Kissinger’s Shadow (21 page)

Even before Team B issued its final report, Cheney had worked with the Reaganite insurgents to insert a “morality plank” into the 1976 Republican platform (a better name of which might have been an “anti-Kissinger plank”), repudiating the “undue concessions” made in “secret agreements” with the Soviets. The formerly isolationist and chauvinist Republicans were now calling for a foreign policy motivated not just by defense of national interests but by a “belief in the rights of man, the rule of law, and guidance by the hand of God.” This appeared to repudiate everything that Kissinger—who as much as said that God died in the Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags—stood for.
20

Team B and its ongoing consequences were a stunning defeat for Kissinger, who started the Ford presidency supreme: his former patron Nelson Rockefeller was vice president and he held, simultaneously, the position of secretary of state and national security adviser. Kissinger even considered Rumsfeld, Ford's chief of staff, an ally, conspiring with him during some post-Nixon bureaucratic infighting. But soon, the liberal Rockefeller became a liability with the gathering forces of the New Right. In early 1975, representatives of the conservative movement met with Rumsfeld and said they would hold Ford personally responsible “for any leftward drift” led by Rockefeller.
21
Perhaps Rumsfeld, at that moment himself considered a “liberal,” sensed that the future belonged to the conservatives. In any case, he soon sided with the militarists against Kissinger. Kissinger later complained about Rumsfeld's “ambitions.” He was, Kissinger said, “the rottenest person he had known in government.”
22

*   *   *

There were, without doubt, dissimilarities between Kissinger's diplomatic philosophy and the “ideological élan” of the Reaganites, which Kissinger himself pointed out. Neoconservatives disdain history, Kissinger said in 1999: “Tactics bored them; they discerned no worthy goals for American foreign policy short of total victory.… Even after the neoconservatives had achieved major influence within the Reagan ascendancy, they continued their assault by insisting on a version of history that lures the United States away from the need to face complexity.”
23

It might appear on first read that Kissinger, considering his foreign policy metaphysics, is drawing a distinction without a difference. After all, he had long insisted that statesmen not be paralyzed by the past, that they act with resolution to bend history to their will. “We create our own reality,” said a Bush staffer to justify the invasion of Iraq. The West needs men who can “create their own reality,” Kissinger said four decades earlier.

But there was a difference. Kissinger burdened his own action-oriented philosophy of history with the weight, or “element,” of tragedy, with the awareness that in the end human ambitions are always frustrated and happiness always stymied. “Life is suffering,” he wrote in 1950, “birth involves death.” And for all his insistence that human interpretation of reality could never be anything other than relative and subjective, Kissinger did think (or at least he said he thought) that reality imposed restraints and limits; however important it was for great leaders to act on hunches and demonstrate resolve, it was equally important to pay attention to those restraints and limits (if only so as not to get bogged down in a series of energy-, resource-, and will-sapping crises that divert from larger goals). This, above all, is what drove both the intellectuals and the rank-and-file of the New Right crazy, why the Zumwalt story resonated so deeply with movement conservatives. Kissinger, having lost Vietnam and reversed course in southern Africa, reminded them of mortality and vulnerability, that their will-to-infinity was constrained by social reality—not to mention what Kissinger called the tragic element of human affairs. The secretary of state had a “predilection,” as one conservative columnist, syndicated in smalltown, heartland newspapers, summed up why the Right disliked Kissinger, for “walking with tragedy.” “Subconsciously, he thinks the U.S. is destined to lose.”
24

Then there was Kissinger's habit, which by 1975 had become marked in his public speeches, of referring to the “fact” or the “reality” of “interdependence”—a word that provoked conservatives almost as much as did détente. We live, Kissinger said, in “a new international environment—a world of multiple centers of power, of ideological differences both old and new, clouded by nuclear peril and marked by the new imperatives of interdependence.” “American policy” is based not on “confrontation” but on the “consciousness of global interdependence as the basis of the ultimate fulfillment of national objectives.” “A world of interdependence.” “The structure of global interdependence.” “The big problem is to bring the nations of the world together in recognition of the fact of interdependence.” “The awareness of our interdependence.” “Today's interdependent world.” “Increasing interdependence.” “Interdependence impels international co-operation.” “Interdependence imposes,” Kissinger said, obligations.

