The early chapters of former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissing’s “World Order” on Europe and Islam are an enlightening synthesis of centuries of history. His chapter on China is useful although he avoids criticism, perhaps to assure a continuation of the usual welcoming mat when he visits.
However when Kissinger looks back on four of five American wars over the past seven decades, his accounts of history contain embarrassing omissions, feeble excuses, and misplaced blame.
Here are some quotes followed by our comments:
“[George W.]Bush, it has been reported, closed a 2007 planning session with the question ‘If we’re not there [in Iraq] to win why are we there?’ The remark embodied the resoluteness of the President’s character as well as the tragedy of a country whose people have been prepared for more than half a century to send its sons and daughters to remote corners of the world in defense of freedom but whose political system has not been able to muster the same unified and persistent purpose.”
Right question but years too late. No word that we were also in Iraq to get control of its oil resources and to enrich our military industrial complex. Instead, we supposedly there due to virtual American idealism.
It wasn’t “W” who failed who Kissinger maintains exhibited the most decent motivations. Rather, it was the people’s lack of willingness to stay the course (in a war that had outlasted the Second World War.) Shame on us.
As for Afghanistan, he quotes young Winston Churchill’s observations in 1897:
“Except at harvest time when em self preservation enjoins a temporary truce. The Pathan [Pashtun] tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician, and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress… Every village has its defence. Every family cultivates it vendetta; every clan, it’s feud. The numerous tribes and combinations of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten, and very few debts are left unpaid.”
We were not a student of Afghan history, but we did know how to read a topographical map and were aware that the Soviet Union (along with every other occupying empire over three thousands years) had been defeated by the Afghan tribes, in large part due to the difficult terrain.
After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, any president would have found it necessary to invade Afghanistan to punish the Taliban. But “W” should have had better sense than to have tried to remain there to bring democracy to the country [and enable chronies to try to control oil interests]. Although “W” disdained what he considered weakness by his father, the elder Bush refused to follow up the quick Desert Storm victory with a march to Baghdad.
Kissinger lists Korea as another example of the American people’s failure to stay the course. This is nonsense. The USA had won a decisive victory when a combination of hubris and neglect on the part of the otherwise successful General Douglas MacArthur and lack of the State Department’s control and diplomatic communications with the newly established Red China triggered the Chinese entry en masse from the north.
Short of using nuclear weapons on China (and perhaps not even then), there was no way to win a land war with an adjoining country with a billion people.
The truce that once again divided North from South had accomplished our initial purpose. We were wise to ration what relatively meager military strength we had at the time for possible intervention in Europe. After almost becoming part of a Taft / MacArthur Republican ticket that would have been substituted for Eisenhower / Nixon and, if victorious, becoming president a year later on Taft’s death, MacArthur did “fade away.”
As for Viet Nam, Kissinger would have us believe that we had prevailed in the war and fored settlement upon North Viet Nam.
At the time and since, we perceived the so call ‘settlement’ as a fig leaf to give the USA time to leave the country and take our prisoners of war with us. Congress understood this and was determined to avoid any return when the truth sunk in.
Perhaps Henry Kissinger was just too close to and to invested in the bungling and profiteering that took place during Iraq and Afghanistan to objectively survey the past seven decades.
When he was directly involved, Richard Nixon and he did laudably, given the difficult international circumstances they faced. But his failure to subsequently give sound advice and to criticize later administrations seems to have marred his retrospection.
