BY POLLY MANN
This May President Barak Obama bestowed another medal on Henry Kissinger—one of, at least, four he’s received, including the Nobel Peace Prize. If one were to choose one event that exemplifies the use of the word “oxymoron,” this would be it. (Oxymoron: a figure of speech combining seemingly contradictory expressions.) Just why the President is so honoring this man is more than a bit puzzling. Certainly Christopher Hitchens would have even more to say about the event. He wrote a book about Kissinger in which he described him as a war criminal. Inasmuch as I agree with Mr. Hitchens, you, my reader, are now able to get a few of the remarks upon which he based his conclusion.
Mr. Kissinger masterminded a plan to carpet-bomb Cambodia. During the bombing’s first stage, from 1969 to 1970, he approved all 3,875 raids, which accounted for between 150,00 and 500,000 Cambodians according to a Pentagon report.
The Pakistani dictator Agha Muhammad Yaha Khan, in 1971, began slaughtering the residents of East Pakistan, and Mr. Kissinger sent him needed weapons—a policy that was then illegal under U.S. law. The killing only stopped after India intervened. The deaths ranged from 300,000 to 3 million.
In 2014, newly declassified documents suggested that in the 1970s, Mr.Kissinger signaled to Argentina’s right-wing military leaders that the U.S. would not object to its plans to launch a 1976 crackdown on dissent—which became known as the Dirty War, and killed about 30,000 people.
Henry Kissinger was national security advisor and perhaps one of the principal architects of the coup in Chile—which occurred as U.S. aggression in Indochina was winding down after more than a decade. From 1969 through 1973, it was Kissinger again, along with Nixon, who was responsible. It is impossible to know how many were killed during those four years; all the victims were considered enemies, including the vast majority who were non-combatants.
This is not an exhaustive list of Kissinger’s crimes: It doesn’t touch, among other things, his support for proxy wars in sub-Saharan Africa or his backing of the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s killings in East Timor. “A back-of-the-envelope count would attribute 3, maybe 4, million deaths to Kissinger’s actions, but that number probably undercounts his victims,” Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, wrote in an article published in The Nation magazine.
Footnote: Activists from the antiwar group CodePink attempted to perform a citizen’s arrest on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when he testified on global security challenges at a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting in January 2016. President Obama should listen to Medea Benjamin, the diminutive but fiery leader of Code Pink.
