casualties drove surviving peasants into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, which was ten times more powerful after the American incursion into Cambodia than it had been before. “American policy in those years towards Cambodia helped create the conditions, perhaps the only conditions, in which the Khmer Rouge [could come] to power."[33] After taking control of Phnom Penh, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge soldiers emptied the cities and forced all Cambodians into the countryside. Government leaders, intellectuals and city-dwellers were executed by the thousands. By 1979 between 1.5 and 3 million[34] Cambodians had died of starvation, disease, and systematic eradication.
During the seventies Kissinger organized kidnappings, assassinations and a CIA-backed military coup in Chile to overthrow the results of a legitimate, democratic election in which a socialist, Salvador Allende, became president. Kissinger installed Augusto Pinochet as dictator, beginning one of the most ruthless governments in South American history. He justified his illegal interference as a way to keep Chile from “go[ing] communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”[35] It is more likely that Kissinger overthrew Allende to protect the corporate interests of Pepsi and IT&T, who relied on the Chilean natural resources and industry that Allende threatened to nationalize.[36] After all, when Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge communists, largely due to the irresponsibility of the Nixon Administration, Kissinger did nothing. Cambodia had none of the natural resources and corporate interests that attracted Kissinger’s attention in Chile.
Cambodia also lacked strategic alliances and was therefore ignored, while Pakistani General Yahya Kahn received a polite note from Kissinger “thanking him for his ‘delicacy and tact’"[37] after his army killed his political opponent and 500,000 to 3 million of his supporters, using “rape, murder, dismemberment and the state murder of children…as deliberate methods of repression and intimidation.”[38] According to historian Lawrence Lifschultz, one reason for the response of the Nixon administration was that “We had to show China that we would respect a mutual friend. …Support for Pakistan in its bloody civil war was supposed to demonstrate to China that the U.S. ‘was a reliable government to deal with.’"[39]
In 1974 Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal and Kissinger became both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under President Gerald Ford. While the Khmer Rouge communists forced their way through Phnom Penh and began their genocidal purges in 1975, Ford and Kissinger gave guns and other military aid to Indonesian President Sudharto. Indonesia had both a strategic position and resources such as coal and oil.[40] Although Congress only authorized the donated weapons to be used for defense, Kissinger and Ford met with President Sudharto in Jakarta and told him otherwise.
The release of previously classified documents makes it clear that former President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in a face-to-face meeting in Jakarta, gave then-President Suharto a green light for the 1975 invasion of East Timor...."Kissinger [suggested] the invasion might be framed in a way acceptable to U.S. law..."It is important that whatever you do succeed quickly...the U.S. Administration would be able to influence the reaction in America if whatever happens [occurs] after we return [to the U.S.]. If you have made plans, we will do our best to keep everyone quiet until the President returns home."[41]
Amnesty International has called the subsequent massacre in East Timor one of the worst cases of genocide in the twentieth century.[42] The only live record of the initial invasion by Indonesian soldiers is a Red Cross radio transmission, in which a voice says in English, “…a lot of people are being killed, I repeat, indiscriminately."[43] According to senior CIA Officer in Indonesia in 1975 C. Philip Liechty, “We were providing most of the weaponry, helicopters, logistical support, food, uniforms, ammunition, [and] all the expendables that the Indonesians needed to be able to conduct this war. You can be 100% certain that Suharto was explicitly given the green light to do what he did.”[44] Between 1976 and 1999, 230,000 East Timorese were killed. Kissinger would later benefit economically for helping President Suharto. In 1995, he was appointed to the board of directors of Freeport-McMoRan, operator of the world’s biggest gold mine in the Indonesian rainforest. Kissinger lobbies for and consults with Freeport-McMoRan through his international consulting firm, Kissinger Associates.[45]
In 1999, when Indonesia buckled under international pressure and allowed a plebiscite,[46] East Timor voted to be independent and Indonesia responded by backing militias that rampaged the territory.[47] Few Americans heard about the catastrophe.
