BY JACK A. SMITH
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's past political misdeeds are catching up to him at last. Some human rights groups are trying to have him arrested as a war criminal for his involvement in Washington's war to dominate Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. And the Spanish judge who sought to indict former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is now going after Kissinger for his role in destroying democracy in Chile.
The British Guardian also reported on June 12 that Chile's Judge Juan Guzman is so frustrated at the lack of cooperation by Kissinger that he is considering an extradition request to force him to come to Chile to testify in connection with the death of US citizen, film-maker and journalist Charles Horman, who was killed by the military days after the coup. Horman's story was told in the 1982 Costa-Gavras film, Missing. Guzman is investigating whether US officials passed the names of suspected left-wing Americans to Chilean military authorities.
Activists in London on April 24 protested Kissinger's presence at a meeting of corporate directors, calling him a criminal for his conduct during the Vietnam War.
A degree of pressure must be getting to the man who served as Machiavelli to Richard Nixon's Prince. With the shouts of "war criminal" still ringing in his ears from the demonstration outside London's Royal Albert Hall, Kissinger told the corporate leaders assembled inside with exquisite abstraction, "No-one can say that he served in an administration that did not make mistakes".
This is the closest he ever came to acknowledging a remote proximity to "mistakes" while serving as Washington's long-time foreign policy guru. One can easily imagine the 78-year-old master of the geopolitical game cynically chuckling to himself over such a self-serving admission, while Poor Richard must still be revolving in his grave, envying and hating Kissinger for being so cleverly outrageous, and getting away with it time and again.
On April 26, Reuters news agency asked the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry in Hanoi to comment on the London protest and moves in some countries to bring Kissinger to trial for war crimes, and received this reply: "We hold that as a key official who played an important role at the time the United States was carrying out its invasive war in Vietnam, Mr Kissinger has to take responsibility for the sufferings and losses brought by this war upon the Vietnamese people."
More than 2 million Vietnamese died in the conflict, as did 58,209 US soldiers.
Of course Kissinger is a criminal. Here's one instance, from a pamphlet (Enough is Enough — 100 Years of US intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean) published a couple of years ago: "As a result of the 1970 elections [in Chile] a genuine leftist reformer was sitting at the very center of government in the continent's most democratic country. Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens, the candidate of the Popular Unity coalition of progressives, socialists and communists, gained office with a plurality of the vote and began to assemble a coalition government.
"In the months leading up to the elections, the CIA had intervened feverishly with money and other forms of support to assure the victory of the ultra-rightist candidate. The US first tried to rig the elections, then to bribe members of the Chilean Congress to have them refuse to confirm Allende in office, and, if all else failed, to begin the process of fomenting a military coup.
"Investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh in his informative book, The Price of Power, quotes Kissinger as saying at the June 27, 1970, secret meeting [in Washington] where these plans were approved: 'I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people'."
So much for democracy. Allende was overthrown and killed in 1973, along with many thousands of Chilean progressives and democrats. Thousands more were tortured and imprisoned. Pinochet's right-wing authoritarian regime ruled for decades with US backing, thanks to Kissinger and his successors.
Visiting Chile in 1998, soon after the elderly dictator retired, President Bill Clinton surpassed routine White House hypocrisy by delivering a moving speech about how pleased Washington was that Chile had finally restored democracy.
We mention this because concealed behind its excessive penchant for the rhetoric of human rights, Washington is perpetrating the same duplicitous deeds today as yesterday. Fixing elections? How about Yugoslavia in 2000? Overthrowing democratic governments? How about Venezuela in 2002 (though a US-backed coup was foiled this time)?
Meanwhile, we've got a war on terrorism to keep the Pentagon occupied today and a government to topple in Iraq tomorrow. Who needs a Kissinger or a Nixon when there's a George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld — criminals all, in our view — occupying the War Room?
Still, it would be appropriate for the man who served as the model for Dr Strangelove to finally be obliged to sit in humanity's courtroom and explain, no doubt patiently and professorially, why the survival of freedom, democracy and the "American Way of Life" required the carpet-bombing slaughter of poor peasants in Indochina's rice paddies.
[From Mid-Hudson Activist Newsletter, published in New Paltz, New York, by the Mid-Hudson National People's Campaign.]
From Green Left Weekly, June 26, 2002.
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