Can a war criminal really be a “noted statesman”?
For U.S. mass media, Henry Kissinger’s quip that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” rang as an obvious truism. Influential reporters and pundits often expressed their love for him. For decades, the media establishment swooned over one of the worst war criminals in modern history.
After news of his death broke on Wednesday night, prominent coverage echoed the kind that had followed him ever since his years with President Richard Nixon, while they teamed up to oversee vast carnage in Southeast Asia.
The headline of a news bulletin summed up: “Henry Kissinger Dies at 100. The Noted Statesman and Scholar Had Unparalleled Power Over Foreign Policy.”
But can a war criminal really be a “noted statesman”?
The New York Times’ top story began by describing Kissinger as a “scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the time of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so.”
And so, the Times spotlighted Kissinger’s role in the U.S. “exit from Vietnam” in 1973 — but not his role during the previous four years, overseeing merciless slaughter in the escalation of a war that took several million lives.
Bourdain added that while Kissinger continued to hobnob at A-list parties, ‘Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.’
“Leaving aside those who perished from disease, hunger, or lack of medical care, at least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths according to researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington,” historian and journalist Nick Turse has noted. He added: “The best estimate we have is that 2 million of them were civilians. Using a very conservative extrapolation, this suggests that 5.3 million civilians were wounded during the war, for a total of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties overall. To such figures might be added an estimated 11.7 million Vietnamese forced from their homes and turned into refugees, up to 4.8 million sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange, an estimated 800,000 to 1.3 million war orphans, and 1 million war widows.”
All told, during his stint in government over the terms of two presidents, Kissinger supervised policies that took the lives of at least 3 million people.
Henry Kissinger was the crucial U.S. official who supported the September 11, 1973 coup that brought down the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile — initiating 17 years of dictatorship, with systematic murder and torture (“trampling on democratic values” in Times-speak).
Kissinger remained as secretary of state during the presidency of Gerald Ford. Lethal machinations continued in many places, including East Timor in the Indonesian archipelago. “Under Kissinger’s direction, the U.S. gave a green light to the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor (now Timor-Leste), which ushered in a 24-year brutal occupation by the Suharto dictatorship,” the human rights organization ETAN reported:
The Indonesian occupation of East Timor and West Papua was enabled by U.