Reporter: “Mr. Secretary, you spoke a great deal about interdependence in your speech.” Secretary Kissinger: “Yes.”
25

In a recent book,
The Age of Fracture
, the Princeton intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers echoes Kissinger's sense that the Reagan White House represented a new kind of presidency, a qualitative leap into a different realm of public symbolism. “No president before Reagan had invested belief itself with such extravagant power and possibilities. In Reagan's urgency-filled speeches of the 1960s and early 1970s the enemies were institutionally and sociologically palpable: the Kremlin and its ‘anti-heap of totalitarianism,' the planners and welfare-state advocates, the forces of ‘anarchy and insurrection' on the Berkeley campus.”
26
I would add Henry Kissinger to this list of tangible enemies to be vanquished.

Yet however much they disliked him and what he stood for, the New Right couldn't dispose of Kissinger so easily. His intellectual defense of war at a moment, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the idea of war was most vulnerable was too important. Over the course of his long career he articulated a powerful set of assumptions and arguments that would continue to justify bold action in the world, up to and beyond the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

What Reagan and his followers did, then, was to keep Kissingerism by splitting it in two. They claimed as their own the half that emphasized that the human condition was radical freedom, that decline was not inevitable, that the course of history could be swayed by the will of purposeful men. Rodgers writes that “by the time Reagan entered the White House, freedom's nemesis had migrated into the psyche. Freedom's deepest enemy was pessimism: the mental undertow of doubt, the paralyzing specter of limits, the ‘cynic who's trying to tell us we're not going to get any better.'” Into Reagan's speeches slipped an “enchanted, disembedded, psychically involute sense of freedom” celebrating the “limitless possibilities of self and change.”
27

As to the rest of Kissingerism—the part that said that history was tragedy, that life was suffering, birth death, that existence was, at the end of the day, meaningless, and that individuals come into the world trapped in a web of wants, necessities, demands, and obligations—that half was for the world's other peoples, those who would be sacrificed in a revived Cold War. For those peoples, in Angola, Mozambique, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran and other frontline states, the Reaganites would recommend an ever-increasing degree of violence so they could have freedom, like us. “America's not just a word,” Ronald Reagan said in his July 4, 1984, address, “it is a hope, a torch shedding light to all the hopeless of the world.… You know, throughout the world, the persecuted hear the word ‘America,' and in that sound they hear the sunrise, hear the rivers push, hear the cold, swift air at the top of the peak. Yes, you can hear freedom.”
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9

Cause and Effect

Values are, at best, a mode of causality. The mystery of life is limited by classifiable data; it exhausts itself in the riddle of the first cause.… Resignation as to the purposes of the universe serves as the first step toward ethical activity and the realization ensues that the meaning of history is not confined to its mere manifestations and that no causal analysis can absolve Man from giving his own content to his own existence.

—Henry Kissinger

On April 15, 1998, Pol Pot, the former leader of the Khmer Rouge, died in Cambodia, an old man with no remorse. A few months earlier, a journalist had asked him if he felt regret for the crimes committed against the Cambodian people—over a million people died after he took power in 1975. No, he answered. “My conscience is clear.” “We had to defend ourselves,” Pol Pot said, referring to the revolution's enemies.
1

Henry Kissinger has faced similar questions about his role in Cambodia. Did he have “any pangs of conscience,”
Die Zeit
asked him in 1976, about a year after the fall of Phnom Penh to Pol Pot's rebels. No, Kissinger said. North Vietnamese troops had invaded first and they were using Cambodian sanctuaries to kill American soldiers. “I may have a lack of imagination,” Kissinger told the German magazine, “but I fail to see the moral issue involved.” America, Kissinger said elsewhere, had to “defend itself.”
2