While America’s mainstream media recently reported the hard-won independence of East Timor, they neglected to acknowledge the covert involvement of the United States in the region. Critics…attributed the press silence to government and corporate interests. They pointed out that the world’s leading oil conglomerates were vitally interested in the oil and gas reserves under the Timor Sea. A petroleum industry trade magazine, Offshore, reported in May 1996 that companies poised to exploit oil reserves off Indonesia and East Timor included Exxon, Conoco, Chevron, Texaco, Maxus Energy, Marathon, Arco, and Unocal.[48]
Unocal is making headlines again after reports surfaced (mostly in foreign news agencies) that the interim president of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai worked for the CIA in the 1980s, was once a paid consultant at Unocal, and that the Bush Administration may have planned to invade Afghanistan before the September 11th attacks in order to build a Unocal pipeline there.[49] Like Lon Nol and Pinochet, Karzai may have been chosen for his willingness to advance American interests instead of his competence, leadership ability or foresight.
Kissinger and President Bush have more in common than a historical knack for adopting foreign policies that promote their business agendas. They both also prioritize America’s position of hegemony above ideological considerations such as honesty and democracy. As Roger Morris noted “Kissinger’s definition of an honorable end or of a decent end to the war I think had nothing much to do with honor or with decency. It had to do with American credibility."[50] His position as one of the most powerful men in the world was dependent on America’s hegemony, and Kissinger encouraged Nixon to prove to North Vietnam that he would use extreme force to end the war. The administration believed the madman theory, using “excessive force” in a deliberately unpredictable and terrifying fashion, was an invaluable instrument of policy.[51] Several organizations today employ the same technique, including the Bush Administration and Al Qaeda. Most Americans agree “the hijackings on 9/11 made the global community more aware of the potential threat posed by modern-day transnational terrorism, for which high casualty counts are an objective."[52] Fewer Americans seem to recognize that, like Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld prioritizes American credibility over humanitarian considerations, and, like terrorists, believes that the ends justify the means.
Donald Rumsfeld’s military policy is clear: to use, in his words, “the force necessary to prevail, plus some.” This advocates unnecessary—that is, excessive—force. Rumsfeld’s policy also rejects “promising not to permit…collateral damage” (New York Times 14 October 2002). The policy was written before the invasion of Iraq, in the knowledge that most of the world considers military action causing excessive “collateral damage” to be a war crime.[53]
Kissinger finally negotiated a peace agreement with North Vietnam in 1972. Two months later, the United States savagely bombed Hanoi and Haiphong, dropping 40,000 tons of bombs and hitting a hospital and other civilian centers.[54] Known as the Christmas Bombing, the attack was the war’s heaviest raid in North Vietnam. Its purpose was to convince the South Vietnamese that the United States would uphold the peace agreement. “They bombed the North Vietnamese simply to persuade the South Vietnamese that they meant it. It was a demonstration bombing. It was a public relations mass murder from the sky.”[55]
In January of 1973 Kissinger signed a peace agreement with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho. Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize that year for ending hostilities, but Le Duc Tho refused to accept because, “there was no peace in Vietnam.”[56] Peace had not been Kissinger’s motive to end the war: he was trying to salvage what he could of America’s reputation. “As Kissinger is supposed to have said…Our goal is to have a decent interval between the withdrawal of American forces and the rape of the first virgin.”[57] President George W. Bush recently echoed this attitude in his oft-mocked comment, “The definition of success as I described is sectarian violence down. Success is not no violence [sic].”[58] These comments constitute a noticeable shift from remarks Bush made in 2003: “Most of Iraq is calm and…on the road to democracy and freedom not experienced in decades continues. Only in isolated areas are there still attacks."[59] Since 2003, violence and insurgencies have increased dramatically. With dwindling international and public support for the war, the Bush Administration has changed its definition of peace and success in Iraq to avoid admitting failure.
Similarities between Vietnam and Iraq are not coincidental. “President Bush is a big fan of Kissinger,"[60] and Nixon’s right-hand man is a frequent advisor to the President on the Iraq War. When President Bush finally organized an independent 9/11 Commission, he chose Henry Kissinger, then in his 80s, to head it. This caused outrage among the families of 9/11 victims, who had requested the commission to get honest answers about how the Bush Administration had handled the national crisis. After a meeting with the families in which one 9/11 widow asked Kissinger if any of the clients of his consulting firm were named Bin Laden[61], Kissinger resigned from the commission. He agreed to share his confidential list of clients with the families, but never specified if he would share the entire list. President Bush and Vice President Cheney vehemently opposed the creation of the Independent Commission, provided only $14 million for the investigation (compared to $100 million given to the independent investigation of President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky), and would not agree to speak under oath when interviewed[62].
