Kissinger’s Shadow

by Greg Grandin

  At the same time, the strain of living under constant bombardment forced those areas under Khmer Rouge rule into suffering the Khmer Rouge imposition of an accelerated program of peasant collectivization, justified by the demands of having to survive during wartime. Emerging from the carnage was fury directed not just at United States imperialism but at the capital, Phnom Penh, the city as a symbol of decadent, urban, and industrial modernity.

  On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.”* Pol Pot’s victorious cadre immediately began to empty out the capital and other cities, deporting millions of urban dwellers mostly to the country’s northwest. Cambodia’s new rulers targeted for persecution Buddhist monks, ethnic minorities, former government loyalists, intellectuals, moderate Communists, and anyone who would stand in the way of establishing their agrarian utopia. Nearly the entire population of Cambodia was forced into rural labor camps. By the time a now unified Vietnam invaded the country in 1979, overthrew the Khmer Rouge, and put an end to the genocidal madness, as many as two million people had been murdered or had died—of starvation, exhaustion, disease, and denial of medical care.

  * * *

  Kissinger doesn’t believe that the British, by bombing Hamburg, were responsible for the Holocaust. But implied in his comparison of the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge are three assumptions worth considering.

  The first is that genocidal intent was inherent in the ideology of the Khmer Rouge since its inception, much as eliminationist anti-Semitism was inherent in the Nazi movement since it was founded. Over the years, Kissinger has offered variations of this position, including in a 1994 book titled Diplomacy: “All evidence shows that the Khmer Rouge had been fanatical ideologues as early as their student days in Paris in the 1950s. They were determined to uproot and destroy the existing Cambodian society and to impose a sort of mad utopia by exterminating everybody with the slightest ‘bourgeois’ education. To allege that they had been turned into killers by American actions has the same moral stature as would be the argument that the Holocaust had been caused by American strategic bombing of Germany.”12

  I asked Ben Kiernan about this argument, and his response was succinct and convincing: “This is irrelevant. The impact of the US bombing of rural Cambodia was not to create a genocidal ideology or political faction but to facilitate its mass recruitment and rise to power over the alternatives.” Kiernan continues: “A similar outcome didn’t happen in Vietnam despite the very intensive bombing there because no comparable extremist or genocidal faction existed in Vietnam. It did in Cambodia but would not have come to power without the US bombing.”

  Kissinger’s second assumption is that the Khmer Rouge would have come to power even without US bombing. To make this argument, Kissinger usually blames North Vietnam for intervening in Cambodian affairs and for providing aid to the Khmer Rouge. He writes in his memoir The White House Years: “It was Hanoi—animated by an insatiable drive to dominate Indochina—that organized the Khmer Rouge long before any American bombs fell on Cambodian soil; it was North Vietnamese troops who were trying to strangle Cambodia in the months before our limited attack.… Had we not invaded the sanctuaries Cambodia would have been engulfed in 1970 instead of 1975.” Then he neatly shifts blame from Hanoi to “doves” in the United States: “If anything doomed the free Cambodians, it was war weariness in the United States,” which prevented Kissinger from continuing the bombing beyond August 1973.13 “The effect of congressional restrictions was to impose an unbearable, almost vindictive constraint,” he wrote in yet another book, on “the scale of American assistance to impoverished Cambodia.” His hands tied by Congress, there was “nothing left” for Kissinger “to do other than to watch in anguish” as Cambodia eventually fell to the Khmer Rouge.14

  There are a number of problems with these statements. To begin with, Kissinger knew the Khmer Rouge were not controlled by Hanoi (nor by Peking for that matter). In fact, declassified documents reveal that Kissinger had spent the months of the bombing escalation looking to find a way to take advantage of the tensions and animosity that existed between China, North Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge to press a deal, to, in the words of his ambassador to Cambodia, “drive a wedge” between Washington’s adversaries.15

  Likewise, Kissinger in mid-1973 wasn’t waging a heroic Churchillian war to keep the Nazi-like Khmer Rouge from taking power and implementing their genocide. Quite the opposite. His goal with the intensified bombing was not specifically to keep the Khmer Rouge out, but rather help bring them into power—as part of an acceptable coalition government. “We would be prepared,” Kissinger told the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, on May 8 “for a solution analogous to Laos.”16 By this, Kissinger was referring to the Laotian government that included the Laotian Communist insurgency, Pathet Lao (which, before the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide, was seen as roughly equivalent to the Khmer Rouge). Kissinger said that if a ceasefire could be reached, he would be willing to accept “some coalition structure in Phnom Penh in which all factions are included,” including the Khmer Rouge.*

  If we accept Kissinger’s analogy—associating the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis—then he wasn’t Churchill in 1940 but Neville Chamberlain in 1938.17

  Kissinger didn’t, in 1970 or 1973, think the Khmer Rouge were the Nazis. And the notion that he would have, were it not for Congress, bombed indefinitely to save Cambodia is a myth he has conjured retroactively. That Kissinger didn’t want Congress to stop him from bombing had more to do with his relationship with Congress than it did with anything he hoped to achieve in Cambodia. It was the principle of the matter, the need to be able to conduct diplomacy unhampered in his ability to deliver on threats and offer incentives. Cambodia, as Shawcross wrote, was just a sideshow to this struggle; Kissinger planned to continue the bombing just long enough to cut a deal, including with the Khmer Rouge, and get out.*

