Intercept: Kissinger’s War Crimes Are Central to Divide Between Hillary and Bernie Sanders [View all]

[99th_Monkey]

Henry Kissinger’s War Crimes Are Central to the Divide Between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
by Dan Froomkin * Feb. 12 2016 * The Intercept

The sparring during Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over whether Henry Kissinger is an elder statesman or a pariah has laid bare a major foreign policy divide within the Democratic Party. ~snip~

Kissinger is an amazing and appropriate lens through which to see what’s at stake in the choice between Clinton and Sanders. But that only works, of course, if you understand who Kissinger is — which surely many of today’s voters don’t. ~snip~

Kissinger is reviled by many left-leaning observers of foreign policy. They consider him an amoral egotist who enabled dictators, extended the Vietnam War, laid the path to the Khmer Rouge killing fields, stage-managed a genocide in East Timor, overthrew the democratically-elected left-wing government in Chile, and encouraged Nixon to wiretap his political adversaries.

First, let’s review what happened at the debate. Here’s the video, followed by the transcript:

And now, some background about Kissinger.

Greg Grandin, a history professor at New York University, just published a timely book called Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. In an article in the Nation last week, “Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace,” he offered this pithy summary:
Let’s consider some of Kissinger’s achievements during his tenure as Richard Nixon’s top foreign policy–maker. He
(1) prolonged the Vietnam War for five pointless years;
(2) illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos;
(3) goaded Nixon to wiretap staffers and journalists;
(4) bore responsibility for three genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh;
(5) urged Nixon to go after Daniel Ellsberg for having released the Pentagon Papers, which set off a chain of events that brought down the Nixon White House;
(6) pumped up Pakistan’s ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to destabilize Afghanistan;
(7) began the U.S.’s arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran;
(8) accelerated needless civil wars in southern Africa that, in the name of supporting white supremacy, left millions dead;
(9) supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America; and (10) ingratiated himself with the first-generation neocons, such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who would take American militarism to its next calamitous level. Read all about it in Kissinger’s Shadow!

A full tally hasn’t been done, but a back-of-the-envelope count would attribute 3, maybe 4 million deaths to Kissinger’s actions, but that number probably undercounts his victims in southern Africa.

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/