The tendency of leaders to obscure or ignore the collateral damage caused by their controversial actions appears to be a persistent characteristic of U.S. foreign policy, and is especially visible in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American mainstream media has been criticized for minimizing their coverage of civilian casualties and other devastating results of war. New studies estimate that between March 2003 and July 2006 655,000 more Iraqi civilians died than would have “if the country had not been invaded, occupied, and wracked by sectarian violence.”[63] The number of civilians killed in the first 6 months of fighting in Afghanistan, 70% of whom were women and children[64], roughly equaled the death toll of the September 11 attacks. When University of New Hampshire economics professor Marc Herold estimated that over 4,000 civilians died in U.S. bombings in Afghanistan the story was largely ignored. According to Time magazine, “‘In compiling the figures, Herold drew mostly on world press reports of questionable reliability’; Time went on to cite the Pentagon’s unsubstantiated claim that civilian casualties in Afghanistan were the lowest in the history of the war.”[65] CNN Chairman told his overseas correspondents to frame “civilian suffering…in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States. …It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties of hardship in Afghanistan.”[66] According to columnist Ben Shapiro, “The United States has achieved an important step in the war against terror: overcoming our own aversion to civilian casualties in order to achieve victory.”[67] Fox anchor Brit Hume said, “The fact that some people are dying, is that really news? I think not.”[68] Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, when asked if he knew how many Iraqi civilians had died because of the first American attacks there in the first Gulf War, replied, “It’s really not a number that I’m interested in.”[69] Instead of confronting government officials about their failure to protect innocent lives, the news media has been bribed, coerced and bullied into promoting a sense of apathy in regard to human rights violations.
Ray Glenn, copyeditor of a Florida newspaper wrote to his staff in 2001, “DO NOT USE photos on Page 1 showing civilian casualties from the US war in Afghanistan. Our sister paper in Fort Walton has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails and the like. The only exception is if the US hits an orphanage, school or similar facility and kills scores or hundreds of children.”[70] Journalists have not only been silenced, but also fired and even killed because of their accounts of atrocities in the war zone. Dan Rather admitted to the BBC that “U.S. press coverage of bin Laden and war has been twisted into an unquestioning outlet of official PR. As a result, America public debate has been reduced to shouting between conspiracy theorists and willfully ignorant ‘patriots.’”[71]
What has the ethnocentric overtones of government and media done to the American psyche? Time magazine reporter Nina Burleigh has learned from her experiences in Iraq that “the rest of the world knows far more about America than we know about ourselves, let alone what we know about them…And this triumph of ignorance means that Americans can’t even comprehend what motivates those who hate us.”[72] When troops first invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, they expected to be greeted as heroes[73]. Perhaps because there has not been a war fought on U.S. soil in over 100 years, Americans don’t understand the lasting effects of our military actions in Iraq during the Gulf War of the 1990s. More than 500,000 Iraqi children have died because of U.S. sanctions, including our deliberate attempt to prevent civilians from obtaining sanitary water after purposely destroying the country’s water system a decade ago.[74] U.S. actions directly violate the Geneva Convention, which specifically prohibits attacking, destroying or removing objects indispensable to the civilian population, including “drinking water installation and supplies and irrigation works,”[75] and constituted a serious breach of international law.
Documents have been obtained from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which prove that the pentagon was fully aware of the mortal impacts on civilians in Iraq and was actually monitoring the degradation of Iraq’s water supply. …In more than one document, discussion of the likely outbreaks of diseases and how they affect civilians, ‘particularly children,’ is discussed in great detail. The final document titled, ‘Iraq: Assessment of Current health Threats and Capabilities’…discusses the development of a counter-propaganda strategy that would blame Saddam Hussein for the lack of safe water in Iraq [J2].