  But it is the third assumption of Kissinger’s Nazi comparison that goes to the heart of the matter, revealing the usefulness of historical analogies in sanctioning military action: it doesn’t matter if the United States, with its bombs, created the causal conditions for the radicalization and victory of the Khmer Rouge. Even if true, his reasoning goes, that fact should have no bearing on future US policy. Think of it this way: let’s say for argument’s sake that British policy was somehow responsible for the Nazi Holocaust; does it then follow that London would be unjustified in waging war on the Nazis once the nature of their threat became evident? Of course not.

  Kissinger is in effect saying: let investigative journalists like William Shawcross and historians like Ben Kiernan establish a credible cause-and-effect relationship between his bombs and Pol Pot’s genocide. The United States has a moral responsibility to act, to refuse to be paralyzed either by the fact or the fear of blowback.

  * * *

  Kissinger got most of his critique of “cause and effect” history from Oswald Spengler, a “historian” in only the wobbliest sense of the word. Spengler played fast and loose with facts, making some up and distorting others. The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper accused him of fabricating a “civilization”—the Magian—from the whole cloth of his imagination. It was “entirely invented by him,” Trevor-Roper said, flabbergasted.18 Over the years, critics have spent a considerable amount of time pointing out passages where Spengler is wrong on the facts.

  Why should Spengler care? After all, he rejected the whole idea of logical analysis, saying that his metaphysics represented a more profound truth than the material realities of the world. “Once we grasp this distinction,” says Stuart Hughes, his intellectual biographer, then we can stop wasting our efforts trying to prove him wrong or right. “He is not writing the sort of history that most of us have been trained to think of as the only possible kind. Hence three-fourths of our objections simply fall to the ground,” missing their mark.19 “Fired by the discovery of some factual error, they have dashed off to meet him on a field of battle where he never had the slightest intention of putting in an
appearance.”*

  Kissinger learned well from Spengler. Confronted with literal-minded critics bearing facts, he responded with emotional analogies. Of course, at this point Kissinger doesn’t have to answer anyone’s questions. No one is going to force him to account for his many errors and inconsistencies, for the faultiness of his facts and logic, for the way he deduces justification for his actions based on his own theories and legitimates the hardest response based on the most fragmentary of evidence.

  But sometimes he does get to first principles. Like when he used his experience bombing Cambodia to make a case for why, in 1998, we needed to bomb Iraq.

  10

  Onward to the Gulf

  For if the trumpet gives forth an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for battle?

  —Henry Kissinger at the 1980 Republican National Convention

  Just as he did with Nixon in 1968, Kissinger in 1980 quickly became comfortable with the inconceivable. In April, with the Republican primaries under way, Kissinger was actively lobbying for a spot with any of the main Republican candidates vying to challenge Carter. And as Reagan began to take the lead, he keyed his public remarks to the front-runner’s foreign policy statements. Through the primaries, though, the Reagan campaign wouldn’t return his calls. “Many people have asked me if I would want to go through it all again,” he told a group of newspaper editors, referring to his time as secretary of state. “The problem is nobody has really asked me to.” “I’m not totally discouraged,” he joked. “There’s still some hope.”1

  When Reagan did secure the nomination, Kissinger was asked to speak at the Republican National Convention. “We all now turn to Ronald Reagan as the trustee of our hopes,” he told the crowd of delegates who had gathered in Detroit and who held him in only slightly less contempt than they did Jimmy Carter.2 Under Reagan’s leadership, Kissinger said, “we will overcome the storms ahead; we will hold our heads high and we will build that better world at peace that fulfills the dreams of mankind and the high ideals of our people.”*

  * * *

  It gives a sense of just how much our standards have shifted that what Thomas Schelling and his Harvard colleagues considered a commonsensical wrong nearly fifty years ago—that the United States had no right to use the potential threat of terrorism to justify military action against a sovereign country it wasn’t at war with—has now become a self-evident moral right. Today, exactly such reasoning is used to sanction the US military’s involvement in, by some estimates, seventy-four global conflicts. The journalist Nick Turse doubles that number, reporting that elite US forces are operating in 134 countries (a more than 123 percent increase since Obama became president).3

  Kissinger played a key role in shifting those standards. His circumvention of the bureaucracy, neutralizing overly cautious area experts and sidestepping congressional oversight—by, for instance, waging secret wars, relying on proxy nations like Iran, South Africa, Brazil, and Israel to conduct covert operations, and cutting deals with dictators like Suharto in Indonesia and Pinochet in Chile—would be replicated by his successors in the Reagan (and, later, George W. Bush) administrations.* We know some of what Kissinger did in Cambodia, Chile, and Angola.4 But we have only the shadow outlines of other operations that were running while he was in office, the extent of his support for Operation Condor or his involvement in Bangladesh’s 1975 coup, for instance, or what he was doing with Pakistan running jihadists into Afghanistan. This last has had consequences that we are still living with.

