Former US Secretary of State, celebrated confidant of Washington’s elite and sought-after speaker and panellist Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100. Kissinger, The Sydney Morning Herald tells us, “left an indelible mark on US foreign policy”. We’d say that’s about right. Here’s a quick look at his legacy:
- As a member of Richard Nixon’s campaign, Kissinger helped subvert the 1968 presidential election. Nixon, with the help of intelligence about Paris peace negotiations being undertaken by the Lyndon Johnson administration, covertly met with the North Vietnam leadership and convinced them to withdraw from the peace talks, with the promise that if Nixon were elected, they would get a better deal. This secret intervention, which violated the Logan Act forbidding private diplomacy, extended the war for years, allowing the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers and, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.
- As Nixon’s national security adviser, Kissinger secretly extended the war in Vietnam into neighbouring Cambodia as part of Operation MENU. More than 231,000 US bombing sorties were flown over Cambodia from 1965 to 1973. Between 1969 and 1973 the US airforce dropped 500,000 or more tons of munitions. From 1964 to 1973, the US Air Surveillance also dropped two million tons of ordnance on Laos.
- In 1971 the United States backed the Pakistan military in the bloody civil war that would ultimately lead to the birth of Bangladesh. An American diplomat in Dhaka, Archer Blood, wrote a dispatch in April saying “Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities … Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy”. He was joined by Kenneth Keating, the US ambassador to India, in calling for his government to withdraw their support for the Pakistan regime. They were ignored. The estimated deaths of this conflict range from 500,000 to 3 million. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped in the conflict, and millions of refugees were created. Soon after the war ended and Bangladesh declared its independence, Kissinger dismissed it as a “basket case”.
- In 1972, Nixon and Kissinger agreed to finance and arm an Iraqi Kurdish insurrection against Saddam Hussein to curry favour with the Iranian Shah, at the time in a border dispute with Iraq. Three years later Kissinger endorsed the Algiers Accord between Iran and Iraq, and America’s support for the Iraqi Kurds dried up. According to a 1976 report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence: “The insurgents were clearly taken by surprise. Their adversaries, knowing of the impending aid cut-off, launched an all-out search-and-destroy campaign the day after the agreement was signed.” The Kurds appealed to the US for help. Help never came.
- In 1973, there was a CIA-backed coup (secretly supervised by Kissinger) against Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in Chile. Chilean army commander-in-chief General Rene Schneider was murdered, Allende died most likely by suicide, and the country was thrown into more than a decade of despotism at the hands of General Augusto Pinochet. A few months before the Chilean election, Kissinger had been quoted as saying “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people”.
- In 1975 Kissinger — having survived the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon — and president Ford specifically gave Indonesia’s General Suharto the go-ahead to invade East Timor just a day before the actual invasion took place. The US was at the time supplying Indonesia’s military with 90% of its arms. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, and US aid just kept coming.
According to Yale University historian and author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s actions between 1969 and 1976 resulted in the estimated deaths of between three and four million people.
This piece initially indicated former Chilean president Salvador Allende was murdered. It has been updated to clarify that he likely committed suicide during the coup.
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