The U.S. press wasn’t allowed into Pr*sident Trump’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak Wednesday. And when reporters and photographers were finally allowed into the Oval Office, it wasn’t Trump and the Russians they encountered, but Trump and 93-year-old Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under Richard Nixon and amnesiac pundits and policymakers dare to call an elder statesman.
To be fair, plenty of leading Democrats have also sought out Kissinger for advice in recent years. That includes former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Sen. John Kerry. The respect accorded Kissinger is enough to make anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the man’s record a lot more than “mildly nauseous.”
Deception is his stock in trade. He continues to deny his pernicious role in the coup in Chile, the coup in Cambodia and subsequent support for the genocidal Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese, the slaughter in East Timor, and on the side of the murderous Pakistani generals in Bangladesh’s war of independence.
The Pakistan-Bangladesh war is one scarcely known by Americans then or now. But as Princeton Professor Gary J. Bass wrote in 2013:
As recently declassified documents and White House tapes show, Nixon and Kissinger stood stoutly behind Pakistan’s generals, supporting the murderous regime at many of the most crucial moments. This largely overlooked horror ranks among the darkest chapters in the entire cold war.
Of course, no country, not even the United States, can prevent massacres everywhere in the world — but this was a close American ally, which prized its warm relationship with the United States and used American weapons and military supplies against its own people. [...]
If an apology from Kissinger is too much to expect, Americans ought at least to remember what he and Nixon did in those terrible days.
In 1975, Kissinger told Thai Foreign Minister Chatichai Choonhavan: “You should tell the Cambodians [the Khmer Rouge] that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” The Khmer Rouge would go on to murder at least 20 percent of the Cambodian population.
In William Bundy’s 1998 book A Tangled Web, The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency, the author wrote that the primary purpose of the 1970 U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia had not been meant to affect the military situation. Bundy, who was a CIA and State Department official in the 1960s and early 1970s, said instead that it was intended "above all as a demonstration to the Soviet Union that [President Nixon] was indeed capable of extreme and irrational response."
Nixon issued orders to Kissinger in 1970, who was then national security adviser. As Chris Floyd wrote a decade ago:
It's 1970. Nixon is angry: The Air Force is not killing enough people in Cambodia, the country he has just illegally invaded without the slightest pretence of Congressional approval. The flyboys are doing "milk runs," their intelligence-gathering is too by-the-book: There are "other methods" of getting intelligence, he tells Kissinger. "You understand what I mean?" "Yes, I do," pipes the loyal retainer.
Nixon then orders Kissinger to send every available plane into Cambodia -- bombers, fighters, helicopters, prop planes -- to "crack the hell out of them," smother the entire country with deadly fire: "I want them to hit everything." Kissinger tells his own top aide, General Alexander Haig, to try to implement the plan: "He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia," Kissinger says. "It's an order, it's to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves."
Without the stepped-up U.S. bombing of Cambodia, during which 50,000-150,000 civilians were killed, the U.S. invasion of 1970, and Kissinger and Nixon’s support for the military coup against Prince Sihanouk that same year, the Khmer Rouge would have remained an obscure, ragtag band of guerrillas instead of the progenitors of one of the worst genocides of the 20th Century.
We can be certain that Donald Trump is as unaware of Kissinger’s foreign policy atrocities as he is about most subjects. His aggressive ignorance is now a given. And even if he were aware, there’s no reason to believe he would care that Kissinger’s policies sparked torture and permitted genocide.
Sadly, Kissinger will never pay for his crimes under a Republican or Democratic administration. But the next time a Democrat is president, she or he should never seek this unindicted war criminal’s advice. Indeed, the order ought to go out that Kissinger, if he is still alive by then, should never appear on any White House schedule.
And if the guy gets a full-blown state funeral, Americans ought to turn out to protest in the same kinds of numbers they have done for resistance demonstrations during the past few months.