Many Americans have forgotten that for the past two decades, the United States has been playing Middle Eastern governments against each other, arming different, conflicting groups to promote American interests when it is convenient for corporate or political agendas. The murderous regime of Saddam Hussein was enabled by American funding and military aid, and it was not so long ago that Donald Rumsfeld was shaking hands and cutting deals with Saddam in Iraq.[76] The United States Central Intelligence Agency armed Osama bin Laden and other rebel Mujahedeen in the 1980s (through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence) to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.[77] The U.S. continued financing the ISI in Pakistan until 2001, when Pakistan’s secret service channeled funds to Ahmed Umar Syed Sheikh, who in turn dispersed the money to Mohammed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the 9/11 high-jacking attacks.[78] The foreign policy Kissinger contributed to in the 1970s and 1980s has had a devastating impact on countries in every corner of the world, and the backlash from our short-sighted actions now threatens America as well. U.S. military actions in the Middle East over the past few decades, along with the implications of “the huge international arms trade (63 percent of it from the U.S. in 1997), with much of it flowing to repressive regimes in the Middle East,”[79] are coming back to haunt us, but many Americans have already forgotten, or never bothered to learn, about the issues that are creating such a volatile environment for troops and civilians in the Middle East.
As Americans struggle to understand the Anti-American sentiments that now pervade much of the outside world, the ironic situation the United States has created for itself through conspiratorial leaders like Henry Kissinger and ethically shallow foreign policy is not lost on our enemies. In a translated confession Osama bin Laden explains what so many Americans don’t understand: why he wants to destroy “democracy.”
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised [sic] and displaced. I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy…And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children. And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance…Is defending oneself and punishing the aggressor in kind, objectionable terrorism? If it is such, then it is unavoidable for us. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy….[T]hose who say that al-Qaida has won against the administration in the White House or that the administration has lost in this war have not been precise, because when one scrutinizes [sic] the results, one cannot say that al-Qaida is the sole factor in achieving those spectacular gains. Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations - whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction - has helped al-Qaida to achieve these enormous results.”[80]
Sixty years after the Nazi Holocaust, the U.S. is only beginning to realize “that violence begets violence, or that the double standards and hegemonism of the U.S. government’s foreign policy were part of a broader pattern from which the evil acts of September 11 emerged.”[81] The media’s inability or unwillingness to ask hard-hitting questions and report the historical mistakes made by the United States of America may be why it took decades to connect Henry Kissinger to many of his illegal or unethical actions, and why important controversies in the Bush Administration are largely ignored in American news despite numerous and increasingly worrisome international reports about Bush’s corporate ties to the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, Afghanis and Iraqis have died because of Bush’s decisions since he took office in the controversial 2000 election, but his personal fortune has blossomed. He has changed his stance on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and warnings he received before September 11, and has downplayed the cost of human life due to military exploits.
According to Rene Lemarchand, comparative genocide expert and professor emeritus at the University of Florida, one reason mass murder continues to occur is "our abysmal ignorance of the events leading to genocide and our inability or unwilligness to take appropriate steps to prevent the worst from happening."[82] Lemarchand goes on to expose one of the dangerous tendencies of the American public: disregarding the outside world. "Just consider some of the countries where the worst killings have happened since the Holocaust--Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi. I don't think there is one American out of a thousand who could have identified these countries on a map of the world before [they] were the site of mass murder" [83]. Overlooking the atrocities committed by other countries is bad, but failing to see the crimes of our own leaders is much worse, and for decades the American public has allowed bad politics to devastate faraway nations. In Cambodia, Vietnam, East Timor, Chile, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, the consequences of U.S. actions have been largely ignored. Until the American people, government, and media recognize the needless suffering our government policies have caused, begin to empathize with those who are angry at us instead of vilifying them, and impose a policy of American accountability instead of credibility, we will continue to create unwinnable wars for ourselves and our fellow human beings.
[1] Tony Davis, "Stop Clapping, This is Serious," The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 March 2003 [article on-line]; available from http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/28/1046407753895.html; Internet; accessed 15 June 2007.
[2]"Bob Woodward: Bush Misleads on Iraq," CBS News, 1 October 2006 [article on-line]; available from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/28/60minutes/main2047607.shtml; Internet; accessed 12 June 2007).
[3] Alex Gibney, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, British Broadcasting Company, 2003.
[4] Charles R. Ashman, Kissinger: The Adventures of Super-Kraut (New York: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1972), 88.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Gibney, Trials.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, (London: Verso, 2001), 13.
[11] Gibney, Trials.