  Likewise, as domestic politics became increasingly polarized, Kissinger’s (and Nixon’s) use of foreign policy to deflect dissent and mobilize supporters was continued in subsequent administrations. Kissinger was especially good at throwing red meat, in the form of bomb tonnage dropped and Southeast Asians killed, to a rising New Right. “We must escalate or P is lost,” he advised in 1970. P being the president, Nixon. Kissinger was worried about upcoming elections. And when even Nixon began to doubt the efficacy of bombing, Kissinger kept insisting that a good “jolt” might, if not break Hanoi, then end the domestic political stalemate in his favor.

  * * *

  But covert ops and political opportunism were not Kissinger’s chief contribution to American militarism. Rather, it is his philosophy of history that was key in restoring the imperial presidency at the moment of its greatest vulnerability. As we saw earlier, the “realism” he is famous for is profoundly elastic, anticipating the extreme subjectivism of the neoconservatives. Kissinger taught that there was no such thing as stasis in international affairs: great states are always either gaining or losing influence, which means that the balance of power has to be constantly tested through gesture and deed. He warned policy makers and defense intellectuals to watch out for the “causal principle.” Let antiquarians concern themselves with why the current crisis has come about. Statesmen have to respond to the crisis and not obsess over its root causes. Their responsibility is to the future, not to the past.

  Neoconservatism, however, is just the highly self-conscious core of a broader consensus that reaches out well beyond the Republican Party to capture ideologue and pragmatist alike, pretty much any politician with any chance at winning higher office. And Kissinger’s contribution to this larger worldview can be found in the arguments used by successive administrations to legitimate ongoing interventionism. From Central America to Grenada, Panama to the first Gulf War and beyond, one can plot the crescendo, the way each military action represented a bit more—more commitment, more confidence regained, more troops deployed, more spectacular displays of firepower, more lives lost.

  From the broadcasting studios of ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS, on the opinion pages of leading newspapers, and, no doubt, in the private counsel he’s given to his allies in public office, Kissinger supported each and every one of these military operations, with rationales drawn from his own experience in office reworked to fit new times.

  CENTRAL AMERICA AND GRENADA

  Henry Kissinger started out as a lightning rod for the rank-and-file Right. Phyllis Schlafly forced Reagan to pledge that he would never “reappoint Henry Kissinger or give him any role in making our policy toward the Soviet Union.”5 But by 1983, Kissinger had inched closer to the administration, leading Reagan to break part of his promise. The president kept Kissinger away from the Soviet Union but named him the head of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America.

  By this point, Central America was in the throes of war. The repressive status quo that the United States had long imposed on the poverty-stricken region—ever-increasing military aid to ever more murderous governments—had collapsed. The left-wing Sandinistas had triumphed in Nicaragua in 1979, and similar insurgencies were on the upswing in Guatemala and El Salvador. Reagan’s hawks were already assembling and arming the Contras in Nicaragua and reinforcing death-squad states in El Salvador and Guatemala. But setting up a bipartisan commission to investigate the “crisis” was a smart move, since it would help to establish broad-based legitimacy for a hard line already in place. More importantly, at least for Kissinger, it gave him a chance to prove his worth to the White House.

  Kissinger’s commission issued its findings in early 1984. The conservative grassroots might have wanted Reagan to keep the former secretary of state as far away from the Soviet Union as possible. This, though, was hard, since Reagan conservatives believed that Moscow’s hand was everywhere, including in Central America. It was a belief that Kissinger was more than willing to affirm. His commission warned of a grave situation, invoking the threat of Russian-interdicted shipping lanes, of torpedoed oil tankers, and of Soviet missile bases. Applying Southeast Asia’s domino theory, the commission said that Nicaragua might topple El Salvador, El Salvador Guatemala, and Guatemala Mexico. The commission’s report stressed the need for Washington to maintain “credibility worldwide.” In the case of Nicaragua, “the triumph of hostile forces in what the Soviets call the ‘strategic rear’ of the United States would be read as a sign o
f U.S. impotence.”6

  Even New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a hawk when it came to Third World radicalism, called the Kissinger commission’s findings a “doctrinal position.” “Facts please,” Moynihan pleaded.7

  Facts weren’t the point. The wars in Central America raged on, costing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives, the vast majority at the hands of US-backed allies. But the commission had served its purpose, for both the White House and Kissinger. For the Reagan administration, it provided cover.8 For Kissinger, the commission gave him a chance to establish his credibility and reconcile with the Right. Kissinger used the commission not just to appease those like Schlafly who saw Moscow behind every world event but to rehearse an important argument justifying intervention.

  “There might be an argument for doing nothing to help the government of El Salvador,” the commission’s final report concluded. “There might be an argument for doing a great deal more. There is, however, no logical argument for giving some aid but not enough. The worst possible policy for El Salvador is to provide just enough aid to keep the war going, but too little to wage it successfully.”9 It’s an effective rhetorical ploy. Under the guise of choice—do something, or do nothing, but if we do something, do enough to achieve our goals—it rendered explicit an assumption that often remained implicit: once something is defined as a problem, then it is justified to do whatever is necessary to solve that problem.*