Henry Kissinger, American diplomat and Nobel winner, dead at 100 Reuters

[usonian]

51. Rolling Stone got it right. No bullshit. "Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America's Ruling Class, Finally Dies

I posted this to the Rolling Stone thread.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218491278

I ran into no paywall, but you might try https://archive.md/2bG7f

Filed under GOOD RIDDANCE
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-kissinger-war-criminal-dead-1234804748/

The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him

BY SPENCER ACKERMAN
NOVEMBER 29, 2023

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.

...

Nixon ran for president claiming to have a secret plan to end the war. His advisers told Hersh they were deeply afraid that Johnson and Hanoi would reach an accord before the election. It would save lives in Vietnam, American and Vietnamese, but it would undermine Nixon’s hopes of exploiting the explosion in domestic antiwar sentiment. Nixon gratefully took what Kissinger gave him to make the U.S.’ proxy regime in Saigon, whose regime peace would destabilize, more intransigent. No agreement was reached until 1973, and the war ended in American humiliation with Hanoi’s 1975 victory.

“It took some balls to give us those tips,” Richard Allen, a foreign policy researcher on the Nixon campaign, later reflected to Hersh. After all, it was “a pretty dangerous thing for [Kissinger] to be screwing around with the national security.”

Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger. We will never know what might have been, the question Kissinger’s apologists, and those in the U.S. foreign policy elite who imagine themselves standing in Kissinger’s shoes, insist upon when explaining away his crimes. We can only know what actually happened. What actually happened was that Kissinger materially sabotaged the only chance for an end to the war in 1968 as a hedged bet to ensure he would achieve power in Nixon’s administration or Humphrey’s. A true tally will probably never be known of everyone who died so Kissinger could be national security adviser.

And that's just the warm-up, folks. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions in Bangladesh, A 17 year reign of terror in Chile, getting even with his critic, Daniel Ellsberg, and of course, Iraq.

And, to accomplish his campaign, he had to silently put up with Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of him, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones.

Opinions above and in the article are those of Rolling Stone.