In a just world, Henry Kissinger would have died in prison. Or, he might have been executed. After World War II we executed Japanese leaders who had less blood on their hands than Kissinger. Telford Taylor, who had been chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, reflected that if the standards of Nuremberg and Manila (site of the Japanese war crimes trials) had been applied, there would have been a “very strong possibility” that the American leadership waging war in Indochina “would come to the same end that [Japanese chief militarist Yamashita] did.” But “we” are a superpower, and so it is we who define the realities and make the rules under which our erstwhile Japanese enemies could be tried as war criminals, while Kissinger is regarded not as a mass murderer, but a great statesman. A tough, far-seeing, unsentimental realist. And, indeed, he was a great statesman—the American empire’s most famously brilliant and ruthless strategist.
I’m not going to go into a litany of Kissinger’s crimes. I could cite Bangladesh and Chile and East Timor. But it’s enough just to know that Kissinger happily passed on to our armed forces Nixon’s order to bomb Cambodia literally indiscriminately: “everything that flies on everything that moves.” According to one careful estimate, the civilian death toll between 1969 and 1973 was somewhere around 100,000 unfortunate Cambodians. Not as many Laotians died; maybe just 30,000. Other estimates run much higher. And, while estimates of Vietnamese civilian deaths during the same period vary widely, they are generally very much higher. When two young aides expressed revulsion over what America was doing in Indochina, Kissinger reproached them for being insufficiently manly. We mustn’t be squeamish in the exercise of America’s imperial responsibilities. And, incidentally, in the service of Nixon’s political interests. It's pretty clear that Nixon/Kissinger deliberately prolonged the Vietnam War beyond the 1972 election so that Nixon wouldn’t get blamed for a possibly dubious-looking outcome. Not many Americans died as a result–Nixon had kept his pledge to bring most of the boys home. It was mainly Vietnamese victims of our bombing campaigns who paid the price for Nixon’s splendid victory that November.
It says a lot about our political culture that Kissinger was able to live out his life as a respected elder statesman, still consulted respectfully by presidents while getting rich on consulting fees from big-money clients eager to rub shoulders with the great man. Kissinger, it should be acknowledged, was not unique in the annals of American war criminality. American leaders exhibited a similarly callous indifference to civilian life during the Korean War. But no American leader came out of that war with a sterling reputation (except, for right-wingers, Douglas MacArthur). Kissinger emerged from the Indochina wars a foreign policy celebrity. A nation that celebrates Henry Kissinger is not a nation that can be expected to conduct a decent foreign policy.
So glad to hear all this stated, and so forthrightly. At least the Times obituary mentioned some of the moral failings of Kissinger, and today they are carrying an essay by Ben Rhodes which is highly critical of the man. For too long people simply fawned over Kissinger.
I completely agree, and I would add to his list of crimes his torpedoing in ;the early 1970s a golden opportunity to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict in coordination with the Soviet Union, which wanted to join with the US to effectively impose a two-state peace settlement. Nixon initially favored such joint action with the Soviets, but Kissinger talked him out of it.