[12] Ashman, Super-Kraut, 13-14.
[13] Hitchens, Trials, 15.
[14] Ibid., 41.
[15] Gibney, Trials.
[16] Ibid.
[17] William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002) 30.
[18] Gibney, Trials.
[19] Shawcross, Sideshow, 29.
[20] Hitchens, Trials, 35.
[21] Gibney, Trials.
[22] Cambodian Genocide Program, Yale
[23] Shawcross, Sideshow, 33.
[24] Gibney, Trials.
[25] Shawcross, Sideshow, 128.
[26] Ibid., 132.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Gibney, Trials.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, (London: Thetford Press Limited, 1985), 287.
[31] Ben Kiernan, "'Collateral Damage' from Cambodia to Iraq," Antipode (November 2003): 850-851.
[32] Gibney, Trials.
[33] Ibid.
[34] "Cambodian Genocide Program: U.S. Involvement in the Cambodian War and Genocide," Yale University Cambodian Genocide Program, 2006; available from http://www.yale.edu/cgp/us.html; Internet; accessed 10 June 2007.
[35] Gibney, Trials.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Hitchens, Trials, 47.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Ibid., 48.
[40] Gibney, Trials.
[41] Peter Phillips, Censored 2003: The Top 25 Censored Stories (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 77-78.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Gibney, Trials.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Phillips, Censored, 163
[46] Phillips, Censored, 78.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid., 162.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Gibney, Trials.
[51] Marilyn Young, "The Mad Bombers," Diplomatic History (2000): 365.
[52] Todd Sandler, and Walter Enders, "September 11 and Its Aftermath," International Studies Review (March 2005): 166.
[53] Kiernan, Collateral Damage, 848.
[54] Gibney, Trials.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Gibney, Trials.
[58] David Welna, "White House, Congress Negotiate over Iraq Bill," NPR, 3 May 2007 [article on-line]; available from www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9972610; Internet; accessed 13 June 2007.
[59] "Bush on Iraq: Key Quotes," The Wall Street Journal Online, 11 January 2007 [article on-line]; available from http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116836283867971532-3sS0gmGhw1K6wL1Qpjh_04oZItc_20070117.html?mod=blogs%20; Internet; accessed 13 June 2007.
[60] “Bob Woodward: Bush Misleads on Iraq."
[61] Kyle Hence, and Ray Nowosielski, 9/11: Press for Truth, Ryko Distribution, 2006.
[62] Ibid.
[63] Richard Byrne, "New Study of Iraq's Civilian Deaths Confirms Earlier Estimates," Chronicle of Higher Education (October 2006): 23.
[64] Marc W. Herold, "US Bombing and Afghan Civilian Deaths: The Official Neglect of 'Unworthy' Bodies," International Journal of Urband and Regional Research (2002): 631.
[65] Phillips, Censored, 129-130
[66] Ibid.
[67] Kiernan, Collateral Damage, 852.
[68] Ibid.
[69] Danilo Mandic, "The Idealistic Nation," The Powell Problem, March 2004 [article on-line]; available from http://www.princeton.edu/~in/march04/mandic.htm; Internet; accessed 13 June 2007.
[70] Kiernan, Collateral Damage, 851.
[71] Phillips, Censored, 48-9.
[72] Ibid., 137.
[73] Michael Moore. Fahrenheit 9/11. Lions Gate Films, 2004
[74] Phillips, Censored, 50-51.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Kiernan, Collateral Damage, 854.
[77] “Complete 911 Timeline,” Cooperative Research, 2007; available from http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/project.jsp?project=911_project; Internet; accessed 13 June 2007.
[78] Ibid.
[79] Phillips, Censored, 142
[80] "Transcript: Translation of Bin Laden's Videotaped Message," The Washington Post, 1 November 2004 [article on-line]; available from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16990-2004Nov1.html; Internet; accessed 13 June 2007.
[81] Phillips, Censored, 132
[82] Daisy Sindelar, "World: Post-Holocaust World Promises 'Never Again'--But Genocide Persists," Radio Free Europe, 26 January 2005 [article on-line]; available from http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/01/007b55cc-b4c6-4ed5-8b19-ae4a5b02f060.html; Internet; accessed 15 June 2007.
[83] Ibid.
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