In 1979, not long after Kissinger left office, a British journalist, William Shawcross, published a best-selling book called
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia
, which called him to account not just for his illegal war but for its subsequent effects: by polarizing Cambodia with a massive bombing campaign, Shawcross argued, Kissinger created the conditions for the triumph of the Khmer Rouge. “The Khmer Rouge were born out of the inferno that American policy did much to create.”
3
The accusation gnawed at Kissinger. He devoted a considerable number of pages in each of his three memoirs, and in almost every other book he wrote, defending himself against the accusation that he was to blame for the rise of Pol Pot. Finally, by 1998, with the Cold War over and Kissinger well settled in his role as America's statesman emeritus, the matter seemed to be behind him.

But then Pol Pot died, and Kissinger once again found himself rehearsing arguments that he first started making in 1969: North Vietnam had violated Cambodia's sovereignty first; the neutral country had become a haven for enemies of the United States; and America took care not to target civilians, just Vietcong and North Vietnamese. Interviewed by the BBC about Pol Pot's legacy, Kissinger used the phrase “the so-called bombing of Cambodia.” The
Guardian
quipped the next day that this was “presumably … distinct from a proper bombing which would have destroyed the entire Cambodian infrastructure and traumatized the entire Cambodian people—not just a large proportion of both.”
4

The BBC interviewer also asked Kissinger the question “Do you feel responsible?” “Absolutely,” Kissinger replied. “I feel just as responsible as you should feel for the Holocaust because you bombed Hamburg.”

It's a fatuous answer. The Nazis, of course, had come to power
before
the British air assault on Hamburg in 1943, and they initiated the Holocaust
before
the Allies targeted that German city. The Khmer Rouge came to power
after
the carpet bombing of Cambodia. They launched their campaign of mass terror
after
Kissinger's bombing campaign.

The flimsiness of Kissinger's comparison is instructive. Foreign policy makers often invoke analogies—usually ones involving Nazis, Hitler, or Munich—for two reasons. The first is to provide a simple framing mechanism to justify action in the present. Saddam is Hitler—three words that concisely convey a world of moral and historical meaning. The second is to deflect away from methods of historical inquiry, such as cause-and-effect analysis, that might place responsibility for current crises on past policies. Kissinger has said, over and over again, that one of the worst conditions that can befall a political leader is to become “prisoner of the past,” to be overly worried about repeating mistakes.
5
Statesmen must refuse, as Kissinger has refused, to accept the proposition that the consequences of any previous action, no matter how horrific, should restrict their room to maneuver in the future. Kissinger's analogy, though, is so unpersuasive it actually achieves the opposite of its intent, forcing us to look at the relationship of cause to effect, action to reaction, and the moral responsibility that attaches to that relationship.

The bombing of Cambodia is distinct from Kissinger's other transgressions, and not just because of its magnitude of cruelty or its body count. Most of Kissinger's policies that draw censure can be justified by reason of state. Read Machiavelli—with his counsel to statesmen to act according to how the world really works as opposed to how it ideally should work—and you'll have your defense for Kissinger's support for Pinochet and the shah, his sanctioning of Suharto's invasion of East Timor, and even his military aid to Pakistan while it perpetuated genocide against Bangladesh.
*
One might support or condemn any one of these actions, but the terms of the debate would have to do with questions of national interest, political effectiveness, and whether order is a higher value than justice or vice versa. The effect of most of these policies—the blowback—is two or three steps removed from Kissinger: one could argue, as Kissinger and his supporters have argued on different occasions, that backing allied strongmen is not the same thing as sanctioning the acts they do. As to the U.S. armed slaughter of hundreds of thousands in East Timor and Bangladesh, that, Kissinger has said, would have happened no matter what he did.